You can pay more money to Lady Gaga if you stop investing in the thousands of acts who barely get played on Spotify at all. In fact if you make the whole service far more selective and just concentrate on the 10% of acts who are responsible for 90% of the sales you'll probably find that nearly as many people would like it. I suspect we might not.

If you want to know how little money artists make in the new digital world, where we can all cherry pick tracks and don't have to shell out £13 for an album, have a look at this royalty statement for an American band called Too Much Joy. They demanded and got a digital accounting from Warner Bros to see how much they'd made from iTunes. It's the sobering truth.

from 2 plays on a radio station with 500,000 listeners?

Maybe I am alone in this,I hope not.I only buy complete albums and I never Pirate an Artists work.As a struggling Artist my self I fully understand how galling it is to see others profit from one's work,that's why I only sell paintings and drawings privately to a few people who seem to like my paltry endeavours in paint and line.It would be a situation greatly to be desired that some of the profits generated by the big guns in the recording industry might be invested in some of the less profitable performers but in a increasingly greedy and short-sighted market driven economic model I doubt that will happen.Dylan was right "Money doesn't talk It Swears".

radio stations don't pay any fees at all to artists

That Lady Gaga figure is way off the mark. It seems to be based only on Spotify payments for the songwriting royalties to the Swedish collection society, which doesn't represent the amount paid to the record company, and in turn paid as artist royalties

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7590782/Spotify-rejects-claims-tha...

puts his/her/their music on anything like Spotify, Last FM etc cant possibly be doing it to make money, only for the exposure. If they are doing it for the money, theyre more stupid / on heavier medication than we think. The only people who MIGHT make money from Spotify is Spotify.

I posted this a while back from Robert Fripp's online diary:
"I have had royalties delve into this and they have advised me that Cat Food has been streamed 353 times and Groon 265 times. This has generated a payment to Island Records from Spotify of £1.61p.

"I have been assured that the recordings have been withdrawn from Spotify and steps taken to ensure that this will not arise again.

"£1.61 gross on 618 streams, then reduced from gross to net artist royalty on tracks improperly provided by UMG - a shareholder in Spotify? Is this seriously being presented as a future for the industry?"

Where is any content on the web - porn aside probably - making money? The Word havent even worked out a way to charge for podcasts that many of us would happily pay 79p for yet. The advertising revenues that were promised never materialised - hence Murdoch's belated attempt to charge for his content - and for most content out there, there's a free way to get it.

In terms of digital content, the web doesn't pay, not now anyway, and anyone who thinks it does is crazy.

The tragedy of this - and of pirating etc - is that a lot of up and coming artists who might be worthy of a listen won't make money from their craft and will jack it in. There's an interesting piece with Petr Gabriel in the Classic Rock Prog special thats partly about that very point should anybody be interested.

i dunno about comparing it to radio really

i mean people are using it now "instead" of buying cds... where as radio im sure is more of a promotional tool...at least for albums... you dont generally get to hear an album in full, at whatever time of the day you fancy it on the radio but you do get this luxury with spotify which obviously makes the need for the cd a little redundant, therefore the artist loses out

and prs for radio play... the biggest ones ie bbc radio 1 and radio 2 pay around £20 per minute to songwriters.... the smaller stations are a lot less than this.