The business case for Spotify is very thin, with only 10 Euro/mnth subscription fee there is simply not a lot of money to share with the artists. Spotify as an organisation has huge costs in terms of technology and labour costs. Even Beatport, the number one seller of electronic music has 10s of people just making the contracts and handling the content management side of things as well as marketing. They offer artists already a much better fee than the traditional vinyl and CD resellers and distributers. I know a few known electronic artist who skipped all the traditional channels and started selling there tracks through their own website and used FB and other channels to promote and sometimes even a local artist promotion agency, but they saw the revenues drop dramatically. Selling music requires channels to plug/promote the music, and that is what the distributers have, they have connections with the radio stations, with TV stations, with billboard owners etc etc. As mentioned already in my previous comments, there are parties who created service for direct selling by artists to consumers, but they need to have deep pockets. Even Spotify is not running black numbers as far as I know. As well as Soundcloud as far as I know the rumours; They had to lay off quite a few people very recently and also had to close a couple of important offices throughout the world.