Damon Krukowski, of Galaxie 500, wrote this insightful article for Pitchfork about the business of streaming music services; Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, etc. They're all great for customers to hear music but they are terrible when it comes to paying the actual artists. Galaxie 500 has been around since 1988, so Krukowski has been exposed to almost 25 years of industry ups and downs. This is harrowing no matter where you're coming from:

Since we own our own recordings, by my calculation it would take songwriting royalties for roughly 312,000 plays on Pandora to earn us the profit of one-- one-- LP sale. (On Spotify, one LP is equivalent to 47,680 plays.)

Granted, people are listening to Galaxie 500 on those services that, otherwise, probably wouldn't be. The exposure element is there but the getting paid angle certainly isn't. It gets particularly interesting when you look at how little profit Pandora and Spotify actually make themselves. Is recorded music becoming an irrelevant purchasable commodity? Regardless, read this article. It'll do everyone some good to know that buying music is still important.