The argument is, should music be free?
The simple answer is largely, no. I personally use Spotify, a streaming website/app. Every time I sit in the car, every time I clean my house, and a lot of the times when I walk into restaurants/stores/etc. without even knowing. I pay $5 a month with my student discount. Many artists have talked about how unfairly the platform pays the artist per play of the song. I can understand that but the world has become so much larger and so much smaller at the same time with the advances in technology.
A person can consume music on a worldwide scale instantaneously. I do not think I go even a single day without hearing a new song. The average price of an album is roughly $15 and buying a single song through places like ITunes is approximately $1.58. So for the same price as I pay for Spotify, I could have 3 news songs a month.
It is a game changer. The same way Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, and other streaming websites are about to make cable a relic, Spotify is doing the same for music. Going to a store, buying the album, downloading it onto your computer and dispersing it to your desired device just isn’t practical anymore. Even if you were to buy it online, you are exposed to so many albums and artists, it can be hard to decide. So, the masses turn to options like Spotify.
Artists without a doubt need to be paid for their work. It’s hard to feel guilty I am 100k in student loan debt that bigger name stars are making a couple thousand less a year when they get so much for live performances, appearances, and whatever else. However, for a struggling musician trying to get their music out there, I can sympathize with the need to be paid for just the song because there is not much else in the way of earning.
Especially when Spotify’s CEO is worth over 2 billion.