You and me might buy our music on bandcamp, but the vast, vast, vast majority of people still just pay for spotify and never give how it works a second thought.
A moderetely successful indie artist is still likely to make way more having their albums on streaming services, than they are selling them on bandcamp.
you can't really use technological complexity as an excuse to depend on fat middlemen.
Is that what I'm doing? At no point did I say streaming services could be fair and good if only this one issue was fixed. Merely that play farming works by skimming the money from real artists.
Now, I'd also like to ask "wtf", since you are kinda suggesting that it is the artist's that are at fault for not getting the money they need to live, by not using their own websites/bandcamp.
Spotify didn't lose a dime. Their cut is fixed.
What each play is worth is determined by how many plays there were in a month, and the income from subscribers that month.
If the "pot" is ten bucks, and people listen to a hundred songs, each artist gets ten cents for each play. If there were a thousand plays, each play is only worth one cent.
This guy didn't make money by taking it from spotify, he made it by taking it from everyone else. Spotify actually has no reason to care, and playfarming scams have been happening for years.
They only get stopped when they get big enough for the giant music labels to notice.