I ditched Spotify and set up my own music stack

So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song?

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.

Spotify isn’t setting a market price, so I’m not sure what your argument is here.

Setting a market price means a band in really high demand can charge X dollars but a new band, that isn’t well known and doesn’t have high demand could charge X/4 dollars.

Spotify OTOH, charges exactly the same price to the user no matter what song they listen to, and the price is “Monthly cost/number of songs listened to”. Unsurprisingly, instead of leading to the promotion and creation of a whole new set of bands, which is what the democratization of tools and knowledge of music through the internet should have led to, this has instead led to consolidation because the removal of the market price and setting a flat structure means people continue to flock towards the songs that are perceived to be the highest value, ie the most popular stuff.