But for context, the full quote about preferring illegal downloading is: "I’ll go even further to say that 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."

They said piracy is never about cost, but almost always about a service issue. Basically people flocked to Napster (and the likes) at the time because it let them browse an infinitude of music which was, back then, incredible.

That was just market demand validation, a latent problem waiting for a solution to address it. Piracy just did it first. Once someone solved it, a little bit better, like Spotify did with realtime (instead of p2p waiting), and with indexing/filtering/curation/etc. It automatically won over piracy.

Then, the one fun argument it brought after, is that the same tools that ended piracy are likely the ones making it rise again. Netflix made everyone happy, but now we have a subscription circus. There's N streaming services, and keeping up with subscribing/cancelling/finding the one that has your content created a ... service problem!

So we're bound to see piracy rise again, not because folks don't want to pay $20/mo for streaming, but because they don't want to deal with the hassle of jumping across N subscriptions and keeping track of that.

I think some of the big media is trying to solve for that, which is why you see all of them now becoming "channels" inside each other, but I'm curious to see how this will evolve.

Spotify tells me when any of the artists I listen to are coming to town - I’ve found and bought tickets this way and I don’t go to a lot of live shows in general.

Spotify is trying to sell me merch and artists can have both a merch and an events tab in app.

Edit: I see an artist with only 400k subscribers selling merch (compared to Lady Gaga’s 99 million), so it must be at least somewhat accessible.

* I don’t know if Spotify is charging money for these services or if they are ultimately fair, but at least for some artists it is generating ticket sales

Just make the albums easily downloadable on Bandcamp is all I ask.

There absolutely is a conversation to be had here, but it is not the one that has taken place for years and years. To be fair to OP, the information wasn't quite as ubiquitous in 2011 as it is today.. but for the last 5 years at least Spotify has published yearly reports giving information to how the payment system works.

The model is a pro-rata model. There is no per-stream rate. The amount of money paid out each month is stream-share based from a shared pool of money which contains roughly 2/3 of every dollar spotify makes. These payments are paid to rights holders (not artists.. labels, distributors) and then rights holders pay a percentage of that to not just artists, but also publishers and song writers. The rate they pay their artists is their business, Spotify isn't dictating that. In fact, this payment model is industry standard (most major streamers pay the same 2/3) and heavily favors the rights holders, which have always dominated the cash flow of the music industry. They just have Spotify to take the heat now.

So, like I said, there is a conversation out there to be had. That conversation is more is 2/3 of music revenue fair? Should Spotify charge users per stream instead of a monthly subscription? Should the subscription be something more like $20/month? $50?

Just dunking on Spotify isn't helping artists. https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/

* edit: I called myself a musician, but thats not quite true.