When it catches on with Mom and Dad and the country western Walmart crowd hopefully people will start making money.
And all we know is some artists are getting screwed. Warner, Universal, EMI might have made a deal where they get a decent percentage and smaller labels get peanuts, we have no way of knowing.
Doesn't take long at all to find out that the deals struck with majors included not a decent percentage, but actually ownership. Ownership means access to a revenue stream — good for labels, bad for artists who don't receive royalties on investment revenue.
Go beyond that one Google search, you can quickly learn that indie labels — the folks who win more than half the Grammys — don't get the same arrangement. So the music one their labels actually subsidizes the competition. They're not all that happy about that.
And lastly: artists. You can listen to them. Plenty are outspoken. For every Metallica getting onstage with Spotify there are many others essentially saying that they receive nothing — and that makes sense because the payouts are designed to work at scale, not at the level most working musicians operate.
Saying all this without judgement. I think the streaming market could be a good one for artists if it were more geared to driving direct purchases — but thinking about it as the answer is a problem. It's the start of exposure, like radio used to be, not the end goal.
See I think it is the end goal and it's going to replace CDs and iTunes really soon. I personally don't like Spotify but Rdio and Mog are incredible. And to have the major labels pulling the strings, which sounds like is happening, is probably a really bad thing.
And all we know is some artists are getting screwed. Warner, Universal, EMI might have made a deal where they get a decent percentage and smaller labels get peanuts, we have no way of knowing.