I'm sorry - this reads like a fan's take on what the music industry/bands is like. Have you uploaded anything to Spotify and gotten paid? Do you have proof that

I'm sorry - this reads like a fan's take on what the music industry/bands is like. Have you uploaded anything to Spotify and gotten paid? Do you have proof that a single band you've "discovered" on Spotify has ever received a check as a result of your being able to listen to their music without directly paying for specific access to that album/song? I highly doubt it. Are you familiar with the breakdown between publishing and mechanical copyrights? If not, then you're just spouting the marketing that companies like Spotify/Pandora want you to spout. Spotify sucks for "making money" as an indie band. It's a nice tool in other areas but to act like "the bands that my friends and I listen to get paid when we listen" is, well, either willfully ignorant or naive. That doesn't make it lose/lose for everyone - like you said, you wouldn't have know the song/artist existed and there's value to some bands in that. It's simple: If you didn't get paid to write software, but instead got paid $6 per hour with no insurance to travel the country while staying in cheap hotels and eating crap food and to go onstage for an hour and half per night to code only to throw the hard drive/files away at the end of the show, would you write really great software during your "downtime"? Or would you be exhausted/bored and find that, hey, guess what - I don't think I'm as creative when I'm on day 87 on the road as I was on day 3. Services like Spotify relegate "songwriting" to "something you do in your downtime because they don't pay the bills". Today is a far different musical/creative world relative to 30-40 years when the record company would front you 6+ months of expenses and say, "Go write a great record." If you think that has no effect on the quality of the music written, you're fooling yourself. And the restaurant analogy makes no sense here. Who is the restaurant - the music industry or Spotify? Who is the bus boy? I'm assuming that's the band but then which side is the waiter?