ZAPPA ON SPOTIFY!

lawp
$potify pay an average of $0.007 per play http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-25217353

Well let's do a little casual math here. Say the average artist earns $2 in royalties for the sale of a CD. Now let's say an average album has 10 songs on it (bear with my assumptions). If someone listens to that whole album on Spotify, that's a total of $0.07 in streaming royalties. The $2 CD royalty is about 29 times that. Is it fair to assume that the owner of a CD will listen to it 29 times? I have albums which I've listened to many more times than that. If a consumer listens to an album 29 times on Spotify in the course of their lifetime (assuming that Spotify is here to stay), then they've earned the artist as much as they would have by purchasing the CD. 
 
Another way to look at it is to consider the viewpoint of the consumer. How many CD's have you bought that turned out to be a disappointment? You heard a song on the radio, you liked it, you bought the album. But the rest of it turned out to be crap and you only listened to it once. How is that value for money? You paid around $15 for something which got one use. Perhaps you didn't feel ripped off, but maybe you should! Some artists put out one good song per album, the rest is just filler. In contrast, think of an album you bought which blew your mind away. Virtually every song on it a classic. You paid the same amount for it, but you've listened to it 100 glorious times over the years. The difference in terms of value for money is incredible. 
 
So perhaps streaming services like Spotify put the onus on artists to produce albums which are consistently good, rather than just putting out one or two decent tracks and filling the rest of the album with crap. For an album to perform well on Spotify, you have to make sure that all of the tracks are going to be listened to again and again, not just one or two. I guess the same goes for iTunes downloads, but the problem is that people are just emailing MP3's to each other. You can't pirate a Spotify stream. Well actually you can because I believe it's possible to "rip" a stream using some kind of software. But most people aren't doing that - they're using Spotify because it's convenient, all of the music they could ever want is at their fingertips and they can listen to it all on their phones without having to worry about storage. 
 
Spotify is still relatively small in terms of users. Especially when you compare them to something like YouTube. So the paltry amount that some artists complain about earning from Spotify is largely to do with the fact that it doesn't have that many users yet. As it grows, this will change. And to be quite honest I can imagine a bit of give and take between Spotify and artists in the future. Perhaps the monthly subscription will rise, and artists will get paid more per stream. I pay $10/month and consider it ridiculously cheap, I'd definitely pay $15 or $20. Whether other people will, I can't say. But I can't see that many people closing their subscriptions in disgust because they have to pay $5 more for it, considering just how much music it gives you access to.