Even if you are starting out thousands streams is nothing. I have a few friends who have a band. Its really small, basically everyone who listens to them knows them personally. They have 20 monthly listeners, but almost all of their songs on their own have 1.000 yearly streams – because Spotify puts them randomly into their automatically generated playlists.

Meanwhile kicking all the 'bands' out with less than 1000 streams allows them to pay the rest more.

I don't actually know anything about where bands are supposed to find an audience, but I don't think bands who haven't found an audience should expect to get paid, the same way I don't expect to get paid for going to a job interview or engaging in a hobby. If a band doesn't have an audience they can reliably entertain, what they're doing is self promotion for their own benefit, not entertainment for the benefit of an audience.