> Yes, there is. They opted into buying a product sold by a business that does that. And the music creator also opted into it. That is where the market cleared. And people had and have the option to simply pay for the music directly, but they don’t want to.

Most people don't and will never have a deep understanding of what they're spending their money on. They are paying money to be able to stream music, and that's as far as 99% of the consumer base has thought things through. It's, unfortunately, always going to be the job of far fewer people to try to get some oversight into bad practices, because the market won't just magically do that on its own. To many people, it comes as a surprise that it's fully possible for them to listen to an artist all the time and yet have the vast majority of their subscription payment go to an entirely different artist they don't even listen to. Legitimately, people are surprised to learn this. It's not intuitive at all.

(P.S.: The fact that something is the way it is today is not in and of itself a "reason", that's just tautological.)

> Anyone is welcome at anytime to come up with an alternative. With the internet, it has never been easier. The fact that this is the dominant model indicates that this is the solution that works for most people (due to them not wanting to pay more for music).

Maybe 20 years ago, but this is pretty crazy to say today. We're going a bit in circles though. I already kind of went in this direction:

> It's not that all things middlemen do are bad, it's that they routinely gain immense power in the market and then together they act against the best interests of nearly everyone other than themselves, while the barrier to entry remains so high that it may as well not be possible for all intents and purposes.

Barely anyone is actually capable of competing with Spotify in any meaningful way. Apple is one of the richest and most resourceful companies in the world and they already had a massive userbase of people purchasing music and it wasn't even that easy of a fight for them to get in the door with streaming. Spotify is still the global leader by a long shot.

> Don’t see why this has to be true, different businesses have different parameters and supply and demand curves that result in different solutions.

Unless you demonstrate some kind of reason why music would specifically have to work differently, I don't think it makes sense to simply take it at face value that it does. Which parameters? Why music specifically and not other industries? I think the answer is more cynical and less satisfying, which is to say, it was and is an industry that's easy to abuse, not unlike many other industries that have also suffered from pretty ridiculously unfair labor and payment practices, like anime, game development, or the VFX industry.

> The funny thing is even at this low price of Spotify, Spotify still loses money.

And yet its shares have been a rocket ship up the past couple years. If anyone is concerned about losing money at Spotify, it sure doesn't show in their operating margin data points, and it sure doesn't show very much with the people invested in it. They know as well as anyone does that competing with Spotify and the other handful of big players is basically impossible if you're not either extremely wealthy or already one of them, so there's probably little reason to fret over it. Even amidst their huge layoffs at the end of the year last year, I would place my bets on them continuing to lose money and keep investing.