I love listening to music. Don’t care much for TV. And there is a huge availability of music on the internet. But, I would prefer that the artists receive a fair share for their work. Are there sites where the artist is compensated fairly? I wouldn’t mind paying if I knew that the artists were being compensated.
Are you talking about streaming sites, or purchasing sites?
No, I don’t care to download music. I am a streamer.
That depends on what you consider fair compensation. One big complaint about the legitimate sites like Pandora and Spotify is the amount of compensation per play as compared to radio or an album sale. The trouble with that comparison is that a Pandora play is to a single person while a radio play is to an audience.
The major web radio services (Pandora, Spotify, Google, Apple, many others) pay for the music. Artists may want more, but the rates seem comparable to radio rates to me, based on my absolute ignorance about radio and web licensing.
You may be interested in this chart, which shows how many CDs an artist must sell or how many times an artist must get streamed per month in order to earn minimum wage, here defined as $1,160.00. Not surprisingly, the artists get the best return on direct sales of self-pressed CDs (it only takes 143 CDs sold to earn minimum wage.), and the artists get the poorest return on Spotify (It takes 4,053, 110 plays to earn minimum wage.).
You may draw your own conclusions about what is a fair piece of the action.