How should musicians make money?

              Music is something that everyone should have free access to, unfortunately that is just not sustainable. Music is a form of art that humans have been creating almost since we came to be. It is used as a method of communication and self-expression, and music should be accessible to everyone for these reasons. However, for hundreds of years now music has had a price tag, and for good reason. The creators of this music need to make money in order to survive and hopefully create more and better music. Starting with plays and orchestras that people had to pay to get into and slowly moving towards vinyls, cassettes and CDs that were sold at stores, and now music is mostly sold on the internet. Music was stolen from stores and pirated in other countries to be sold here, but never has it been on such a large scale as it is now. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (ifpi) 95% of music downloads worldwide are illegal and award no money to the artist or production company. The reason for this huge spurt of piracy is the anonymous nature of the internet. People can buy a song once and then easily put it up for public download where it can be replicated infinite times without any fees other than the 99 cents that was payed for the original song. The people who download the music think they remain completely anonymous so there is no guilt involved. From the surface it looks like these people illegally downloading music are cutting funding to their favorite artists but that might not be true. According to an article from Time Entertainment, these downloads are actually helping the industry. Supposedly people who listen to lots of music will illegally download some of it and then stream, or buy the rest of their music. People who listen to only some music will usually buy their music legitimately according to the study. The study also suggests that the music industry has grown an additional two percent because of this illegally downloaded music. They are suggesting that this explosion of illegal downloads will actually help the industry in the long run as well. The music industry will be forced to change its ways so that people will download music that will support the musicians and not continue to steal music.  
     I believe that music should be payed for and that the current laws around music have the right idea but are severely flawed. They try to discourage free downloads by making them illegal but they fail to realize that there are other ways of making money off of music. First of all, free download links can be placed on websites that have advertisements that create revenue for the artists without making the consumer directly pay. Secondly, some musicians want their music to be downloaded for free because either they want to spread their music and don't care about the money or they just want to get their name out. And finally, people who own a lot of one bands music either illegally or legally are likely to see that band in concert. In the end I think that artists deserve a paycheck for creating their music but I don't think that the money has to come directly from consumers.