last year

When a freshman is wondering whether to play sports or focus on academics because of the immense time commitment, it’s usually the parents who have to give a nudge toward one or the other. Except this time, the decision was left to 15-year-old Javier Zarate, and he chose to give up club soccer to try for straight A’s last year at Garfield High.

Last spring, Garfield soccer coach Pablo Serrano, knowing he had a highly regarded goalie on his campus, began a lobbying campaign with emails and text messages inviting him to try out for the Bulldogs’ soccer team.

“He told me if I wanted to give it a shot, I could try out,” Zarate said. “They were very welcoming and nice.”

The rest is going to be part of Garfield sports lore, because Zarate saved three penalty kicks when Garfield won the City Section Division II championship game against Canoga Park and delivered more saves last week in helping the Bulldogs beat Bakersfield Taft 1-0 in the Southern California Division V regional final.

Incredibly, Garfield is headed to Sacramento this week to play in the first CIF state soccer championships, against Branford on Saturday at 10 a.m. at Natomas High.

“I’m super pumped up,” Zarate said.

Who knows how many alumni from Garfield are living in Sacramento or nearby, but they have been known to travel around the country to support their Bulldogs, especially if rival Roosevelt is the opponent. Something tells me there’s going to be a caravan from Boyle Heights headed to Sacramento to provide support.

“I know some will make the drive,” Serrano said.

It’s been a strange season in City Section soccer, with six schools removed from the playoffs for using ineligible players, most of whom played for club teams while also playing tor their high school team, in violation of CIF bylaw 600.

Serrano said there’s always a reminder making sure his players know the rule.

“There’s a lot of soccer going on in this community,” he said. “It’s always a challenge because kids play outside with club. It’s something I do from the beginning of tryouts. We talk to the kids that if they play in a club outside of school, they are not allowed to play high school or vice versa. There’s no excuse,”

In the case of the 5-foot-6 Zarate, he didn’t play any soccer last year while focusing on academics and being part of the school’s ROTC program. His weighted grade-point average is at 4.4. He wants to study to become a firefighter.

“My family motivated me to be academically focused and I found a balance to do both,” he said of his return to soccer.

Goalies are usually much taller than Zarate, but he received lots of lessons on how to overcome the size disadvantage.

“I get that a lot that I’m very short for a goalie,” he said. “As a kid I, got training by a good trainer. He told me, ‘You’re pretty short for a goalie. As long as you can master being able to dive and jump high, you should be as good as them.’”

Garfield finished fourth in the Eastern League behind City Section soccer powers South East and Marquez, both of whom were eliminated after making the semifinals because of ineligible players.

Given the opportunity to get hot in the playoffs, the Bulldogs have done just that. Junior Noe Marmolejo has been the leading goal scorer.

The team is scheduled to take a bus to Sacramento on Friday, stay at a hotel Friday night, rise early for its game on Saturday, then immediately return home. Considering how loyal the Boyle Heights community is, look for lots of fans supporting the team in Sacramento and when that bus returns home.

“It’s an honor,” Serrano said of being the first City team to play for a state soccer title.

Back in the early 2010s, the music industry was at a low point.

Piracy was rampant. Compact disc sales were on a steady decline. And the then-new audio streaming services, like Spotify, were taking hits from creators for paying low royalty rates.

Today, Spotify has grown into the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service and the highest-paying retailer globally — paying the music industry over $11 billion last year. The Swedish company said in a recent post that the payouts aren’t strictly going to ultra-popular artists, but that “roughly half of royalties were generated by independent artists and labels.”

“A decade ago, a lot of the questions were really fair. Spotify had to be able to prove out if it could scale as an economic engine. People didn’t know if streaming would scale as a model,” said Sam Duboff, Spotify’s global head of marketing and policy of music business.

Duboff said Spotify’s payouts aren’t “plateauing — we’re still growing that royalty pool on Spotify more than 10% per year.” He credits the streaming platform’s growth to “incentivizing people to be willing to pay for music again” by providing personalized experiences and global accessibility.

The company, founded in 2006, serves more than 751 million users, including 290 million subscribers, in 184 markets.

“The average Spotify premium subscriber listens to 200 artists every month, and nearly half of those artists are discovered for the first time,” Duboff said. “When you build an experience where people can explore and fall in love with music, it inspires them to upgrade to premium and keep paying.”

The platform offers a wide variety of playlists, curated by editors like the up-and-comer-driven Fresh Finds or rap’s latest, RapCaviar. There are also personal playlists generated for users, such as the weekly round-up Discover Weekly and the daily mix of tunes called the “daylist.”

The streamer considers itself the first step toward “an enduring career” for today’s indie artists. Last year, more than a third of artists making $10,000 on the platform in royalties started by self-releasing their music through independent distributors.

“Streaming, fundamentally, is about opportunity and access. It’s artists from all over the world releasing music the way they want to and reaching a global audience from Day One,” Duboff said. He adds that when fans have a choice, they will discover new genres and music cultures that may have otherwise languished in obscurity.

In 2025, nearly 14,000 artists earned $100,000 from Spotify alone. The streamer’s data also show that last year the 100,000th highest-earning artist made $7,300 in Spotify royalties, whereas in 2015, an artist in that same spot earned around $350.

The company, with a large presence in L.A.’s Arts District, emphasizes that the roster of artists on its platform who earn significantly more money — well into the millions — is no longer limited to the few. A decade ago, Spotify’s top artist made around $10 million in royalties. Today, the platform’s top 80 artists generate over $10 million annually. Some of 2025’s top artists globally were Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift and the Weeknd.

Spotify claims those who aren’t household names can earn six figures, with more than 1,500 artists earning $1 million last year.

For some musicians, the outlook is not as clear

Damon Krukowski, a musician and the legislative director for United Musicians & Allied Workers, argues that Spotify’s money isn’t necessarily going to artists — it’s going to their labels.

Those without labels usually upload music through distributors such as DistroKid and CD Baby. These platforms charge a small fee or commission. For example, DistroKid’s lowest-level subscription is $24.99 a year, and the site states users “keep 100% of all your earnings.”

”There are zero payments going directly to recording artists from Spotify,” Krukowski asserts. “Recording artists deserve direct payment from the streaming platforms for use of our work.”

The advocacy group, which has mobilized more than 70,000 musicians and music workers, recently helped draft the Living Wage for Musicians Act to address the streaming industry. The bill, introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives last fall, calls for a new streaming royalty that would directly pay artists a minimum of one penny per stream.

In the Q&A section of Spotify’s Loud and Clear website, the streamer confirms that it “doesn’t pay artists or songwriters directly. We pay rights holders selected by the artist or songwriter, whether that’s a record label, publisher, independent distributor, performance rights organization, or collecting society.”

Instead of following a penny-per-stream model, Spotify pays based on the artist’s share of total streams, called a “streamshare.”

“Streaming doesn’t work like buying songs. Fans pay for unlimited access, not per track they listen to,” wrote the company online. “So a ‘per stream’ rate isn’t actually how anyone gets paid — not on Spotify, or on any major streaming service.”