PROSTHETIC, METAL BLADE Reportedly Pulling Their Catalog Off SPOTIFY

Prosthetic Records, whose current roster of artists includes ALL THAT REMAINS, ANIMALS AS LEADERS and SKELETONWITCH, is in the process of pulling its catalog from streaming music service Spotify.

"There [does] not appear to be an upside," Prosthetic co-owner E.J. Johantgen tells LA Weekly. He adds that the only income from the service comes in "fractions of pennies," even on the label's biggest titles.

The only revenue independent labels receive is pay-per-stream royalties. To Johantgen, this doesn't sound quite right. "I would like to see what their projected ad revenue would be. Then we could really determine if their rates are fair," he tells LA Weekly.

Prosthetic is the third Los Angeles-area metal label to remove its titles, joining Century Media and Metal Blade.

Fans noticed late last month that Metal Blade was beginning to pull its music off Spotify. However, the label which was founded by Brian Slagel in 1982 has not issued an official statement explaining its decision to make the move.

Century Media announced on August 9 that it was pulling its repertoire from Spotify in order "to protect the interests of their artists".

"The income streams to the artists are affected massively and therefore that accelerates the downward spiral, which eventually will lead to artists not being able to record music the way it should be recorded," Century Media said in a statement. "Ultimately, in some cases, it will completely kill a lot of smaller bands that are already struggling to make ends meet."

The U.S. version of Spotify, which gives its users access to all the songs in its cloud to organize into playlists and listen to as they please, reportedly attracted 1.4 million registered users of its ads-supported free service in the first month, as well as 175,000 paid subscribers for its promo-free version. In Europe, where Spotify has been available in seven countries since its launch in 2008, the company currently has around 1.6 million paying users, according to published reports.

According to the an infographic on the Information Is Beautiful web site, which visualizes the different monetization methods available to artists and how profitable they are, if you are a solo musician, at $0.00029 per play on Spotify, you will have to receive 4,053,110 plays per month to earn the U.S. minimum wage of $1,160.