With the rapid growth of technology over the years, very little has sat still and the music industry is no exception. The interconnectivity between artists and their fans is such that now they can share their works almost instantaneously.

Streaming services, such as Spotify, have also made it so that anyone and everyone has access to a larger collection of music than they would ever be able to acquire throughout their whole lives of sorting through and collecting CDs or records.
And yet, as of late, there has been much unrest in the music industry with a considerable number of big name artists pulling their catalogues from certain streaming services all together. The most notable example is the group of artists at the heart of the Tidal Music streaming service who vow to pull their music from everywhere else on the internet in search of greater compensation for streams to their listeners.
This is insane. Music, at its core, is art and, as an artist, one should endeavor to have their art open for everyone to participate in. Artists created their work because it made them feel a specific way, and we, as artists, put our work out there in hopes that other people can somehow relate to what we are feeling through what we have created.
Experiencing art is something that people shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to do, but that’s exactly what will happen when some artists only make their catalogues available in certain places.
Then, in order to listen to everything they want to, someone could potentially be shelling out subscription fees to multiple different services only to hear a small group of artists.
A lot of people argue that this type of business is fair and allows the artist to be better compensated, but a photographer doesn’t charge you every time you look at one of their prints, do they? No: they charge you when you want an original, or when you want to hang a print on the wall of your home.
Why should music be any different? And besides, services like Spotify make it incredibly easy for people to discover new musicians that they like, musicians that they’ll like enough to go out and buy a concert ticket to see, or a T-shirt, or a record in order to support them.
Music and art are both fundamental parts of the human experience that shouldn’t be limited unnecessarily.