This is my answer to Antti Vilppunen's blog article Spotify Pays 30 Cents for 100 Album Playbacks . From my answer you can quess that I am a Spotify user, and I do pay the Spotify premium fee happily.

Comparing Spotify with radio station or better, internet radio station, is a more correct way to do than comparing it with buying records from record store. One might also compare the revenue stream from Spotify with the revenue stream from Pirate Bay. From the user point of view, Spotify and it’s likes is a legal way to get music from internet. If Spotify did not exist, many of the listeners would change (back) to pirate music services.

Spotify can also be seen as a death for middlemen in music business, not death for the artists. In future it will be easier for the artists to interact directly with internet music sites and forget the record companies. When all music is in the net in digital form – not physical, shipping it and selling will not need any big record labels no more and the band can create their own small label and sell their music themselves – cutting the real bad boys away from the revenue stream.