The way I understand it is that Spotify (and Qobuz confirmed in a podcast), negotiate revenue with the music publishers not the artists. Both Spotify and Qobuz return 75% of their revenue to these publishers. That leaves 25% to pay all the costs related to running the business. As someone who has owned his own business a gross margin of 25% is not a lot. Now before someone says "well if they make a $1B, and that leaves $250M", think about the number of people and the infrastructure you would need to run and operate a $1B business. Yes they get their inventory (the songs) for free, but think about just the hosting costs involved in delivering all those streams. So, did the publishers negotiate a better deal with Apple? Possible. But keep in mind that Apple only has a "pay to play" option (as does Qobuz). Spotify has a lot more listeners but most of those are on the free plan, and so it is only getting ad revenue from those listeners. Now, granted that could be significant, but I would venture a guess that it is not $10 a month, otherwise their business model would not have a "pay to play" option because they can generate more revenue from ads.