The funny thing to me is that if the music industry starts clamping down more and demanding higher wages for streams, it'll just keep the indie artists out. I know we're talking pennies here, but if I had to pay to listen to every trash indie band out there, I'd just stop listening to the genre altogether. Also, a lot of these "artists" need to get over themselves. Art on the internet is basically free. You've got a myriad of competition that is willing to work for free and you feel entitled to payment even when nobody cares about your music. The .004c per stream is very generous imo but clearly pays out for top songs. This lesser known indie types obviously will never reach those payouts. But they aren't paying for the streaming, hosting, and maintenance of the website which I guarantee fronts most of the costs. Not to mention, every westerner with a mic or a tablet wants an artsy job. Everyone wants a star trek job to work on you passions. But the reality of the business is it's very hard and there's an unbelievable amount of competition. And that is purely why I disagree with these people being so entitled for being such sub par artists.
I've been happy for about a year now buying and downloading songs from Amazon Music, Bandcamp, and Patreon. I get full control of my music library, and usually I get clean metadata & album art. I've had to do cleanup for some Patreon downloads and a CD rip.