It’s good for the company, the corporations, and the consumer. The company earned huge amounts of revenue last year, and continues to attract investors from all around the world. The corporations - that is, goliaths like EMI and Universal - receive substantial gains from offering their music to the company. The consumer need only connect to the Internet to access millions of songs, all for free. Good for company, corporations, and consumer. However, some are still strongly opposed to the service. In a movement spearheaded by hugely influential musicians like Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Talking Heads’ David Byrne, more and more artists are pulling their music from the program every day. So why are people complaining? In simplest terms: Spotify hurts the music industry. Today, I’ll show you why Spotify’s ludicrous payment system harms artists both big and small and discourages the lengthy process of creating high-quality music, a central part of the growth of the music industry over the past century.

Before going any further, I feel it would be wise to explain briefly what Spotify is. It’s a service created by Swedish startup Spotify LTD in 2006, who first released the software in public in 2008. It offers music from a huge variety of bands for streaming on any computer connected to the Internet. If a user chooses to employ the program’s services for free, the music pauses every couple of songs to play an advertisement. Paying a certain amount of money per month adds additional services such as ad-free music, downloading for offline play, and the ability to stream and download music on a mobile device. The service has a burgeoning userbase, with upwards of 24 million active users on the site, and it looks to expand even more in the future.

So, if Spotify is so huge and gives access to so much music, why is it a bad thing? Because the amount of money it pays its artists is incredibly small. Let’s take a moment to compare Spotify and iTunes. An artist makes about 10 cents per track they sell on digital distribution services like iTunes which allow unlimited, restriction-free downloads of MP3 files. Therefore, in order for an artist to make the current monthly minimum wage in the United States, they must sell about 1,250 albums on iTunes, or about 12,500 singles, not an easy feat. However, if making minimum wage using iTunes is difficult, doing the same on Spotify is impossible. The artist must attain over four million track plays on Spotify to make just over one thousand dollars, at a pathetic 290 millionths of a cent per play. To put this into perspective: Daft Punk's “Get Lucky,” quite possibly the biggest song of this summer, racked up about 25.5 million plays in its first month on Spotify. Think about that for a second: one of the biggest songs of 2013 generated a paycheck of about 6,500 dollars from Spotify in its first month, an amount that would make for a yearly pay of less than 100,000 dollars for two of the biggest musicians in the world. And, of course, not everyone can achieve the same gigantic play-count as Daft Punk. For smaller, less-exposed artists who put their heart and soul into developing an album over the course of two to three years, a meager income from Spotify simply isn’t worth the blood, sweat and tears the band gave to create their music.

What about the bands who rely on Spotify to expose their music, though? Take Swedish electronic duo Cazzette, for example, and their status as the first band ever to release an album exclusively on Spotify. There’s clearly some good to Spotify if groups can become famous thanks to Spotify’s prominence, right? The point this argument overlooks is that not every band can make it big through the use of a massive program like Spotify. Sure, there’s a “Discover” feature which shows the listener new music based on bands he or she likes. However, when was the last time any one of you found new music using a service like this? As Talking Heads lead singer and guitarist David Byrne puts it, “the actual moment of discovery in most cases happens...when someone else tells you about an artist or you read about them – not when you're on the streaming service listening to what you have read about.”

“But Spotify shouldn’t be a band’s primary form of income,” some might say. “A band should make more money from touring and merchandise sales.” I agree with this point. Given the popularity of concerts and the exhausting tours bands undertake, it stands to reason that artists should earn more money from tours and merchandise sold at those tours than anything else. However, if Spotify becomes the primary form of music consumption, as it’s looking to become now, it disincentivizes bands to spend as much energy recording as they currently do. If an artist will make little to no money with the release of each new album, it’s only logical that there will be less incentive to put in as many hours of hard work to create the high-quality new music on which the industry has thrived for so long. Spotify could become a monopoly of sorts, but one which doesn’t control its own products, and when there’s no more product left the results could be devastating. As Byrne puts it, “many musicians will eventually have to find employment elsewhere or change what they do to make more money...the inevitable result would seem to be that the Internet will suck the creative content out of the whole world until nothing is left.”

It’s that potential lack of creative content which is why Spotify could be so harmful to the music industry. When the primary way to access music is no longer friendly to the artists, what then? The foundation of the music industry - that is, artists producing quality content in order to receive the means to support their craft - that foundation will start to crumble. This is why I ask you all to be aware of how you support the music you love. There are countless ways to ensure an artist’s livelihood, even beyond just listening to the music. Buy the physical CD, buy some clothing, go to a concert - there are so many ways that music can be kept alive and well. The Internet is both a blessing and a curse to musicians everywhere. Make use of it however you will, but know this: your decisions matter. Thank you.