Also, consider the free account. Presumably, the artist still wants to get paid. So now Spotify somehow needs to be able to make back those 2,400 pennies per user from advertisement.

It seems extremely unlikely to me that Spotify users stream 4 hours per day on average. I suspect it's less than one hour.

It's a fairly arbitrarily number sure, but I think it could be representative. During the working week I listen to music almost all the working day, when I as commuting that adds on another couple of hours.

Even if it's 2 hours a day it would still represent an increase in costs.

Another poster put it better: for $9.99 per month you would be able to pay for 999 streams, I am sure a typical user can easily exceed 999 streams in a month.

Well for instance, I'm on a family plan (6 people total for $15) and I stream a full workday+ daily. I know lots of people who do the same, where they have a lot of "background music" time and then a little active listening.

It's also still remarkably cheap for unlimited access to all the music ever recorded.

That ship sailed in the 90s with widespread music piracy. The market simply doesn't value digital copies of recorded music that much anymore.

Spotify was an increase in artist revenues as prior to that most people were paying nothing for their music, be it bittorrent in the 00s, cd copying in the 90s, or recording radio to tape in the 80s.

Nit: It's nowhere close to all the music ever recorded. It's barely most of the mainstream artists.

The problem is that people don't care about "all the music ever recorded". They mostly care about a very limited selection of music. And if Spotify starts costing like $45 a month, how many people still think it's worth it? You can buy like four albums off of iTunes for that and then listen to them as much as you want.

I'd just go back to torrenting at that price.

Will consumers pay that price is the question?

For all music ever recorded, maybe. But Spotify doesn't even have half of what I'm regularly listening to - a regular annoyance - let alone half of all music ever recorded.