Streaming music service has launched Spotify Artists site and claimed that even “niche indie albums” can generate $17,000 a month. This is how the company is planning to win over its musician critics by launching a new Spotify Artists website to explain its business model.

Spotify has also launched free analytics for musicians to get information on streams of their music. The company announced it would help artists sell merchandise from their Spotify profiles and published figures on how much they can expect to earn. This move is a response to trenchant criticism from some artists this year. For example, Thom Yorke described Spotify as “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse”, and David Byrne called streaming “unsustainable as a means of supporting any creative work”.

The new website is supposed to answer artists’ questions about how the company calculates its payouts for streams of their music. Spotify convinces musicians that as the service grows, their streaming earnings will cover any loss from falling sales of CDs and downloads.

At the moment, the streaming service pays out almost 70% of its total revenues to the industry copyright owners – labels, publishers and collecting societies. Those then pay musicians and songwriters their percentage.

Spotify Artists is also going to dissuade musicians from judging Spotify by “per-stream” payouts by explaining how it can calculate their gross revenue by their share of total monthly streams. It explained that the resulting payout varies across the world, depending also by the ratio of free to paying users, and the overall volume of music being streamed.

The website also provides real (but anonymized) figures made in July for a month’s streams of 5 specific albums, ranging from $3,300 for a “niche indie album” to $425,000 for a global hit.