Is Spotify Really The Answer?

There's been a fair amount of fawning coverage of the music-streaming service Spotify and it's impending arrival in the United States, but Robert Fripp has an interesting diary entry about the back-end numbers for the artists:

£1.61 gross on 618 streams, then reduced from gross to net artist royalty on tracks improperly provided by UMG - a shareholder in Spotify? Is this seriously being presented as a future for the industry?

Now, the real question here is scale. Is 618 streams a lot? A little? The immediate sense is that this is a couple orders of magnitude smaller than what someone like Muse might be streaming this week. But that brings us back to what's good for the music industry versus what's good for the musician. The labels and the blockbuster artists get theirs from this math, but the long tail continues to struggle, which means that the industry will continue to swing for the fences instead of developing artists with more modest expectations. So, for the moment, I'm with Fripp on this one.

And given the licensing issues in the United States, keep an eye out to see if Spotify takes a big shortcut and just buys Rhapsody, because they're only really different in implementation, to my mind.