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.

>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?

The amount they'd get for royalties if you couldn't pirate but had to buy their album/single to hear it. So similar to what they got at the pre-mp3/pre-Napster era. Remove a little for the (non existing) physical costs.

(Whether they'd actually get 100% or 0.5% of those royalties would be between them and their record company contract).

"But this is streaming"

And my argument still is: you should pay the amount analogous to buying it once, and then stream it forever or zero times. Streaming should just add the convenience, not change the pricing.