As technology progresses, the way people perform every day actions has evolved and become more efficient and innovative because of technological advancements. For example, technology has been created to make tasks like parallel parking, brushing your teeth, or taking notes in class far easier than they were before. But with these new technological innovations comes a slight tradeoff where the user actually loses a form of "expertise" because these tasks no longer require skill; they are now just mindless tasks. The user of the new technology can become lazy and become dependent on technology if they abuse the invention. However, the user can benefit greatly from this technology if they use it to assist them in completing a task instead of letting the invention take over the task completely.

Similar to the belief that technology can evolve the way we go about performing everyday tasks; musicians, record producers, fans, and music aficionados see music streaming as a new technology that is negatively changing the way we listen to and experience music. Many people who spend their time listening to and exploring music have found that music-streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora provide fans with a simple way to access their favorite music. Listeners are also able to access some of these services on their tablet or mobile device, which makes this method of listening to music more attractive. Lastly, with these streaming services, listeners have the ability to discover thousands of types of music and artists because they have all of this music at the their fingertips. However, these music-streaming services hold various qualities that make some listeners, artists, and record labels believe that music streaming is bad for the way we listen to music, the music industry, and the culture of music as a whole. Although various artists, music listeners, and record labels believe that music streaming is bad for various entities of music, music streaming could be another advancement in technology that could prove to excel music and make it prosper into something incredibly innovative if it is handled and used properly.

From the standpoint of an artist, someone who puts hard work and dedication into creating art would obviously like to be paid in full for the music they create. Artists such as Taylor Swift and Tom Yhorke believe that they are not paid in full for their music when it is streamed (Knopper). They have since pulled their music from the music-streaming service Spotify because they believe that Spotify is basically giving away their music for free to half of the people who use Spotify. They believe this because although Spotify is leading the market of online music sales with 75 million users, 55 million of these users are using the service for free (BBC). How is allowing for half of the users of Spotify to stream the music for free legal? Spotify offers two ways to use their service. Users have the option to not pay for the music-streaming service and are able to listen to all of the music they want on their computer, but they are periodically interrupted by audio advertisements. With this, users of the free version of Spotify also cannot listen to whatever music they want on their tablet or mobile device. Instead, users can only choose an artist or album and click shuffle in order to listen to the music. With the premium service, users can listen to as much music as they want, at any time, and on any device as long as they have an Internet connection or have the music saved to their phone. With this service, users must pay $9.99 a month unless they are eligible for certain deals such a student or family discounts. By looking at this way of charging their listeners, it is easy to see that this is why Taylor Swift and Tom Yhorke believe that Spotify is giving away their music to half of Spotify's users. With this belief, they believe, as well as other artists, that Spotify also does not pay their artists in full for their music being streamed. Spotify pays its artists by how many times their music is streamed. However, they pay artists much less for one stream than artists are paid for an actual download.

While it seems like Spotify is actually not paying these artists enough, they actually are paying the artists in full but over a longer period of time. First, looking at how Spotify has 55 million users that are not paying for a subscription, one may believe that this is unfair and that the Spotify is giving the music away for free. This is not the case because users can only pick which songs they listen to and listen to whatever they want on a computer. Users are easily able to listen to the music for free on the computer if they were to use Youtube concluding that using Spotify for free on a computer is almost the same thing as using Youtube on a computer to listen to music both being completely legal. Secondly, when looking at how Spotify pays its artists it does not provide the best representation to look at how much they are paid per month or year for their music. With downloads, the user pays to download the song once and then it is theirs and the payment is dispersed to the service providing the downloads, the record label, and the artist. With streaming, all of the music is on a large database that can be accessed whenever there is Internet present. On Spotify, to stream a song, the user selects the song and basically presses play and each time the user listens to the song, it counts as one stream. Since artists are paid for each stream, they are paid much less, $0.005, for each stream whereas with a download the artist, whose music is available from a record label, receives $0.033 (Dredge). If an artist were not on a record label, they would receive $0.89 per download. In "Spotify's D.A. Wallach Explains How Spotify Pays Artists", D.A. Wallach explains that Spotify does pay their artists in full, but it occurs over a longer period of time (King). He explains that looking at how much iTunes pays its artists compared to Spotify on a monthly basis is an inaccurate way of looking at payment (King). Wallach also explains that if it obtained more subscribers, artists would in turn be making a great deal of money when he says "If we can get to the scale of Netflix  --  which has 20 million subscribers  --  we estimate we'd be paying out to artists what iTunes is paying out on a year to year basis" (King). This means that if Spotify were to have a much larger premium subscriber size, more and more people would stream a song so the artist would actually be receiving a billion payments of $0.005 instead of a couple million $0.033 payments. Aside from artists believing that music streaming is killing the revenue they receive from their music, record labels and companies that sell CDs and records believe that music streaming hurts the economy of the music industry. 

According to Victor Luckerson in his article "Spotify and YouTube Are Just Killing Digital Music Sales", after music streaming began, digital sales dropped in 2013 from 1.34 billion to 1.26 and CD sales continue to decline (Luckerson). While these sales have declined, the music streaming sales for Spotify, YouTube, and Rhapsody have sky rocketed. This obviously does make music-streaming look like a damaging entity in the music industry, but that is only because it is limiting the sales of previous ways of listening. Furthermore, by looking at this point that music streaming is limiting the sales of other ways of buying music, one would come to the conclusion that streaming is hurting the music industry economy. However, this is not the case.

Since technology is progressing, most of what we do is done digitally, through the use of Internet, and on our many tablets, mobile devices, and computers. Since most of what we do is done this way, it seems like it only makes sense that the new music industry is heavily influenced and impacted by this advancing technology. Therefore, it might be necessary to leave CDs and records in the past in order to catch up to the rapidly progressing world we live in today. With that being said, that does not mean that CDs and records have to be completely abandoned. If someone wishes to hold an album or something tangible from an artist, they can still do so buy purchasing the CD or record. In terms of simply listening to music, music streaming might be the new way of listening to music. YouTube, Beats Electronic, Deezer, iTunes, and are all new music listening services or companies that plan to create a music streaming aspect of their company (Luckerson). Since there are so many new streaming companies and services surfacing in the world, it makes sense that music streaming could be adopted as the new innovative way of listening to music. Aside from the economy of CDs and digital sales, in "Making Dollars: Clearing Up Spotify Payment Confusion", David Macias explains that Spotify has actually increased revenues for the recorded music business in Sweden 30% the reason being that Sweden is Spotify's country of origin. Macias goes on to mention that most other country's music industries are either flat or declining in revenue and that Spotify is responsible for roughly half of the music revenues in Sweden. Not only does Macias explain Spotify's impact on the economy, but he also illuminates the fact that record labels take a large portion of the money for their revenues and only give a fraction of what they receive from Spotify to the artist who's music is being streamed. Although record labels and artists are usually partners in the music business, it should be taken into account that the reason many of these artists believe they are not being paid enough could be because the record label is taking a large potion of the income from streaming their music. For a large portion of the music streaming debate, many of the complaints come from artists and record labels because they believe they are not being paid enough. With all of these issues with payments, the music business economy, and the amount of sales of CDs or records, it seems as though ever since digital music has existed, CDs and record sales along with how music was handled, experienced, and sold has evolved into something completely different than what it is today.

Music aficionados have complained about digital music as well as streaming in regards to the "original way" of streaming music. These people who are largely invested in the culture and experience of listening to and buying music explain that with digital music, one loses the cultural integrity of an album when it is not played on a CD or record. They explain that when you listen to a CD or record, you hear the music in its truest form where you listen to the album all the way through, listening to each song, and hearing the whole album has one large piece as the artist intended for you to experience it (BBC). "I just really like the idea that I'm holding the physical artifact of what the musicians wanted you to have, what they created in their brain, you know. You can listen to it when you want and you can hold it" says Carrie Colliton in the BBC news article "Is Streaming Good for Music?". With this idea that CDs and records are the most raw and truest forms of music, it is easy to see that digital music and streaming does hurt the culture integrity of music, but what if the ways of listening to music through CDs and records become a thing of the past?

As it was stated before, what if digital downloads and streaming are the new ways of listening to music? Before, it was stated that maybe music ought to be bought and sold online since most of everything we do is through the Internet. This could still be the case when this issue is viewed from a cultural aspect. What if full albums are not how people listen to music modernly, and music eventually turns into single pieces instead of albums? This idea is unorthodox, but what was music before it was albums? Albums barely existed in the times of bepop, swing and jazz. Instead, most artists had just single songs with one theme that did not transition into other songs. Songs have already started to become just single pieces again in pop culture today when a pop artist releases one song off of an album they have yet to release. What is the purpose of this? Predating digital music, an artist released an album because they wanted you to listen to this whole album. Lately, artists will release a single song because they really want you to listen to this single song. The song "Hotline Bling" by Drake was released before his album "Views from the 6" was released. Artists have begun to emphasize individual pieces instead of albums as a whole possibly because when people stream music, for the most part, they tend to make their music available to be streamed or downloaded as individual songs instead of streaming or downloading albums as a whole.

For a large part of the argument for why music streaming is healthy and good for music, the factor of technology comes into play more often than not. If people are to let technology grasp music and let ways of music streaming and other new entities of music run its course, people may see many new ideas, innovations, and a general sense of simplicity become prevalent in the new music industry. This simplicity can also be found when dealing with copyright and music piracy. 

Music piracy has grown into a large force in the music industry that drives the economy downwards and began when music became available digitally in the early 2000's (Chiou, Huang, Lee). Since digital downloading of music became available, it has drastically changed the economy of the music industry. Basically, all of the music that is pirated is because of digitally downloaded music because people were then able to take albums they had bought and upload the to their computers so that they are then able to make the music available for free downloading. While this seems like a horrendous thing to happen to the music industry, it should be noted that this happened solely because of digitally downloading music, not because of streaming.

According to Andy Malt, streaming has actually limited the amount of digital music piracy occurring in the music industry. Spotify has been said to be countering music piracy after a study conducted by Will Page shows that the number of times an album was streamed on Spotify is much greater than the amount of times it was illegally torrented (Malt). In this study, they took four albums and had two of them be made available for streaming on Spotify immediately when they were released while the other two were held from being on Spotify for a period of time. The albums that were made available for streaming had a better result of the stream to illegally pirated ratio. "There is no evidence in the four case studies showing that streaming on Spotify hurts sales ...  The most popular album on Spotify had the highest sales to piracy ratio." says Page in Malt's article.

Not only would music piracy be countered by music streaming, but also copyright laws would be much more lenient and less confusing to operate with. For example, record labels and artists who hold copyrights must "fight multiple infringers" who are engaging in relatively minor copyright infringement resulting in a tedious and frustrating process that the music industry has to deal with (Chiou). If everything were to be done through music streaming, we would first have to deal with less music piracy, but we would also have less copyright laws making things more simple and causing less headaches for the music industry. Why is this the case? Most copyright laws have to do with copying a certain product whether it is a book, movie, or music and then redistributing it to others either for free or for money. In most cases, these copyright laws exist because it is simply to take a tangible thing like a book or CD and replicate it to be redistributed. If everything was done online through streaming on a server that is governed by a legal company, there would be no room for anyone to copy this music and replicate it hence limiting the need for copyright laws.

It is obvious that much of this debate is caused because new ways of listening to and sharing music are being produced and they are clashing with the previous ways of doing these things. But where do many of these ideas come from? Many of these ideas, and almost all of them, have sprouted because of the essence of new technology in the world. If something or some task can be made simpler, then someone will most likely make it such. While this can cause problems and cause damage to the actual performance of the task, this is not the case with music streaming. Technology has been progressing rapidly and changing the lives of many: almost everyone has a smartphone and they almost never put it down, tablets are accepted within school walls, and many households are not able to function without the existence of a computer. Because of this and the fact that much of what we do in our everyday lives revolves around the Internet and the technology that simply does not leave contact with us, it only makes sense that music streaming becomes the new way of listening to music. It seems as though that everyone should have however much music they want and at any time they want since they always have these devices in their possession. The world of the Internet and technology is incredibly vast, so why not use this vast amount of technology to access the colossal database of music that humanity has produced.

