A new article in The New York Times bemoaning the poor revenue models of streaming music services fails to acknowledge a startling fact: subscription music services are getting higher-than-average conversion rates for registered users to paid subscribers.The article makes mention that Spotify has 6 million paying subscribers of its 24 million users. That’s a 25% conversion rate!Pandora, on the other hand, has only 3 million paying subscribers out of 70 million registered users. But nevertheless, that’s a 4% conversion, higher than the industry average of 1%-3%, according to our 2013 Online Subscription Benchmark Report.Of course, there is a real problem with music streaming in terms of its business model. Pandora is still not profitable, despite a $5 billion valuation.That’s because while everyone *thinks* consumer attitudes toward music are changing, they’re really not. Just like the radio and record days, consumers want to listen to music for free and will only plunk down money for their favorite artists and songs that they want to listen to obsessively. Granted, instead of albums, consumers are buying singles on iTunes. But since no one ever experienced paying for radio tunes, consumers aren’t conditioned to pay for audio experiences. This isn’t the cable TV world.Music streaming services should keep that in mind when creating their profit projections. With those high conversion rates, there’s definitely money to be made, but expectations should be kept in check.