This year marks 20 years since Metallica (and others) settled/win a case Napster in a case for artists rights. At the time, Metallica were widely criticised by many fans...people called them out of touch, hypocrites, greedy.

Metallica just wanted control over their music and to prevent other people make money from being a unauthorized music distribution service.

Now, we have the streaming age. People have the instant access to music for pretty much free if you like...and there are growing concerns over artists getting proper reimbursement for their material.

Odd now that generally, its gone from "big rich rock stars being greedy" to "musicians need payment for their work"

The internet has become less of a hive of scum and villainy since the late 90's/early naughts basically. There's a slight defense in that we were before a transition there where the only option was "pay the super rich labels or steal" or no middle ground which led to the napster fight, but it's become more nuanced over the years resulting in the we've gone too far/the balance is fucked to fuck type deal we see today.

I guess before it felt smaller, more just people sharing their shit like a big party. These streaming platforms are now the big industry normal, so the industry normal not actually paying the content creators feels shitty. With that said this industry normal was required to beat the pirates, the old (possibly misattributed) adage of Steam's mantra of offering a service that's better than the pirates. Back when Napster was a thing, the options were spend an eternity finding something rarely stocked or a heap of money on a $30 new release CD. The middle ground of consumer comfort and artist/label money joy wasn't really there.

As it stands it's probably gone too far, the average person can probably access all the free music they could ever want without ever needing to touch a shady russian blogspot in this day and age, which sadly means it's pretty fuckin' impossible to walk back on to since any walk back is not going to be accepted. They probably needed to go for more of a "here's the album right now for five bucks" model early on opposed to "come to Apple and pay 2 bucks per song" one they opted for, which is closer to your Steam approach. It also doesn't help that even today music is far, FAR more easily shared illegally than movies or games.

There's also the issue that most of those other mediums are far less susceptible to multiple uses. Sure, some people watch their favourite movies or play their favourite games over and over, but nothing like music. So music taking on this pay-per-play model is a bit more sensible than the lump sum to be on the platform like with Netflix or Gamepass, but it's pretty obvious that the split is fuuuuuuccckkkkeeed. With that said giving them an appropriate amount per album listen just isn't possible with bandcamp ads or a spotify sub so... yeah. Shit's fucked.

Completely agreed. To the rest of your post - I've still got treasured albums I bought imported just as the dam broke - £25 for a Sonata Arctica CD ! - and I've got ancient rips downloaded from (I imagine) the same blogs. With the internet as user-friendly as it is now, and online commerce so mature, there's no good reason for something like Spotify, and agreed again, no reason for dodgy blogs with terrible fonts and an entertaining mixture of languages

A lot of the comments in this thread matched my view, https://forum.metal-archives.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=127854&hilit=spotify, which I'll just quote as it hasn't changed in 9 months -