Barry Collins has written a piece for Expert Reviews on Björk’s reluctance to release her new music on Spotify. She says it simply doesn’t feel right to essentially give away something you’ve spent years working on. It’s a point of view that aligns with my own, and while revenue from streaming services is better than nothing, there are plenty of reports online that showcase how little bands and artists actually receive from the likes of Spotify.

Naturally, Spotify itself was bullish in response. CEO Daniel Ek argued:

We’ve already paid more than $2 billion in royalties to the music industry and if that money is not flowing to the creative community in a timely and transparent way, that’s a big problem

So it’s the fault of the labels in not getting money to artists, apparently. But what stood out to me more is the figure. Apple plays this trick too: talk about the BILLIONS that have been paid out, but entirely remove the context. A billion sounds like a lot when you’re talking about US dollars, Sterling or Euros. To the individual, a billion is a lot. But when that amount is divided up among every artist or developer on a service, across the entire amount of time the service has been running, a swift bit of maths leads you to a very different conclusion.