Debate rages as Spotify, MOG, and Rdio kill / save the music industry

For the conscience-laden music consumer, streaming music services present an interesting quandary. By separating the concept of "legal access to music" from the age-old paradigm of "paying the artist for an entire song or album," they've presented us with a whole new set of ethical dilemmas to worry about. Instead of buying your music, you pay a subscription fee that is in some way filtered down from Spotify to record label to artist, based on some opaque algorithm of pay-per-play, which is based on some opaque deal struck between the label and Spotify, and then the label's opaque individual contract with each of its artists.

I suppose what I really want is some sort of "free range" sticker slapped on my music consumption, so that I know the artist was ethically treated in this transaction. Unfortunately, the current state of the industry is rife with finger-pointing, and I have no idea who devours — and who's getting screwed out of — the $9.99 I drop into this darkened pool every month.

What I do know for a fact is that some artists aren't happy with streaming services. Notable pullouts include Coldplay, Adele, and the Black Keys (each of whom have removed their most recent albums from one or all of the services), while many artists and catalogs have never been available at all.

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