[ghaff]

Discovery is one important reason. Not that that's guaranteed to work. You probably need to do your own marketing--including playing at local bars etc. for pennies and tips. Of course, the same things is mostly true these days for writers with a publishing contract.

People pursue creative pursuits for a lot of different reasons, including personal fulfillment. But you pretty much have to win the lottery to make a decent full-time living off of it. People may somewhat enjoy laying bricks--but it's a job they expect to make a living at. If they can't, they'll try to do something else.

[carlosjobim]

I get it, but I just think it's strange. Like it would be wrong for a brick layer to let himself be taken totally advantage of, even if he enjoys laying bricks.

If it's for personal fulfilment, artists can be happy with the sales they can make on their own, even if the numbers are small. Or even give their music away for free, if they want to get as many listeners as possible. But what is the sense in letting a billion dollar company exploit you and make bank on your work, while paying you almost nothing in return?

Imagine if other professions were like that? "Just keep laying the bricks for free for my company, and maybe one day you'll be a famous bricklayer and I'll pay you millions".

[amenhotep]

You keep returning to bricklayers and that's a really odd way to analogise it. The bricklayer is tangibly giving away the results of his labour - once he's finished building a house, he doesn't have it any more. Musicians are not giving Spotify their music! They're not sitting there slaving away at an album, handing it over to Spotify, and being left with nothing. It's still their album.

If musicians were actually left without their music, like the bricklayer, I'd agree with you and I think so would most people. But conversely, if a bricklayer really loved building houses, spent a great deal of time building houses, owned all of them himself and they were empty and he was doing nothing with them, and a company came up to him and said "hey, we like your houses, we have a business letting people go on tours through houses and we make money off it, would you let us run tours through your houses in exchange for a cut of the profits, which will probably be very small but could be large?" then I don't think you can be too scandalised by him taking the deal and making at least some money off these houses that he'd already built and was doing nothing with! Even if you think selling photos of the houses directly to customers is a better model! Especially since he can still do that!