We are now living in the age of streaming which allows you to legally listen to a huge catalogue of music for free. Artists do get paid, although we're told they don't get much.
As someone who wanted to make it big in the music business, I've always leaned more towards the idea artists should make money from recorded music, but within reason.
It was in 1992 when I was a Queen fan that my parents started giving me pocket money of £2 a week. Anything I specifically wanted to have had to come out of my pocket money including tapes. At the time a typical price for a tape was £8. I owned both Queens greatest hits albums and one studio album and figured out if I was to buy the remaining 13 albums it would take me a year, even longer if I fancied having a few mars bars along the way.
As it turned out, I bought 2 more albums but they were both on CD so cost even more. A year later I'd moved on in my music taste. I think the CDs cost £12 each, and I questioned whether it was right that a kid had to save 3 months worth of pocket money to buy 2 CDs that they wouldn't have any interest in listening to a year later.
A lot of my music collection in the early to mid 90s was copied tapes. It wasn't a very big collection but would have easily cost over £100 if I was to buy them all, tapes were more that £10 each by the mid 90s.
When I became a raver one of the advantages was actually the price I paid for the music. I bought a Best of Jungle compilation, which did cost £13 like most CDs but it was 4 CDs so £3.25 each seemed much more reasonable. Then there were Tape Packs, £20 for 12 tapes. You could even buy some individual tapes for £3. I managed to build quite a large collection in a short space of time despite getting just a fiver a week from my paper round.
By the late 90s you were looking at £17 for a CD which in my mind was ridiculous. At the same time, downloading music for free started getting more popular. Some people I know who would illegally download music were always going to do it regardless, but several people said they only did it because the price of a CD was a rip off.
I found an article which broke down where the money from a £8 CD sale goes to and it said £1.04 went to the artist. If an album went platinum (300,000 sales) and there were 4 people in the band that's £78,000 each, not bad but not exactly life changing either.
Considering you have no shortage of musicians with fortunes of over £100 million I think it's fair to say that album sales have made only a small contribution to that figure.
The price of a CD has dropped significantly in recent years. To give some perspective, in the days of £17 CDs you could have a night out down my local pub for less money than that. Around 3 or 4 years ago I went to HMV and bought a CD and then went to the pub afterwards, the pint of beer cost me more than the CD did.
People in the music business do complain about streaming or YouTube etc paying very little money. However, something many people would have said about certain songs in the past is "I like that tune but it's not one I'd go out and buy". I've said that about plenty of tunes but have probably listened to them on the internet and therefore the artist has made a small amount of money from it. Streaming hasn't prevented me from buying it as I was never going to buy it in the first place.
I do still buy CDs as I prefer the physical format, but streaming allows me to decide what to buy and what not to. Imagine if you liked a band and bought there latest album for £17 but found you didn't like it, you'd probably not buy an album of theirs again. With streaming you can determine you don't like it without spending money but it could be that you like every album they release going forward, you'll know it via streaming and therefore buy the album.
It is true to say I have bought albums I would have never bought otherwise had I not heard the music on the internet beforehand.
It's probably true to say the price of CDs has come down because of viable alternatives, but because they exist you'll always have people who won't see the point in buying a CD if you can listen to it for free on Spotify.
It would however seem that instead of encouraging streamers to buy CDs, artists are now trying to sell more CDs to CD buyers. A large number of albums in recent years have had deluxe anniversary albums released. So people are paying a lot of money for something they already own plus maybe a couple of remixes or tracks that weren't deemed good enough for the album the first time round. It's money for old rope, even Noel Gallagher admitted that when Oasis released a 20th anniversary edition of "Definitely Maybe".
Going back to basics though, we have the artist who wants to make as much money as they can from their music and the consumer who has a limited budget to spend on music. Despite my quite sizable CD collection there are many CDs I've never bought for financial reasons. If someone has £100 to spend on CDs and a CD is £10 they will only buy 10 CDs even if there is 50 they want to buy.
Personally I never pay more than £5 for a CD these days and rarely pay that much. I've even bought CDs for 1p plus postage from Amazon in recent years. Whether or not that may seem too little, I bought my fair share of £17 CDs back in the day to justify that.
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