There's a difference between a $20 CD and a $10 all you can listen to music account with no commercials. The artists are getting less money because music is worth less today. Technological change is making that job obsolete in the same way that illuminated manuscripts have become obsolete.
I am tempted to agree with what you say. I do believe that modern technology has lowered (financial) barriers to access art, no doubt.
However, if it's only artists that appear to be mostly suffering from this new reality, while big (record/copyrights/tech) corporations still appear to be doing very well, I'm inclined to argue that this is probably more about unfair distribution (even more than it traditionally already was) than about the argument you put forward.
No matter how you slice that cake, if in the end artists have to struggle to get by while others make a killing from exploiting their creations, then there is something fundamentally wrong. Personally, I think that today it might even be more wrong than it has been for a long time.
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And that explains why huge megastars like Lyle Lovett have pointed out that he sold 4.6 million records and never made a dime from album sales. It's why the band 30 Seconds to Mars went platinum and sold 2 million records and never made a dime from album sales. You hear these stories quite often.
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It’s not just that. The distribution models also discriminates against small bands. If the four bands I’ve listened to in December received 70% of my Spotify subscription payment, this would be much less of a problem.
That's a very important point. I know some indie artists who get way less than a subscription's worth of money each month, while having a bunch of "superfans" who mostly listen to their their music.
Basically the money we pay is not going to the bands we listen to. It's being used to appease some larger pop artist so they won't leave the platform. Or to finance the platform itself.
This Lack of transparency from streaming services is a much bigger problem than the amount of money paid per stream.
Sure one can argue that Spotify is free to do whatever they want with the money, but it's still not a fair deal for small artists.
From what I have seen, the pay is entirely by listen count and not taking the users subscription and dividing it by the % you listened to each artist. So if someone subscribed to Spotify and listens to 10 songs in the month, most of their subscription goes in to the pool and pays for people who had lady Gaga on 24/7 for a month.
What job? The job of the artist? I sure hope not! I mean, ok, we don't have illuminated manuscripts anymore, but we still have typographers, illustrators (for books), painters etc., so the job has evolved, not disappeared completely. What technological change will eventually make obsolete are probably the record companies...
A lot of scholarly publishers today, even very respected names, no longer provide typesetting and expect authors to do all the work and provide a camera-ready PDF. The whole scene of publishing genre fiction directly on Amazon also eschews quality typesetting and often even basic editing and proofreading.
Just saying. There are a lot of jobs today that the market apparently no longer wants to pay for, even in the book world.
