Can Spotify be good for music artists?

That’s the question everyone in the music business has been asking since Taylor Swift pulled her music from the popular streaming service just before dropping her platinum album “1989.”

It was a bold move that paid off. Never mind the album sales figures (1.2 million copies in the first week),  Swift had the second highest grossing YouTube channel of 2014, earning more than $4 million dollars in ad revenue. The video for her hit single “Blank Space” grabbed 250 million views in less than a month.

So how much would Swift have made if the song streamed 250 million times on Spotify? Calculations sit somewhere between $1.5 million and $2.5 million. In other words, considerably less.

Then there’s Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. He also skipped Spotify and self-released his solo record “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” on Bit Torrent as a $6 dollar package of seven songs and a video. It’s been downloaded 4.4 million times. Estimates are he made 90% of that. So, despite lukewarm reviews, he took in about $23 million.

If other digital streaming avenues are more profitable, will artists abandon Spotify unless the service hikes their payouts to artists?

The issue seems to be coming to a head. Spotify took a public jab from Jimmy Buffett last fall for not paying their artists enough. David Byrne wrote that artists would be “out of work within a year” if they relied on income from Spotify.

Yet, despite the negativity, some place the blame on record labels, most prominently U2’s Bono. At the 2014 Web Summit in Dublin, he pointed out that Spotify pays more than 70% of its revenue back to the music community (Spotify has confirmed this). What the whole music industry needs is more transparency, Bono said, starting with the record labels.

ZEITGUIDE friend Mark Gillespie, CEO of entertainment management company Three Six Zero Group, sees Spotify paying worthwhile dividends  in the near future.  “The actual model behind Spotify will become really nice if the number of subscribers increase. We are slowly building a very stable economy of streaming revenue.”

Sure enough, the number of people using streaming services is up—54.4% from 2013 to 2014—and so are people paying for it. This week we learned that Spotify now has 60 million users and 15 million paid subscribers. Both figures mark a 50% growth from May to December 2014.

Music streaming looks here to stay with or without Swift and Yorke. Now if someone can just figure out how to get the artists paid properly.

The conversation will only heat up further this year as we expect major releases from in 2015 from the following:  Kanye West, Bjork, Bob Dylan (2.3), Imagine Dragons (2.17), Modest Mouse (3.3), Madonna (3.10), Drake, Iggy Azalea, Coldplay, Fleetwood Mac, Metallica, Macklemore, Rihanna and many more.