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.

Without giving specific numbers, I think the following situation is inherently unfair:

I pay Spotify $20. They take their cut (say, 50%) and there's $10 left for the artists. I've only listened to one small artist throughout the entire month. The artist does not get $10 but much less despite Spotify knowing precisely which artists I listened to.

shameless plug:

SoundCloud implements a "fan powered royalties" model, so that $10 in your example goes to those who artists who you stream

https://community.soundcloud.com/fanpoweredroyalties

I have often thought this method made more sense. It should not be total revenue / total streams, it should be what a single person pays going to exactly what they listen to.

It isn’t fair that someone who listens to a ton of things has a much greater say in how the money is distributed even though they pay the same as someone who only listens to one artist.

By that logic the most fair would be pay per play for every song, with some fraction to the artist. But subscribers really like the single payment for unlimited plays model.