I bought 10 albums this year, and three of those as presents for other people. A couple of years ago that number would be closer to 70, and it’s not like I listened to any less music in 2011 than I have in the past. The difference is made up by Spotify.

I fell for Spotify pretty hard in 2009, signed up for the Premium service as soon as it was launched, and have happily paid my £9.99 per month ever since to enjoy ‘unlimited’ access to a huge variety of music. The service seemed tailor made for me: as much new music as I could find time to listen to, synced to my iPod inside a well designed app and updateable at any time via wi-fi. I used Spotify, in both its desktop and portable incarnations, a heck of a lot in 2010, and in 2011 it became my default means of listening to music. Of the 20 albums on my year-end list I own only four, and all but one of those was discovered via Spotify.

I’ve experiences a few glitches with the service, such as a couple of occasions when the iOS app would suddenly decide it needed login credentials to proceed, and would then not be able to use them because I was on a train and didn’t have a net connection. I’ve also run afoul of the admittedly rare circumstance of having an album disappear from the service, rendering itself unplayable – this happened to Das Racist’s Relax this year, which I’d been enjoying for a few weeks before it was pulled from Spotify for reasons unknown, leaving me with a dead playlist. But these are fairly minor problems, easily outweighed by the positive experience of using the experience for the most part.

My doubts about the service started to creep in at some point this year when I started reading reports, maybe around the time of launch of Spotify in the US, about how it wasn’t working out so well for artists. Having positioned itself as the music industry’s saviour, and the answer to the exponential problem of piracy in digital media, Spotify was allegedly not doing right by the people behind the music.

Here’s the pitch: giving people easy access to limitless music for a low price makes the hassle of piracy look like too much hard work. With Spotify you can get everything in one place, it’s sorted properly, the quality is what it should be, and you’re not breaking the law to listen as much as you want. I’ve always been ardently anti-piracy, adamant that artists deserve to be paid for what they create, so this argument spoke to me directly and if it seemed too good to be true it was at least sanctioned by the labels, right?

Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing for the artists. When Coldplay decided to keep their latest LP off streaming services I’ll admit to feeling a little irked. I wanted to hear the record, and, accustomed as I had become to paying £9.99 per month for as much music as I wanted, I resented being asked to pay £7.99 for one album that-my appreciation for Coldplay being mild at best-probably wouldn’t get played all that much in a couple of months. A year or two before I’d been used to paying £7.99 per album download-down from £9.99 for a CD-and hunting the various digital retailers to pick it up a couple of pounds cheaper was all part of the fun.

I started to look into what the return for artists was from the different distribution channels, and what I found certainly seems to support the idea that if it looks too good to be true it probably is. The exact details of how Spotify calculates payouts to artists is something of a (guilty?) secret, but various sources have pieced together estimations that, together, probably give us a good idea. Anu Kirk (project lead at MOG (mog.com)) estimates that Spotify pays about $0.04 per album streamed, so about $0.004 per track per listen.

David McCandless of Information is Beautiful used data from this blogpost and spreadsheet to put together a visualisation which really helps push the point home:

If an artist has to rack up over 4m listens on Spotify per month to make minimum wage it’s difficult to argue that the streaming model isn’t broken. Selling 12,399 tracks per month on iTunes seems more reasonable, though still a stretch for smaller artists without label-backed marketing. And this is where we come to the argument that musicians these days don’t make money from record sales, instead relying on concert tickets and merchandise to make a living. I don’t know the extent to which this is true, and if it is then it’s something of a shame: not an excuse for the poor earnings made via music sales but a symptom of it.

I don’t entirely know where this leaves me. Do I return to using iTunes and the odd CD purchase as my main channels of music consumption? It seems logical, and with the arrival of iTunes Match it’s easier than it’s ever been to have access to your entire collection from anywhere. But what about discovering new music? I’ve grown accustomed to seeking out new releases on a Monday and giving anything which interests me at least a quick listen on Spotify. Hopefully, if the music blogs are doing their job, I’ll still be able to keep up to date with new releases and hear streams of many of them before making a purchasing decision. Maybe I’ll have to listen to more 6Music, visit We Are Hunted with greater frequency and spend time haunting Bandcamp, but with a little effort it should be possible.

I’ll miss Spotify. The idea is brilliant, the execution is excellent, but it seems too exploitative a model to support, and perhaps to survive. Whether its more artists pulling their albums from the service, or a rise in membership fees which members would be forced to go along with to maintain access to their playlists, it seems something has to give with the way Spotify is set up at the moment.