Behind the music: Why We7 serves musicians as well as fans

Hardly a week goes by without Spotify being in the news (and here I am mentioning them again). Most recently, founder Daniel Ek has said he believes the company should be awarded a Most Successful PR Coup on a Shoestring award for only spending £5,000 on Spotify's launch. He's got a point, because you'd be forgiven for thinking that they're the only UK ad-funded streaming site around.

It puzzles me that We7 doesn't get half the attention Spotify does, when they're not only a better site for discovering music, but have supported up-and-coming artists right from the start and, as opposed to most other services, pay them in a transparent, straight-forward way. Maybe they've been more focused on creating a working model that's attractive to both music fans and artists, than gaining column inches in the media.

Let's start with why I like We7 as a music fan. Their front page may be more cluttered than Spotify's, but it provides a lot more ideas for new music I might want to check out. My current favourite is the celebrity playlist function (I had no idea Mark Ronson was a fan of ... And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead!). On Spotify, I often find myself drawing a blank, and just end up listening to the music I already know and like.

With We7, it's also a lot easier to share playlists and tracks with my friends, as it's a website and not an application that needs to be downloaded and installed by anyone I want to share them with. The site also lets me send links by email and make widgets and codes for Facebook and Twitter (you can see a playlist I made below). Better still, my friends don't need to login or register with the site to be able to listen to the music links.

The people running the site also seem to be very hands-on. One girl I spoke to complained on Twitter that she couldn't get the new player on NME to work since they switched to We7. NME responded immediately (got to love Twitter) and passed on her Twitter name to We7 who sorted it out and gave her £10 for helping them troubleshoot.

As a member of the music-creating community, I like We7 because they actively work to promote and help new emerging acts. The front page features both well-established and unsigned acts. Up until now unsigned artists could upload their music into a "holding area" where it was judged by We7 users. The ones that received the best response eventually got moved onto the full service and got their own page. Some would even get promoted onto the front page.

We7 tells me they're going to stop that method because of feedback they've received saying it took too long. Instead, they're about to launch We7 Presents, where they'll choose a small number of unsigned acts over the next year (five to launch, then one a fortnight) and give them a We7 10-week promo package, with what the site calculates to have a media value of £10k, which includes their turn on the front page and a mention in their newsletter etc. The artists get paid a minimum per-stream rate right from the start and the terms of payment for unsigned artists are transparent, as they're even posted on the We7 site.

On the other hand, YouTube are anything but transparent. They have always refused to pay the going streaming rate that PRS set in 2007, as well as the new rate (lowered by almost 2/3) they set this summer. We7, in contrast, has abided by it since the beginning, without the constant moaning that comes from many other music services.

More often than not, new music services make sure that they've got the major labels onboard from the start, even if they have to pay them massive advances and make them shareholders in the company, while giving independent labels and unsigned artists (if they'll even feature them) half of the advertising revenue. By paying these labels and artists a minimum per-stream rate (they do downloads too, by the way), right from the start, We7 share in the risk of entering a new business model with them.

Ever since the birth of Napster and subsequent illegal filesharing sites, the question of "how do you compete with free?" has been a constant point of discussion in the music industry. I believe there will be more than one answer to that question. By engaging fans in discovering new music, in a way that torrent sites don't, while cracking the ad rates v running costs dilemma, it appears We7 are well on their way to coming up with one of those answers – and they get a virtual Fair Trade stamp for respecting the people who create the music, without which all music services would be obsolete.