The debate over the business ethics of Spotify continues, as Placebo vocalist Brian Molko becomes the latest in a line of musicians to publicly criticise the online music streaming service as self-serving and harmful to the industry.

Speaking to Music Week, Molko stated that he felt the people behind Spotify were ‘just interested in making money at the expense of others. It comes from a place of just pure profit-making on their part’, and called attention to the ‘negligible’ profits that artists received from the service.

Earlier this month Radiohead’s Thom Yorke removed his solo music, and the works of his side-project Atoms for Peace, from Spotify, stating on Twitter; ‘Make no mistake, new artists you discover on Spotify will not get paid, meanwhile, shareholders will be rolling in it’. Last year, Black Keys member Patrick Carney said that the service was not fair to new artists.

The service, launched in Stockholm in 2006, currently has over 24 million subscribers, a quarter of whom pay a monthly fee for additional features. It has been touted as a legal and fair alternative to digital piracy, but has come under fire for supposedly failing to adequately compensate the musicians whose work is streamed on the service – a 2010 infographic estimated that a solo artist would need over four million plays a month just to earn minimum wage.

Counterarguments by Spotify state that the majority of their revenue is spent on royalties, and that it is the responsibility of the record companies to ensure their artists were fairly paid.