A fair criticism. I did not intend to imply that musicians were in any way less valuable than instrument makers, recording studios, distributors, et al. My st

A fair criticism. I did not intend to imply that musicians were in any way less valuable than instrument makers, recording studios, distributors, et al. My statement would better have been expressed as "guitarists wouldn't make guitar music if nobody made guitars." The flip side of the coin, of course, is that you can self-distribute music without a distributor. People have done it. As a web developer, I could build web pages that do things and distribute them via hard drives if ISPs did not exist, or I could start my own ISP. Musicians have it even easier, as they can just self-distribute on the internet -- but, whether by choice or by representative proxy, musicians have chosen to allow their product to be distributed by Spotify. They're of course free to haggle over the terms of that arrangement, and there are likely valid criticisms of Spotify, or the agents who negotiated their terms on behalf of the musicians... the only point I intended, despite whatever inartful phrasing I may have used, is that "Spotify doesn't make anything" is not a valid criticism of Spotify.