[sleepyhead]

I'm not arguing that what Spotify pays artists is reasonable, but what many fail to understand is that streaming is very different from buying. I don't own the songs I listen to on Spotify thus pricing must be different. And I listen to a lot of music I would normally not buy making it more similar to radio in many ways.

[bad_user]

You NEVER "own" the songs you buy. You only "own" the right of listening to those songs whenever you want.

So how is "owning" a CD any different from Spotify?

Also, the value of a song diminishes the more you listen to it. Seriously, even if you love a song, put it on repeat for a day and you probably won't listen to it again for a couple of months.

So it's not like Spotify customers will one day buy the music, unless they really have very specific needs, like being somewhere with a bad or expensive Internet connection, but if you subscribed to Spotify in the first place then I doubt that.

[technoslut]

> So how is "owning" a CD any different from Spotify?

Because if you quit Spotify you lose all the music. The CD you can keep for life without having to pay $10 every month.

[tacoe]

If you don't think it's different, wait for publishers to pull albums from Spotify. This happens all the time. poof gone. Does this happen to your CDs?

[lt]

Does "owning" a song makes any sense in the digital world, or is it a relic of the physical album days?

Even besides the licensing/ownership fact (you have always purchased a license to listen to the music privately), I bet there's more music released in a given day than hours in that day. I keep thinking that the model where you can just listen to whatever you want for a flat flee makes a lot more sense in this universe.

[earl]

I'd buy an argument like that for pandora, where you can't control play order or exactly what you listen to, but come on. Spotify is a total substitution for purchase: listen to pretty much whatever you want in the order you want as many times as you want up to and including 24x7. The $5/mo subscription gives you most even moderately popular music you want for the price of 4-5 cds, with shipping, per year. So obviously spotify shouldn't be forking out $.70 per track per play, but hearing things like artists like Jons Hopkins getting the price of a cd for 90 thousand plays (ie if a song is 5 minutes long listening to it for three hundred and twelve days) is far far too low. [1] I don't know how to set the right rate, but this isn't it...

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293892