Labels took Spotify equity they were not obligated to share with artists

Evidence

The Big 3 labels extracted 18 percent stock equity in Spotify, which profited them a tidy sum when Spotify went public in 2018 and its market capitalization reached $29.5 billion. This was to be another massive payday for the labels, which they were not obligated to share with their artists. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 214

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s goal of tracing a financial instrument (catalog/equity-for-licensing) to who captures the value; connects to the core ownership-structure-leaves-fingerprints thesis.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the reader’s running question of whether financial structure maps to artistic form — here it shows the finance side’s value capture mechanics.
• SEED: Angle: how equity-for-licensing turns artists into the last claimants on value created by their own catalog.