Spotify presents a huge dilemma for musicians. If you don't use it, you're cutting yourself off from 365 million potential listeners. If you do use it, the pay is barely visible to the naked eye. The rates vary according to the length of the streamed track (and I believe according to region) but ours average less than $0.005 per stream. Someone would have to stream a track nearly 250 times before streaming is more lucrative for us than purchasing the track. Frankly, we'd rather have 90p now than $0.005 dribbling in over a decade or more.

Of course if you're an international artist with millions of streams, and on a major label with probably better rates, then you might see a significant income. For everyone else it's a joke. But you have to be on it to be heard.

Someone in a recent discussion claimed that Spotify is no different from radio. He's wrong, because Spotify is on-demand. If you like a piece of music you hear on the radio you have to wait for it to be played again, so you're likely to buy it rather than wait. On Spotify you just stream it again. He eventually admitted that his main income stream came from selling merchandise, and the music was a loss-leader for this. However in some genres selling merchandise isn't a thing, and I suspect this is true for most folk performers.