Pop star Billie Eilish has strongly criticized the business model of ad-supported free tiers, accusing them of turning music into “bait” to maximize advertising profits while exploiting artists’ labor.
Eilish’s criticism highlights the imbalance in the current streaming ecosystem, particularly the huge pay gap between paid and free accounts.
The “Bait” Business Model
According to Eilish, the free tiers (which rely heavily on advertising) are used as a “bait” to attract and retain billions of users. This helps the platforms solidify their position as attractive advertising channels, driving up their own value while the value of the music—that is, the artists’ intellectual property—is reduced to almost zero.
- Profit Prioritizes Advertising: This model prioritizes ad revenue and massive user numbers over properly compensating creators.
📉 The Alarming Salary Gap
The unfairness is evident in the average payout per stream, especially between paid and free users:
| Stream Type | Estimated Payment Level (Average/turn) |
| Premium/Subscriber Stream | Usually from $0.005 to over $0.01 |
| Ad-Supported Free | Significantly low, often under $0.004 |
| YouTube Music (Ad-Free) | Estimated at $0.002 or less |
This means that a budding artist would need millions of streams from a free account to make a modest income. Even for big stars like Eilish, the actual royalties after label, management and taxes are only a small fraction.
The Debate Over Payment Models
Eilish’s criticism adds to a larger debate in the music industry about the current royalty model, known as the Pro-Rata (or Market Share Model).
- Pro-Rata Model: All subscription and advertising revenue is pooled into a common fund, which is then distributed based on a percentage of an artist’s total streams across the platform. This model has been criticized for favoring superstars and artists with huge streams at the expense of mid-level and emerging creators.
- Proposed Solution: Many parties are calling for a move to a User-Centric Payment System (UCPS) , where a listener’s subscription money would only be divided among the artists they personally listened to. This would supposedly allow fans to directly support their favorite artists in a more equitable manner.
In short, Billie Eilish’s message is a warning: by turning music into a free and abundant commodity, streaming platforms are at risk of devaluing the artistic labor that underpins their billion-dollar empires.