>It is obvious that it is hurting artists bottom line. No it's not. Working out how much money gets split between people doesn't tell you if it's hurting the artists bottom line - it tells you how much money on average a song on spotify gets. To work out if it's hitting artists bottom line you need to know if use of spotify reduces the amount of cash flow from consumers to the artists. My spotify subscription is around the amount I was spending on CD's beforehand. I suspect the 30/70 split mentioned above in the comments is a similar or lower cut to that taken by the record shop or ITunes. Thus, for me personally spofity is revenue neutral for artists/music industry. Do similar math for population as a whole THEN you can draw your conclusion.

There, i've just increased your spotify revenue by around half a cent, try not to spend it all at once.

>Jumping straight away to a tax makes it look like nothing more than a money grab. In Wales, where we've had a plastic bag charge for some time (see comments above about England's charge being proposed) this problem is dealt with very easily - it's not a tax it's a mandatory donation to charity. This may be because the welsh government is not allowed to introduce such a tax (i'm not sure to be honest) but it certainly deals with the money grab issue - the organization that mandates the charge fundamentally does not get the cash.

That's a very good list - i'll be checking out Peter Watts and David Marusek for sure since the others make up most of my 'buy every book' list. I would add John Meaney, Sean McMullen, China Mieville, Iain M Banks and Jon Courtenay Grimwood on to round it out on the Sci-Fi side of things.