Can you bankrupt Spotify by listening too much music?

I'm an avid Spotify user. I listen to music pretty much the entire working day.

That got me thinking... If Spotify pays artists per stream, how many songs do I have to listen before I've "used up" my subscription?

A Spotify or Apple Music subscription costs $10.99 per month.

Apple claims to pay $0.01 per stream^[1]. Spotify doesn't publish official numbers on how much they pay per stream, but estimates range between $0.00318 and $0.005, so let's take $0.00524 per stream^[2].

Breaking even

To break-even on my Spotify subscription I need to listen to 2.097 songs.
10.99 / 0.00524

That comes down to almost 70 songs per day. The average song is around 4 minutes long^[3], so that means listening to music for 4 hours and 40 minutes each day. That's a lot, but manageable!

Apple Music pays more to artists, so you'll break-even on the subscription after listening to 1099 songs. That's only 33 songs a day.
10.99 / 0.01

How to bankrupt Apple

What if you keep listening beyond that point? Could you do some serious damage to Apple's or Spotify's business?

At the time of writing, Apple has a cash reserve of $67 billion^[4].

At $0.01 per stream, I would have to listen to 6,700,000,000,000 songs to deplete their cash reserves. That's 6.7 trillion songs.
67,000,000,000 / 0.01

There are roughly 230 million songs in the world^[5], so that means we would need to listen to every song 29,130 times over.
6,700,000,000,000 / 230,000,000

Not only is it impossible to bankrupt Apple or Spotify this way, it's not how they pay artists...

How royalties are actually paid

Apple and Spotify don't pay artists per stream.

Instead, they take the total number of streams in a given month and determine what proportion of those are for a given artist. It's called "streamshare"^[6] or "stream share basis"^[7].

If you only listen to 1 artist for the entire month, your subscription fee will still be distributed amongst all artists on the platform based on their streaming share.

If 10% of all streams were Metallica songs, then 10% of my subscription would go to Metallica. Regardless of whether I listened to any of their songs.

I find it strange and unfair for smaller artists. Perhaps it would be more fair to distribute my subscription fee amongst the artists I listened to in a month?