Thom Yorke pulls his music from Spotify stating new artists get hardy any revenue from the service

Apparently a million streams generates £3,800. Wanted to get your opinion on what you think about spotify, whether it's good or bad for the music industry/new artists in general. Here's a link to the Guardian article.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jul/15/thom-yorke-spotify-twitter

there was another article I ready about someone only getting paid like $22 for over 1.6 million views. Can't remember who it was though

I don't know much about Spotify but if you ask me the music industry is a tired old dog.  It was taken over by business men in the sixties but they didn't realize that they could get rich until the early-to-mid seventies.  As much as I love Led Zeppelin, I have to admit that they were the trend-setters for this.  The music industry now is dominated by money and there doesn't seem to be any way to escape it.  If I remember correctly I believe I remember reading somewhere that most artists only see about 10-20% of the money made from album and single sales.  And most record companies only make a profit off of their most successful of artists, those that sell a million copies or more.  So it makes sense why they've dominated the economic landscape of music and try to direct artists, pressuring them to change their work into whatever they think will be marketable.  I don't mean to come off as sounding like "RECORD LABELS ARE EVIL" or "ROCK 'N ROLL IS DEAD" but to be honest it's not too far from the truth.

I'm thankful to the labels for giving the fans and the artists what they wanted: availability.  Every artist will tell you that getting the proper exposure is everything to their success.  But once the internet came along, it changed everything, the cost of "proper exposure" is now free, and the people in charge of the labels have been trying to catch up ever since without realizing how the internet is changing the economy of everything.  And now the labels just want to get money from record sales to protect their investments, meanwhile the artists are starting to realize where the real money is, it's in the live shows.

The more powerful the internet becomes at sharing information and experiences the more people are going to realize that the materialistic value of music, the songs or albums themselves, shouldn't be thought of as a product to be marketed, sold, and receive a profit from.  And this will put a huge importance on the live shows, those bands that know how to really put on an entertaining performance are going to be the most successful.  Soon owning music on a physical format will be reserved for only the most hardcore fans of this band or that, which they bought at a live show and it was created as a product just for this purpose.  An album cover will have something like "Live Show Summer 2013" or something like that on it.

Honestly, what I think the music industry needs is a service similar to Netflix, an inexpensive monthly fee that allows people to listen to whatever they want, whenever they want, where ever they want, how ever often they want.  But I'm not sure how that will change the music industry...