Have you ever stayed up until midnight waiting for your favorite artist’s new album to come out on Apple Music? Is your “Fall Vibes” playlist on shuffle in your headphones? Do you anxiously await your Spotify Wrapped every year?
Streaming platforms are the dominant way that we experience music in 2025. They offer many convenient features that please both listeners and record companies. But what about the musicians?
The current state of music streaming does not support the very artists that hold it together. Let’s take a closer look at music streaming: the benefits, drawbacks and alternatives.
How did we get here? Decades ago, the World Wide Web introduced new ways to access music. Musicians could make their own websites, creating a digital hub of all their music for purchase. For small musicians who couldn’t get their albums on the shelves of record stores, an online option was a game-changer. Supporting your favorite artist was easy; buying a track or an album would download it to your hard drive forever and put a little money in a musician’s pocket.
This system became easily exploitable. Someone who bought the tracks could upload them to another website for free, allowing people to download the music without paying the artist. This is called music piracy.
In the 2000s, platforms like Napster and LimeWire were centers of free music exchange. It was wonderful for music fans, but not so wonderful for musicians or record companies. To deter music piracy, tech developers worked with record companies to provide a better alternative: music streaming.
According to Dynaudio, “In 2008, the tipping point occurred. Spotify put all these things together…For the first time, a catalog that even Napster couldn’t compete with was yours for ten bucks per month.”
It was a revolution—the convenience of music piracy, but fully legal. The subscription payment model was simple but effective. Over time, Spotify’s technology has enhanced, allowing the program to recommend new music based on previous listening habits. According to the Spotify website, Spotify is the most popular streaming service today, with 696 million users.
If millions of people are paying a monthly subscription for access to their favorite music, musicians should be getting paid handsomely, right? Wrong.
According to RouteNote, Spotify pays artists between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream—less than a cent. This is standard for other streaming services as well. If you are Taylor Swift, the amount of streams adds up quickly to give you thousands of dollars, but for the rest of us, we see little to no revenue from tracks published to streaming.
Even Taylor herself has had some problems with the streaming industry. Back in 2015, she spoke out against Apple for not paying artists when their songs were streamed with the free trial version of iTunes. She wrote in a Tumblr post, “Three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing.”
So, if everyone (even Taylor Swift!) has problems with how music streaming treats artists, why do we keep using these systems? I will give credit where it is due: for artists, music streaming is the best way to get heard.
For a small fee, music distribution companies can put your track on every major streaming platform, and you can direct fans to the new release very simply. Streaming can also be a good way to discover new artists that you have never heard of.
This can also have drawbacks, because streaming service recommendations are based on an algorithm. If you want your music heard, you have to appeal to the algorithm. The music business has always had a negative impact on creativity, but streaming magnifies all of these problems.
At the end of the day, streaming platforms want content, not necessarily music. They want tracks that are easily categorizable into one of their specific genre’s playlists, so they can advertise it to more people and get more subscribers. In my opinion, websites like Spotify have lost the soul of music.
While streaming is a convenient thing with many benefits, music lovers should look at other options as well. Luckily, music existed for a long time before Spotify.
Bandcamp is a platform that allows listeners to directly pay artists for downloads of music. The musician also might have merchandise like T-shirts, and you can guarantee that the proceeds are going back to the artist.
Buying physical copies of your favorite songs on CD or vinyl are also great ways to support musicians. Besides supporting artists directly, physical media also has the benefit of a completely different listening experience.
With a CD or vinyl record, listeners have to experience the whole album as the artist intended, rather than selecting individual songs. They also usually come with booklets or liner notes with interesting photos and graphic design.
If you want the experience of a playlist without relying on online streaming, you can download tracks off of Bandcamp and burn a mix CD! The process of picking songs is extremely fun, and you can even design your own cover art for the disc.
There are many things in this world that are convenient on a surface level, but have issues if you look closer. Music streaming is just one example of this. What was once a revolutionary alternative to piracy has become a ball and chain for artists. Let’s think more critically about the ways we engage with art.
