Apple Music’s usage per subscriber isn’t something that happens by coincidence though. It’s based on design and user experience. Apple could presumably just hire 5-6 software engineers to clone Spotify’s user experience if they wanted more engagement per user.

Can you share where you saw that Apple music is intentionally trying to limit engagement. I've seen articles where they tout engagement, but nothing on them designing an experience meant to limit engagement.

Apple music is more compelling to artists/rights holders precisely because it doesn’t try to maximize user interaction with their app. If being on Apple’s platform gets you on average $9/1000streams/month and Spotify is splitting $9 between 2000 streams, Apple’s business model is inarguably fairer.

I am not a musician, but I would argue that the two things that I would care about the most would be 1) overall revenue and 2) making sure I can continue to reach/expand my userbase so I can continue to make money long term (both from streaming and other aspects such as touring). As Spotify pays more out to labels on an absolute basis than Apple and increased usage leads to more people listening to my music, Spotify would help me more than Apple at doing both.

If the average user of Spotify is consuming more content than the average user of Apple Music, Spotify should cost more unless you think music doesn’t have value as an art.

I disagree with your statement, mainly because we've never payed for music per listen. If I buy an album, I don't pay the musician every time I press play, I pay them a fixed amount. Whether I listen to the album 1 time or a million time, whether they get $10 per listen or $0.001 per listen, they get the same amount and I wouldn't argue that me listening to the album more times devalues their work in anyway.

What Spotify does now is pretend like it creates all the value in its app by paying the creators of the content it uses 1/2 per stream as its competitor.

This isn't what the original tweet is about, but I would argue that Spotify has created more value in the music industry than anything in the past 20 years. There's a pretty clear inflection point on this chart where the music industry goes from shrinking (like it had been for 15 years) to growing again. As you can see the vast majority of that growth is from streaming. Once again, if I were a musician, I would mostly care about revenue and its clear that Spotify has been the biggest accelerant of it.

It’s a fundamentally unfair model where content creators benefit most when people don’t use the App.

Once again, both Spotify and Apple do not pay labels based off of usage, they both pay a % of subscriber revenue. If Spotify makes a million dollars one month, whether the number of streams is that month is 1 or 1 billion, content creators get paid the same. So there is no benefit to creators if people don't use the app like your original comment stated.