[Jgrubb]

It's not about that. It's about "Oooo, shiny new music toy that's included for free with Facebook. Awesome! Now I don't have to buy music ever again!"

This inevitably erodes purchases from any other online outlet, which leads to less money flowing to artists. This is made worse by the fact that Spotify's royalty rate is absolutely abysmal. This is well known, and leads to less money flowing to artists.

Spotify is such a good thing for the consumer of music. I say that as a consumer of music who was a Premium Spotify subscriber until last week. But as an artist, it's just another mechanism for record labels to whittle down the money they owe you for your working for them. That's why I cancelled my subscription last week.

This is the key bit to me -

"...I actually prefer illegal downloading over Spotify because when you get music illegally it’s at least implicit in the transaction that what you’re doing is potentially harmful to the artist. But with Spotify, your conscience is clear because you’re either enduring ads or paying to use the service and access the music."