Over 200 labels recently left Spotify. It seems these were mostly smaller electronic music labels, and I’m not sure how much that will affect Spotify’s bottom line. But it has opened up an interesting discussion about the way the company compensates artists and labels. And now Spotify is promising a big announcement this month. What could it be?

I doubt Spotify is going to really go in a radical new direction, but here’s what I’d like to see: a metered music service. Something like the cloud computing resources we’ve come to know – the lowest tier of usage is free. Pay as you go above that. It’d be a nice reversal of the consumerization of IT.

One of the complaints from labels is that Spotify’s all you can eat buffet devalues music. And I’ve heard from many individual music listeners who used to be really into Napster, Soulseek and other means of acquiring music without paying for it who have said they feel like the specialness of music was wearing off.

I’ll admit it: I’ve downloaded a lot of music that I didn’t pay for. Back in college and the first few years after graduation, when I was starting my career and didn’t have much disposable income, I didn’t pay for recordings at all. I’d go see bands live, but never pay.

Today, things are different. I have more money to spend. I also go to live shows a lot less, so maybe I’m more motivated to give a little back. Bandcamp, in particular, encourages me to spend money on music by making it easy to by music directly from a growing pool of artists. Meanwhile, Amazon.com makes it fast and easy to download DRM-free music from artists that are signed to labels.

Paying for music makes it seem a bit more special, less disposable. But sometimes I’ll still end up buying something that seems awesome the first time I hear it, usually by streaming it, and then end up getting tired of rather quickly. And then there are albums that I download for free – sometimes because the artist made it available freely, sometimes not – that I listen to a lot and never actually end up paying for. A metered service just makes sense to me. Charge me for the music I listen to a lot, let me listen to everything else for free.

Even my old broke self would probably have agreed to that – those were days of intense music exploration for me – I downloaded a lot of stuff just to find out about the history of different genres. I wouldn’t go on to listen to much of it, it was more of an educational pursuit. But there was also musical that was formative to me at the time – stuff I’m sure I could have spared some money to pay for, especially if someone could lay it for me in terms of how much time I spent listening to a particular song or album.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of complications. How do you track how much you listen to something? Last.fm, iTunes and other applications can track how much you listen to digital music, if you want. But my car only has a CD player, so I have to burn CDs to listen to the car. Sometimes I’ll burn something new and throw it in the car, listen a couple times, and then get bored with it. But there are other CDs I’ve listened to countless times.

The other problem is how to keep people honest within this sort of system without becoming draconian. DRM sucks. What we put up with from Netflix and what we put up with from Spotify will be two different things. We have different psychological expectations of ownership from what amounts to a movie rental service than we would for something that would amount to an music store.

But the service wouldn’t have to be perfect, at least not at first, in order to make a difference in how we think about music purchases.

What do you think? Should metered be the way to go?