I dont get how the artists make any money?

If everyone downloaded Spotify and listened to any album they waned either for Free or the £10 per month option.

No one would ever need to buy an album ever again?

How does this help the artists / music industry?

And bye bye HMV.

Artists do get paid when songs are streamed but for me it's never seemed like a good deal for them. There are lots of articles on the Net about artists being unhappy at the paltry sums they receive (some of this is down to the record labels taking a large cut and only giving the artists a small %). It may sound good that they are getting paid but it's very debatable if it's good for the artists and the industry in the long run.

Can you download Music from Sportify (I mostly hear CD's or MP3 in my car)

Don't believe the hype about spotify, every day i think of an album to hear, and after a search, it's simply not on there.

Soundtracks. They are woeful with them too. Even with new stuff. I recently saw the movie Drive, liked the ost, went on spotify thinking "it'll be there, it's current enough" but nope. Nada.

I subscribe to two streaming services and use them to decide what albums I want to buy. I use Last FM as a music discovery service (the similar section of artist pages). Once I find an artist that looks interesting, I will listen to a selection of their songs and if I like, I go to Amazon and download their album. If I don't like an artist or they are not on those sites, I ignore them.

I'll still buy albums for the same reason I don't download off iTunes much... I like to have the album in my hands

Spotify's a crap deal for artists and songwriters. But the majors have sizable shares in Spotify so things won't change. All streaming models are unfair to those making the music and are only sustainable because they pay out sod all.

If you are on the free option like me, then it's not forever, you only get to listen to a track five times, once you played it five times you are never able to listen to it again off Spotify. So if you have a few of your favourite albums on it, songs are going to turn the dreaded purple/blue colour eventually and you no longer have those tracks to play.

Basically I use Spotify as a test system - when there is an album I come across that I like the sound of, I take a listen to it first on Spotify and if I like most of the songs I will buy the CD, if not, I delete the album off my Spotify once I've listened to it and if there is say one song on the whole album I liked then I'd download it off something like Amazon.

For example I bought the first album from the band The XX, and wanted their second new album that was released a few days back and I can tell you I'm glad I had Spotify because I found the whole album one big giant bore. So will not be buying it at all.

I also use:

Last.fm
Youtube - if an album isn't on Spotify you can usually find what you want on youtube to listen to albums to see if you want to buy it or not.


^ As you can see, I prefer having the physical format over digital music storage only.

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Artists do get a tiny bit of money every time their song gets streamed, although it's not much.

That's why you tend not to see artists advertising Spotify much, since they don't really want people to use it. They usually link to iTunes when they want people to get a song, since the artists get a higher amount per sale from iTunes than they do from other download sites.

But I don't think artists really make that much from downloads anyway, and most mainstream artists don't sell that many albums when you think about it now. They probably make most of their money from things like touring, TV performances, advertising, etc.