Spotify is second largest source of revenue in Europe for labels

I think so. "Digital music sales" generally means the sale of music files, while CDs are counted as physical objects, not files.

> Spotify cannot be compared to iTunes and amazon, or traditional CD sales. It is more equivalent to royalties from FM radio play.

Well, that sounds like a strange simile to me. When listening to FM radio you do not chose what tracks you listen to. Spotify isn't Pandora. With Spotify, you can chose whatever track you like (as long they have it and there's no commercial queued). Lady Gaga got $167 for 1 million plays. Imagine what the small artists receives.

Spotify is controlled by the four major record companies: Universal, EMI, Sony and Warner. Even if they just own 18% of the shares, Spotify's entire existence rests on the trust that these record companies continue to license "their" music. The four record companies are using the power of Spotify to further strengthen its domination over other record companies and penalize artists outside their own team.

To me, listening to Spotify and actually believing you are doing something better for the artist than those who pirate is no less than delusion.

I've seen this happen on occasion and it's the one thing that really pisses me off about Spotify. I expect music that's in my playlists to actually be there when I want to play it. I pay for it, it's legal and it earns the labels more than the thousands of people who use Pirate Bay. When they yank the music I listen to, away from Spotify it makes me want to fire up my BitTorrent-client again.

So THAT's why they have 'Buy' buttons on the songs.

Of course it can! The fact that it is on-demand practically negates the need to buy the music else where. On radio you have to sit around waiting for your song to come on. I've seen royalty reports from Spotify's largest artists, and it was indeed microscopically small.

You can do that with your website. Who needs spotify for that?

100% correct, at least as it pertains to me. The concept of "owning" music has been dead to my generation since Napster. I'm not even sure what that concept means, nowadays. Music is like water, you can get it from a million sources, paid or not. Getting it isn't the problem.

My real problem is finding what I want to listen to at this very moment, and managing it. I don't want to spend forever finding my music, downloading it, arranging payment, organizing it, backing it up, copying it to my iPod or other computer, etc.

Spotify gets this: search -> listen -> add to playlists. At work, home, wherever... just login. Girlfriend's music? Switch user. Throw away my iPod, it was just a shipping container, anyway.

I heard a talk by Andreas Ehn (Spotify's former CTO) last year and he actually mentioned in his talk that piracy was the benchmark they were trying to compete with Spotify.

Piracy still is the market leader in catalogue size and ease of use for consumers at large (just see the AVC post in another comment). This is actually a fantastic way to look at it - Spotify didn't set out to beat iTunes or any existing market player with a business model, they wanted to beat piracy.

Now that's an ambitious goal, even though many other services aim at doing the same indirectly (by beating existing market players).

The main reason music is gone from TBP is because everyone knows RIAA is watching the peers on public trackers like mofos.

Serious pirates are all on small, private trackers with exclusivity, speed, and quality as the main guidelines. You can't just join them either, most require relatively decent speeds tests, high ratios for seeding/sharing and have closed registrations, only invitations. Seedboxes are all the rage, and the hardcore pirates are probably using Usenet quite a bit now as well.

Just to clarify it's not just mobile streaming, but offline mobile support. I carry around 1500 tracks on my Android using Spotify Premium for £10 / month. The transparent wifi syncing and social aspects of the service (collaborative playlists, music inbox etc) are awesome too. If it's available in your country, I urge you to try it.

But it has an interface that no one undestands

It too, as Spotify, has a Swedish connection: it was founded by Niclas Zennström (Skype founder).

p2p

Here is a nice article: http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/

Exactly. GEMA charges a minimum of €0.1916 ($0.2626) for each streaming of a song up to five minutes. Compare that to the £0.0022 ($0.0035) charged by PRS for Music, the equivalent performing rights collection society in the United Kingdom.