How much is a painting really worth? It depends who painted it. It will also depend on the art collector. I'm not a big fan of Van Gogh's 'Starry Night' and wo

How much is a painting really worth? It depends who painted it. It will also depend on the art collector. I'm not a big fan of Van Gogh's 'Starry Night' and wouldn't pay a dime for a copy. But I might pay $50 to commission an artist for a semi-professional sketch of one of my favorite TV show characters. Few people would place the same value on the commissioned art. Most would consider it worthless! What do paintings and music both have in common? Both are artforms. Both are heavily reliant on subjective taste. Someone might be willing to pay $15 for a Taylor Swift album but wouldn't pay $3 for a Slipknot album. The problem with the music industry is they try to price all music more-or-less equally. All singles, regardless who made it, are about $1.00 nowadays. But are all songs worth $1? If an album has 10 tracks is it worth $10 or $12? Would someone buy an album if they only actually listen to 2 of the songs? Why buy an album for $12 if they only like $2 worth of the songs? If I buy the song on iTunes how many hoops do I have to jump through to put that song on my Android phone? The distribution and control over the music favors the pirate. Few people want to order physical CD's because they then have to burn/import the tracks onto their computer to access the music on their mp3 players/phones. But if they purchase the CD online, through iTunes, they don't actually own the music! They also get locked into the Apple Ecosystem (see earlier point about Android). As for Streams vs Radio. Radio playing the song 16 times might reach 1,000,000 listeners in New York. A stream playing a song 16 times likely reached only 16 people (if only a handful more). So charging "per time the song is played" is not the correct model if the song is reaching significantly less amount of people per time played. TL;DR Distribution is the largest problem. The next largest problem is the market model. The last problem is art is inherently worthless and is only given value by a person - and that value changes per person.