We really need some sort of vaguely apples-to-apples comparison.
Looking only at CDs ca. 2005, which sold at about $15 each, an album that went platinum (1 million sales) would gross $15 million in retail, probably $10 million in wholesale, leaving about $1-3 million for the artist depending on contract terms. Estimates seem to put Spotify compensation at $3000 paid to the artist per million plays. So, you'd need somewhere between 333 million and 1 billion plays to get comparable revenue to a platinum album.
"Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd is currently the most-streamed song on Spotify at 5 billion plays [1]. That's roughly equivalent to a 5-15x platinum album from a single song and streaming platform alone; the record for most platinum album seems to be 34x platinum for Michael Jackson's Thriller [2], which had 7 songs that all were hits to some degree or another. Michael Jackson did a lot besides just record the songs; he also put out elaborate music videos and went on showy tours. All told, there are more than 100 songs with more than 1 billion plays on Spotify (in fact, the 100th is still above 2.4 billion plays).
So, I think, the situation has not really gotten worse.
> Looking only at CDs ca. 2005, which sold at about $15 each, an album that went platinum (1 million sales) would gross $15 million in retail, probably $10 million in wholesale, leaving about $1-3 million for the artist depending on contract terms. Estimates seem to put Spotify compensation at $3000 paid to the artist per million plays. So, you'd need somewhere between 333 million and 1 billion plays to get comparable revenue to a platinum album.
Solid comparison, and illustrates the issue pretty well I feel.
> "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd is currently the most-streamed song on Spotify at 5 billion plays [1]. That's roughly equivalent to a 5-15x platinum album from a single song and streaming platform alone; the record for most platinum album seems to be 34x platinum for Michael Jackson's Thriller [2], which had 7 songs that all were hits to some degree or another. Michael Jackson did a lot besides just record the songs; he also put out elaborate music videos and went on showy tours. All told, there are more than 100 songs with more than 1 billion plays on Spotify (in fact, the 100th is still above 2.4 billion plays).
So then let's bear that out. I don't have the data on the Thriller album for for the sake of argument, we'll rely on a quick google which says it was about $8 in 1982. I'll use the same split you did (33% off for wholesale, about 30% of which went to the artist) so if we run all that down, with US sales being 35 million units. So $55.44 million went to Michael, if we assume all of that is true and correct, which adjusted for inflation would be about 184 million dollars.
We'll compare that to the Weeknd's streams for Blinding Lights. We'll put him on the high end of receiving a half a penny per play, that works out to about 30 million dollars, for as you point out, the highest streamed song on the platform.
It's still not quite a 1:1, unfortunately, but: Michael Jackson with 7 hit songs of varying popularity was able to shift 35 million albums for a personal profit of 184 million in 2025 dollars, versus the Weeknd, who with the most popular song on Spotify, made $30 million.
And it's worth pointing out here, these are both superstar heavy hitters. The story gets a lot worse for any artist not in that category.
Looking only at CDs ca. 2005, which sold at about $15 each, an album that went platinum (1 million sales) would gross $15 million in retail, probably $10 million in wholesale, leaving about $1-3 million for the artist depending on contract terms. Estimates seem to put Spotify compensation at $3000 paid to the artist per million plays. So, you'd need somewhere between 333 million and 1 billion plays to get comparable revenue to a platinum album.
"Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd is currently the most-streamed song on Spotify at 5 billion plays [1]. That's roughly equivalent to a 5-15x platinum album from a single song and streaming platform alone; the record for most platinum album seems to be 34x platinum for Michael Jackson's Thriller [2], which had 7 songs that all were hits to some degree or another. Michael Jackson did a lot besides just record the songs; he also put out elaborate music videos and went on showy tours. All told, there are more than 100 songs with more than 1 billion plays on Spotify (in fact, the 100th is still above 2.4 billion plays).
So, I think, the situation has not really gotten worse.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Spotify_streaming_reco...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thriller_(album)