Spotify is killing music in 2026

If you are one of Spotify’s 281 million paid users, you just got hit with a price increase in 2026. If each of those people is now paying just $2 more a month, that's over half a billion dollars in new monthly revenue — more than $6 billion a year — on top of what they were already making. And yet, somehow, the people actually making the music are still being paid fractions of a penny per stream.