i've seen charts that actually say you could make thousands of dollars just off 130k streams. however, in order to do that, you gotta be doing it totally independent without a label / middleman taking a cut.

Yeah the "Spotify is the new radio" part was not something I was really thinking about. The thing for me is that Spotify is losing so much money every year and I don't understand the insane valuation for it. Twitter had to bail out Soundcloud a couple years ago and they are not optimistic about getting their money back.
_Twitter put the money into SoundCloud in 2016, via its Twitter Ventures unit, in a deal that valued the company at $700 million. Now Twitter, via its 2017 annual report, says it has written off $66.4 million it invested in SoundCloud because that money is “not expected to be recoverable within a reasonable period of time.”_

Everyone likes these streaming services because people are used to not paying for music which makes the radio analogy make more since. I don't see this changing but Spotify has a huge uphill battle to really earning the 20 billion valuation people are giving them. Spotify is also doing a direct listing which means they are bypassing the fees companies typically pay banks when they go public. They are just trying to bring liquidity to their existing share holders that have funded the company. I still firmly believe that the streaming industry is going to see some major disruption through blockchain tech. As we see more and more artists taking a much more independent approach and embracing this new tech we could see a huge disruption to traditional music industry ways.   I wrote a post here on steemit addressing this.     

https://steemit.com/music/@rumble/spotify-ipo-valued-at-usd20-billion-plus-what-this-means-for-blockchain-music-dapps-like-peertracks-find-your-creative-freedom

That future is a lot closer than 10 years away. Their are a lot of promising blockchain projects working on this now.

lol, would that get the whales voting?