I ditched Spotify and set up my own music stack

In the old days, artists would join a label and put out an album. The artist would earn about 10% of sales or so (varies of course, but on average). So a $15 CD would earn an artist $1.50.

The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005. So it would take about 300 streams of a song to earn the same amount as selling a CD used to make.

I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? There are many albums I own that I have listened to way more than 30 times, which is what it would take for a 10 song album to get 300 song 'streams'

Is that a fair compensation? Why or why not?

I think artists should be able to earn money from creating music, but I don't know how we decide how much they actually deserve if we aren't just going based on the price the market sets.

The people making the art, should be paid the most.

Why? There's a fair market value for the art. There's also a fair real world cost* for distributing and advertising, set by the market (the people working those positions need to eat too). It's trivially easy to go negative, if you try to market something that isn't popular.

If it weren't a net benefit for the artist, they wouldn't go under a label, or stream on a certain platform. They're not being forced to. They do it because it results in more money in their pocket.