Over the last few months I’ve noticed a growing murmuring from musicians about Spotify and royalty payments, culminating in this Music Week article that inspred this rant.

“Got paid £8 for 90,000 plays. Fuck spotify.”

Fuck Spotify. I mean really? Do you cry when thousands of people downloaded a free track on your website? Are you devastated because your SoundCloud profile has topped 100,000 plays? Are you enraged with the injustice of Radio 1 playing your music to millions of listeners for free and only giving you a measly £60 in return? Such outrage. 90,000 potential new fans? Fuck Spotify.

And it’s not just Mercury Prize nominated artists rushing to alienate their fans, some labels I used to respect are getting in on it as well:

“Spotify will kill smaller bands that are already struggling to make ends meet”

So said Century Media as they pulled their entire catalog.

Well I call bullshit Century Media, even if you filled the late 90’s with glorious metal for me - or at least filled in the gaps between Roadrunner, Peaceville and Earache. This isn’t killing smaller bands - can you honestly stand there and say that a service like Spotify is going to be the final straw for a struggling band? Seriously? It won’t be the unscrupulous promoter that pulls the show when they’ve rented a van and drove 400 miles? It’s not the cost of replacing the gear stolen from an uninsured rehearsal room? It’s not the management paying thousands to move the best support tours out of reach? It’s not the labels unprepared to invest in developing talented bands? There’s an untold number of things that are killing smaller bands and Spotify is way down that list. Surely by the end of 2011 it has to be time record labels grow up and stop blaming the internet for their imminent demise - perhaps they’d be able to capture some higher moral ground when arguing the value of music if they weren’t flooding the market with inane disposable crap.

If you’re a musician, your product is you - it’s your live shows, it’s your publishing, it’s what you can physically sell to real people. You have to treat Spotify exactly as it is, a glorified Myspace player that may (or may not) help you to connect with more fans who - if you’re on top of your game - might just put in the time to care about your music. There’s never been a better time to be an independent musician, so stop being so upset that people are actually listening to your music and be happy that you live in an age where it’s possible to produce a professional sounding album on your goddamn mobile phone.

Update 15/12/11 - for the record, in my last PRS statement Spotify paid me at a rate that would have made 90,000 plays worth £72