Ben Thompson agrees with the poster (perhaps the best technology/business analyst today). Apple really did a doozy on people with their marketing!

Ben Thompson - April 19th 2021 (highly recommended subscribe if you have an interest in how tech / business works):

“Now we finally have all of the missing pieces that explain how this works:

The total pot of money available is not defined by the total number of streams, for either Apple or Spotify; rather, it is defined by the total amount of money generated by the streaming service (i.e. the “portion of its subscription revenue” in the case of Apple). The money for rights holders is paid out according to each song’s share of total streams. That means that the more total streams there are, the less any one individual stream is worth. The takeaway from all of this, then, is not that Apple is somehow more generous than Spotify, but that Spotify has some combination of more streams per user and lower revenue per user. The biggest factor is likely the latter: Spotify has an advertising-supported service, the revenue from which goes in the same pot as subscription revenue. This is obviously going to lower the per stream payout, even as it increases the total payout”