Will Streaming Music Kill Songwriting?

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/will-streaming-music-kill-songwriting

I came across this link which I found very interesting, since I don't know personally any "professional" song writers - (or someone making a living writing songs} but I've always been interested in the business of things. I don't know if this is totally true or not.

If so, than maybe writing maybe just for the enjoyment of the art and I should hold off on ordering my yacht for cruising Lake Michigan 

Well - stories about Spotify's extremely low royalties have been going round for some time. Streaming music won't kill songwriting but Spotify sure is making it harder for composers to live from their compositions alone.
3 million streams seventeen dollars and seventy-two cents - that is quite a rip-off.
Musicians unite!

I'd like to offer the following:

1. Lake Michigan is just beautiful (especially to someone from CT. )! I actually love all of the great lakes. So, @Vince , could you handle the lake in a kayak or canoe? I mean what is the minimal boat that would allow you to enjoy this great lake? I say shoot for that.  I mean with a 1000th of a cent per stream you could eventually get something that kind of floats. 

2. Yes, please write for your own enjoyment! Your music has real and honest substance!

3. It's hard to feel all that much sympathy for anyone involved (besides maybe some of the songwriters). "Blurred Lines" is worth $17,000,000? ... come on!..... the guy is the son of a famous actor, he barely sings an almost non-existent melody over an obvious copy of a Marvin Gaye groove...... and that's the hit? No wonder radio is dying. They played that stupid song over and over and over and over......
This is hardly songwriting.

4. The death of this industry is part of the revolution that is happening. Be it imperfect, people are making their own music again.     

This is very interesting @Vince - good find  The final point made by @Bill from November Sound maybe prophetic I think.

I wonder if the attempted 'commoditization' (is that a word??) of music to be the equivalent of buying a box of cereal in a supermarket might backfire in the end.
Couple that together with over-compressed production and you have a perfect little 'unit' of consumption, of low bandwidth and ultimately unsatisfying. 
In some ways I wonder if the current streaming of music is the endpoint of thinking of a song as a 'unit' and 'A Change is Gonna Come' down the line.
I think the act of creating music cannot be controlled in this way, look at the Kitchen itself for how people band together, so we are due a kick-back at some point.

To save up to own a record, to go down to the second-hand record shop and trade in one vinyl for another, was part of my early life. 'Let me lend you this record- you've got to hear it' or
 'come around to my place and hear this' was part of the process of going up. Maybe as the ownership of recordings goes away so does the amount of pleasure derived from it.
Home taping didn't kill music, despite what the record companies wanted us to believe at the time, it acted as a sampler, a way into listening to a new band, genre etc.
I'm not sure about other countries but the reassurance of vinyl as an object of art, if not sonic quality, is becoming a feature in the UK. Younger people are wanting to have the experience
their parents had I guess.

We also only look with Western eyes at all this and we forget there is a whole world out there that might have a different opinion about music from us.
Some of them don't even use the same music system or notes. So there will always be songs and songwriters writing about hope and despair, love and hate, black, white and grey, death and life.

So songs and by extension songwriters, will always be with around as it is part of who we are. 
 

The death of this industry is part of the revolution that is happening. Be it imperfect, people are making their own music again.     

Perfectly put.

 

The death of this industry is part of the revolution that is happening. Be it imperfect, people are making their own music again.     

Perfectly put.

 

Oh, that's beautifully put indeed @Bill from November Sound , +1 !