[shibboleth]

These are just my views from what I've experienced during my time in the industry, but the figure being given by Derek Webb is extraordinarily low for a service like Spotify, even for an (assumed?) independent artist. The price he gives for Spotify's artist payment per listen ($0.00029) is even lower than Last.FM's ($0.00070). For additional comparison, Spotify pays labels $0.002 while Last.FM pays $0.005. I'm not exactly sure how/why Last.FM pays better than Spotify, but I would wager to guess that it is a combination of Spotify having larger operating expenses and advertisers willing to pay less per session. Nonetheless, these figures are awfully low and I would like to see more artists coming forward with information like this (even though it probably won't matter).

After looking through some notes, I found that Rhapsody is closer to Spotify when it comes to artist payments. Rhapsody pays artists ~$0.0002 but pays labels significantly more at ~$0.03 (!)

[sp332]

I think Spotify gave the labels a large amount of stock when they made the deal. So it's not $.002/play, it's a bunch of stock + $.002/play.