As the current decade has developed a musical identity of its own, Spotify has filled the role of its director.

Like the iPod did to digital music in 2001, Spotify has revolutionized how the world thinks of and values music. The iPod and iTunes brought the medium to the digital frontier with 99-cent song purchases and unprecedentedly large storage space. Spotify, meanwhile, brings a near-endless library of music to its 75 million users.

For Spotify, though, the critics are louder than ever.

American indie folk singer Joanna Newsom has never been a fan of Spotify. She made her views on the service clear Oct. 18, telling the Los Angeles Times that Spotify is “a villainous cabal of major labels,” “a garbage system” and “the banana of the music industry.” (Newsom clarified this metaphor: “It just gives off a fume. You can just smell that something’s wrong with it.”)

As hyperbolic as Newsom’s claims might sound, she’s hardly alone in her critique. Other major artists like Taylor Swift, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, The Talking Heads’ David Byrne, The Black Keys’ Patrick Carney and James Blunt (just to name a few) have been openly critical of the service’s means of supporting the artists it hosts and pays.

These artists argue that Spotify hardly provides any royalties to them, and they’re not wrong. A November 2014 report by Time pegs Spotify’s payouts between $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream.

And that’s before the record labels divide the money up on their own.

According to these numbers, Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud,” the all-time most-played song on Spotify, has netted $1.4 million. Taking into account the 15 percent of royalties that artists receive from labels on average, Sheeran himself has made just over $200,000 on this song. Remember, this is the best-case scenario.

But what artists and critics don’t realize is that, while the royalties are admittedly awful, they’re really the best that Spotify can afford right now.

On Spotify’s end, the company hasn’t made a year-to-year profit yet. Its spokespeople defend their payment practices saying 70 percent of the company’s total revenue goes to music rights holders, with total payouts estimated at $1 billion in 2014.

The disconnect really lay less with Spotify and more with how slowly the industry is evolving.

Music has always been something you pay for and own, whether on vinyl, cassette, CD or digital download. As Spotify’s taken over, though, that model’s shifted from ownership to a paid subscription fee to access a digital library of music. This takes ownership completely out of the equation, and nobody from the music industry is really used to that yet.

I speak here on behalf of the listeners, however. I pay the monthly $5 student rate for Spotify Premium and use it for almost all of my music listening now. For someone like me who wouldn’t have the financial ability to purchase all the music I listen to on “legacy media” like CDs or iTunes downloads, Spotify is my only opportunity to have this much access.

As much as music traditionalists love to deride what some call the musical gluttony that streaming services like Spotify seem to endorse — I say it’s gluttony that people are asking for, after all.

No perfect system has emerged yet from music streaming. Jay Z-sponsored Tidal was one option, but its big-name music celebrity executives running the whole show is as one-percenter hyper-capitalist as they get. To make an overly simplified economic metaphor here, Spotify is trying (and succeeding, so far) to bring a socialist payout system to music streaming, with the promise that, one day, everything will be better for everyone. (Hey, Spotify’s a Swedish company, after all.)

Will Spotify live up to its hefty promises of generous music paydays for all like the company promises, or are they doomed to fail with more and more artists speaking out against the service’s royalty payment policy?

It depends on who backs down first. Maybe it will be the artists. Maybe it will be the labels. Maybe it will even be the listeners.

For now, I’m still streaming.

Brett Weiser-Schlesinger is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. He can be reached by email at bweisers@syr.edu or by Twitter at @brettws.

Published on October 27, 2015 at 8:59 pm