Swedish artist and composer Magnus Uggla has launched a scathing attack on the owners of Spotify. After discovering that Sony BMG is a shareholder and after receiving virtually no payment from his music being played there, he has withdrawn his tracks from the service declaring, "I'd rather be raped by The Pirate Bay."

For many years now the media has been filled with the industry line that the operators of The Pirate Bay are little more than thieves, handing out other people’s content without ensuring creators get paid. Few have been more vocal than the music industry, who time and again distill the situation down to a simple, easily palatable ‘truth’ – The Pirate Bay is evil because the artists don’t get paid.

But where are the alternatives? If someone created a service to compete with pirates, everything could improve. Sites like The Pirate Bay would cease to exist and users would flood to legal services where not only could they avoid being sued, but the artists would get paid too.

It seems that just about everyone who has tried it absolutely loves Spotify. It has in excess of 3.5 million tracks available, all for free (if you chose that option), all funded by advertising. And of course, for those wishing to champion the morality of paying artists, this is dealt with too. This week it was revealed that the major labels all have fingers in the Spotify pie – surely paying the artists would be a foregone conclusion?

Not according to Swedish noble, artist and composer Magnus Uggla, who has launched a scathing attack on the fledgling streaming service, branding it as dishonest.

Writing on his blog he says that Spotify is a really incredible, fantastic service which offers everything – for free too. But, he writes, it’s too good to be true. Like thousands of other artists, Uggla’s work is available via Spotify and, due to involvement of the major labels and a lack of involvement from the local torrent site operators, he of course expects to get paid a reasonable amount. Not so.

Uggla says that when he received his first earnings statement from Spotify it became apparent that he “earned as much in six months as a BUSKER could earn in a day.” Ouch.

Understandably upset, Uggla raised the issue in a long discussion with Sony boss Hasse Breitholtz but came away feeling that he should trust in the man and the service.

However, Uggla was as surprised as most people when he learned last week that the major labels, including Sony, all have a stake in Spotify. A mere 30,000 kroner ($4,000) investment bought the company 5.8% of the service now valued at around 1.8 billion kroner ($251m).

Referring to the valuation, Uggla questions how this company can do so well – and comes to the conclusion that it’s at the artist’s expense. He says that Sony Music, after “suing the shit out of The Pirate Bay” is acting just like them by not paying the artists.

“I would rather be raped by Pirate Bay than by Hasse Breitholtz and Sony Music and will remove all of my songs from Spotify pending an honest service,” he says.

Sony? Dishonest? Surely not…