I would find an estimate like "AirPods make more money than Spotify" interesting; its a sort-of poetic "the hardware you use to listen to the music is worth more than the music itself", at least in a limited scope (of course, the entire audio hardware industry is larger than Spotify, but is the entire audio hareware industry larger than the entire music recording industry? idk).
Spotify rents music that it itself rents from 3 companies that own most of the music. Why would those 3 companies not just raise their rents if Spotify starts making a decent profit?
Spotify has been around since 2006 and just eked out a tiny profit last year. Unless they plan on owning music themselves, I don’t see why the music owners wouldn’t try to capture most of the profit.
I have met audiophiles. The impression I get is that having nice headphones "on the go" is not a priority and people live with the low quality of small-and-wireless headphones.
Very few audiophiles are sitting at their desk using Airpods, though. In that market, wired headphones rule supreme. (Many people are using wireless noise-cancelling headphones, however, not for audio quality but because "work" is too loud for people to work. At my last job, they even had Sonos speakers around playing music all day. It was crazy!)
