I think it's unfair to blame Spotify in this situation. The labels set the asking price and Spotify either chooses to pay it or have no music to legally stream. As a service Spotify is a fantastic service, since it debuted here in Australia I've barely downloaded music in part because I pay $12 per month for on-demand music and don't need to download.<p>If Spotify were benefiting from the extremely low royalty payments, then maybe I'd side with the argument Spotify is taking artists for a ride, but the matter of the fact is Spotify are not profitable whatsoever. This amazing service is operating at a loss and has been for years now. If artists want better payouts maybe they should lobby their labels to do so.<p>A service like Spotify costs a lot of money in terms of bandwidth and infrastructure to operate. Storing and streaming music isn't a trivial thing, the costs of operating the service are a massive percentage of Spotify's monthly expenditure fees. It's not costing the artist money to put their music on Spotify, it's costing Spotify money to put an artists music on their platform and allow others to listen to it. The royalty amount might be low, but make no mistake, the artist is still getting a better deal than Spotify currently is.<p>The only people currently winning out in the online music space are Apple and music labels. Services like Spotify and artists themselves are being shafted and have more in common than they think.