The music streaming market is saturated. Grooveshark went belly up just last week. And while artist-owned, high fidelity music streaming service Tidal launched with fantastic pomp and pageantry, it dropped below the top 700 downloads spot in the App store after its first week.

The main obstacle the music streaming business faces is that most consumers are reluctant to shell out a monthly fee for something they can get for free from the radio or steal online. High fidelity services, while great in concept, are limited by the fact that most consumers can’t tell the difference and the services use 10 times the bandwidth which makes them prohibitive for anyone on a modest data plan.

It would seem that the music streaming business model is fundamentally flawed. Most services charge consumers $10 -$20 a month and pay artists about half a penny per play. Meaning as an artist, you’d need your song to be streamed 10-million times to earn a school teacher’s salary, and that’s assuming you somehow recorded the album yourself in a studio that you magically built for free. Have you heard the song “Wake Me Up” by Avicii? It was played over 168-million times on Pandora (one of the larger steaming services); singer and co-writer Aloe Blacc earned just $4,000 from those spins.

So, are streaming services ruining music? Not quite. Streaming companies do not pay musicians directly; they pay record labels and music publishers, who then pass on whatever percentage of that money each creator’s contract entitles them. Unfortunately, we can only divide up those royalties so many ways before there’s nothing left. Nowadays, if an artist is lucky enough to write and record a hit song, their best hope in our current techno-economical climate is that it will be stolen by most consumers and then licensed by streaming companies who pay so little they might as well have stolen it. A bleak prospect.

The silver lining on this dark cloud is that there’s never been a better time to be an artist. Recording studio time used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Advances in technology has made it such that artists can now build their own studio for a fraction of that (and most do). Instead of waiting around to catch the ear of a record company, artists can publish their music online and let the public do the legwork. Does that mean record companies are obsolete? Not at all, their role has merely changed from making records to distribution. Artists are often a little too ‘left-brain’ to trouble themselves with the business side of making music but ultimately, the profit in music is linked to the risks associated with investing in it. The chief beneficiary will always be the risk-taker. The best part is, artists can be that risk-taker. What’s more rock n’ roll than taking a risk?

The music industry will continue to endure growing pains. The way we listen to music is changing. The way we make music is changing. The only certainty, is that the change won’t stop.