Is Spotify essentially legalized pirating?

Spotify pays a musician $.0006 per stream and it can be free for the listener. Most artists find this to be woefully inadequate, and it leads me to wonder if this is basically legalized piracy. If not how close does it come to piracy in terms of what the listeners get for the price?

I can listen to those same songs on Youtube and usually the artist will receive zero compensation.

It's not piracy, because if artists (or their agents) don't agree to those terms their music won't appear on Spotify. I think that's what happened with Taylor Swift before they renegotiated the loyalty.

Ultimately if you want to support the artists, buy their concert tickets, that's where they make their money.

no

Spotify would need to get the musician's permission to be able to stream their music, so then it is not piracy. If a musician feels that the compensation is not enough, then they can sue if their musician is streamed without permission. Bmanva mentioned the example of Taylor Swift not allowing Spotify to stream her music, and she is in a good position to be able to do so. The question is would a small-time relatively unknown (perhaps beginner) musician be able to do so, they might not get much radio play and their albums may not sell so well (well practically nobody's albums sell as well as Taylor's do), so they may have to accept the low payment from Spotify in order to get exposure and some extra money.

Piracy sites in contrast would play the music without getting the musician's permission and probably without paying anything (maybe they'd buy a cd in order to upload the songs to their site).

They just want to get rich like everyone else.

No, it's a good service. Artist does not need to receive share for being paid.

they are paid per stream while the ad's make it possible :p

If they receive compensation then it´s not piracy no matter how shitty is that compensation.

Is that figure how much goes to the artist or is it how much goes in total royalties, because artists getting screwed over by record labels is an entirely different issue. Even so however, is .0006 per play that really unreasonable? If a radio station with 10,000 people tuned in played a song and had to pay .0006 per listener that'd be $6 per play, it's hard to gauge equivalency as radio stations operate under a blanket licensing fees but I couldn't imagine that stations pay much more, if not less per listener.