how... does this work? realistically i mean.

doesn't spotify charge you a good markup on the "earning", like youtube does for ad income so you only get like 50-60% of the receipts so what kind of laundering is this if you have to give away a big chunk of the money? why not do on app store or steam then? or roblox?

One stream is at least 30s listening time, that's 86400 streams per month.

They pay out approx $5 / 1000 streams (depending on market).

It costs around $10 per month (depending on market).

So if they have no filtering at all, you can theoretically get around $400 (legit) for every $10.

So it comes down to how incentivized they are to filter (which is ~0 - basically so it isn't visible to outside actors).

That said, one of the sources from a criminal gang says it's a pretty bad rate and is used only to launder larger sums (at least order of $100k).