Tweeted by Charles Arthur (@charlesarthur), the Grauniad's Technology Editor this morning is an Information is Beautiful pictogram(?) of how much a solo artist has to sell before he or she makes the euivalent of the current US monthly minimim wage of $1,160.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-ear...

I'm guessing not many artists get the 4,549,020 plays a month on Spotify but the self-pressed CD route looks feasible and presumably a self-hosted download would relieve them of the costs of pressing and packaging.

Strikes me that this kind of backs up the theory put out on the podast a while ago that the way anyone is going to make any money online is by treating streaming sites as advertising (like the radio shows of yesteryear) and hoping folks will like the product enough to buy a download.