I'm gonna have to respectfully disagree with your disagreeing. I think.

If you feel that these added "music widgets" up at the top don't benefit the artist then, in fact, I would still argue that they hurt the artist by pushing sites that might create long-term relationships with fans down on the search page in contrast to short-term "hey, buy this single" one offs.

If you think that simply being on the first page is enough - lots of research has shown that being in the first 5 places is best.

 Organic Ranking Visibility - http://eyetools.com/research_google_eyetracking_heatmap.html
(shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location)
Rank 1 – 100%
Rank 2 – 100%
Rank 3 – 100%
Rank 4 – 85%
Rank 5 – 60%
Rank 6 – 50%
Rank 7 – 50%
Rank 8 – 30%
Rank 9 – 30%
Rank 10 – 20% 

Any push down of sites hurts traffic. 

As to the "other" music destination sites Google has made it clear that they are perfectly happen to "swap out" these partnerships at any time they want so nothing is solid there. 

I'm in total agreement on the "Net Neutrality" issue - which was mostly my original point.