Old saying. The internet is like the California Gold Rush. The only people who got rich there were the people selling the shovels.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/apr/13/spotify-songwriters

and according to Eamonn Forde (who he?) last.fm are outsourcing their song-streaming functionality to (among others) Spotify http://www.musicweek.com/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=1040752&c=1

Interesting times...

Ten years ago most people bought the album and they might even pay as much as £13 for it. These days an album is half that price and people just download a couple of tracks. You can argue all you like about "the model" and whether this or that service should be paying more to the artists but if we, the public, are directing less money at the products of those artists there's going to be less money to go around. That explains why we're paying so much for concert tickets.

A mate of mine has recorded an album (and a damn fine one at that).

He sells CDs for £6 a pop. He was saying the other day that it would take about 800,000 streams of his album to make that on Spotify.