Jeff Price slaps his hands on his desk. As he details the flaws he's found in the music industry since the early 2000s, his words fly out faster and faster until he has to stop to breathe in the middle of a sentence.

"Music is important," says Price, the former owner of the indie record label Spin. "Music has inherent value. And if you want to use music, you've got to fucking pay for it."

In 2005, Price co-founded a company called Tunecore. At a time when the only other option for digital sales was the iTunes Store, Tunecore allowed musicians to upload their music to sell on the internet. Artists, Price believed, no longer had to get locked into contracts with labels, ones where they signed away their copyright. Price realized the internet had the potential to change the music industry's whole business model.

"I think what happens in the next three years will really decide the future of the industry"

"I launched Tunecore because I thought artists were being screwed, and you know what? I was right," he says.

Tunecore became part of the revolution that overthrew the old system of music and helped introduce a new digital Wild West. It was radically successful in helping artists get their music online.

Now Price is trying to do the same thing for streaming. In 2013, after being ousted from Tunecore, Price founded Audiam, a service that attempts to help artists get paid for digital streams.

Price is a controversial figure in the music industry. He yells and rants, even on the phone with me. He isn't right about everything, but he's right about this: the music industry has a problem with ownership and pricing transparency, and nobody who could do anything seems to care about fixing it.

The crisis in music

Money in music comes from payment. Most people, however, don't pay for music anymore. From 2012 to 2013, purchasing physical music such as CDs and records dropped 13 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Digital music purchases dropped 6.3 percent. That year was the third in a decade and a half in which physical music sales dropped more than 5 percent. For everyone who makes their livelihood from music, those numbers are terrifying. But they're especially concerning to artists.

Artists don't feel like they're getting their fair shake, as songwriter Aloe Blacc told me in December. Labels, who represent performers and their copyrights, feel like they are being squeezed out of the picture and losing money rapidly. Publishers, who handle the songwriters and their copyrights, are worried that copyright is going to change so drastically that their future may be in jeopardy.

Almost everyone in music thinks they aren't paid what they're worth. Some have numbers to prove it. In November, Blacc wrote in Wired that Avicii’s "Wake Me Up!," which Blacc co-wrote and sings, was "the most streamed song in Spotify history and the 13th most played song on Pandora since its release in 2013, with more than 168 million streams in the US." And yet, he wrote, "that yielded only $12,359 in Pandora domestic royalties."

The numbers are much, much fuzzier than they appear, however. One of the big problems music is facing is that everyone is dissatisfied with the amount of money they are making, but they have very little data to prove their point accurately. There's no concrete data that shows it's exponentially harder for an artist to make money streaming than it was to make money from selling digital or hard-copy albums.

There are a few things everyone in the industry wants. Everyone wants listeners to be able to access, listen to, and enjoy music. Everyone wants, or at least says they want, creators to be paid for creating that music. But pretty much everything else is open for debate.

"This is really a crucial time," Charles Caldas, the founder of the digital rights agency the Merlin Network, told me. "I think what happens in the next three years will really decide the future of the industry."

There are three main components of the industry — infrastructure, transparency, and technology — that together could hold the key to fixing this whole mess and creating a world in which art can flourish, both creatively and financially.

The internet transformed how we listen to — and pay for — music

The music industry used to function like a record store. The store had a single entrance, and when you walked through it, the first thing you'd see was a display of Top 40 albums — the Celine Dions and Norah Joneses and Madonnas of the world. Everyone had to walk past the stuff at the front to get to their niche area, be it rock 'n' roll, hip-hop, or metal.

Then the internet happened.

In 2003, iTunes blew a new door into the wall of the record store, creating another way for consumers to find music. As the internet grew and Napster solidified its popularity, more and more doors were blown into the walls of the record store. Everyone could find any album they wanted at any time and didn't even have to walk past the Top 40 to get there. They didn't have to walk at all.

"There used to just be a handful of ways to get into the marketplace," Casey Rae, a vice president at the Future of Music Coalition, told me. "Now there are infinite ways. The earlier system still had a lot of disadvantages, like limited shelf space and fewer chances for the non-mainstream artists to get heard."

Now, instead of an organized record store, music exists everywhere, which makes it that much harder to keep track of. Instead of knowing exactly how many records were made, packaged, and sold, music changes hands far quicker than money ever could. It can be under a pay lock in one moment and free online in another. The internet made music more accessible than ever, but it also made it much harder to trace. The malleability of music makes it a more creative field than ever before, but it also makes it one in which no one really knows who made, owns, or should get paid for anything.

"We have a totally new model," Charles Caldas told me. "There's a shift going on from ownership to consumption and access. It's fundamentally changing the way people pay for music."

Indeed, the idea of owning music is outdated. In terms of revenue alone, from 2013 to 2014 the sales of digital music fell almost as much as sales of physical CDs did. The only two sectors of the industry that saw growth in the last year were streaming and vinyl, which is a collectors' hobby.

Artists are being forced to adapt in response to this shift. Some artists, especially younger ones, don't mind this new, post-ownership system. Nicole Miglis, the lead singer of the electro-pop band Hundred Waters, wants to be paid for her work. But she has accepted that people accessing her music on a streaming platform or downloading it illegally is how the system works now — for better or for worse.

"I fully support free music," she said. "I think it's called stealing now, but I think that's going to change in the future."

Singer-songwriter Joni Fatora told me she considered printing some CDs of her first EP but realized that no one buys CDs anymore. "Instead, I'm going to do a smaller run of vinyl," she told me. "I think people see it more as a piece of art when it's on vinyl, and I think my listeners would really want and appreciate that." Fatora released her album on SoundCloud, and is hopeful it'll get plays there.

Recording artist Niia told me she thinks "the expectation that albums should be free is fine, because that's the standard, and right now I just need the exposure."

These are young artists. For them, acquiring a fan base is their first step to having loyalists who will purchase their albums and pay to see them at shows in the future.

Their understanding of how music is priced is that it should function on a kind of sliding scale. Right now, they cannot expect everyone to pay full price for their work. Just like young artists handed out cassette tapes during the rise of hip-hop in the Bronx, they are handing out their work to potential fans.

"I fully support free music. I think it's called stealing now, but that's going to change in the future."

But artists who have been working for years and have established fan bases and credibility within the industry already don't see free music as a right. They see it as their own lost revenue.

"It's my opinion that music should not be free," Taylor Swift wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last year. "My prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is. I hope they don't underestimate themselves or undervalue their art."

Melvin Gibbs, a famous bassist who has appeared on more than 200 albums, expresses a similar view.

"The major problem for me as a creator," Gibbs told me, "is that we aren’t getting fairly compensated. We’re being asked to invest in a whole new business model without getting any reward for it."

The big debate over money led Taylor Swift to withdraw all of her music from Spotify in December. Streaming is making artists money, but it's not enough to sustain an artist on its own — they must sign advertising deals, tour extensively, or bring in some other supplemental income to make that work. For a pop star, those things are part of the job, but for a smaller artist they can be exhausting. Only a major overhaul to the way royalties are paid out and the structures behind that process could make streaming as profitable as possible for artists.

The problem with copyright

The problem is that music royalties are based on licensing — who owns what parts of the song at what percentage, and who gets paid for what — and the current system for copyrighting music is incredibly and unnecessarily convoluted. Here's how it works right now: every song has two copyrights, a mechanical copyright for the music and lyrics and one for the actual recorded performance of the song. Every type of platform pays a flat fee for the mechanical license, but the performance licenses vary.

None of these laws were passed even semi-recently. The idea for the mechanical copyright, in fact, stems from mechanical pianos, which were heavily used in the early 20th century.

"I think everybody should be doing a lot and probably a lot more to reassess the shape of how monetization happens, to find a way that people can be, if not happy, at least in a place where they can continue to create and produce music," Caldas told me.

Every stakeholder wants the laws around copyright to change so that they receive a bigger chunk of the pie in the end. The argument right now centers on the Fair Play Fair Pay Act, a bill before Congress that's attempting to change the way artists are paid for radio plays.

Currently a compulsory license is in place for radio and non-interactive streaming services where users cannot pick the next song, like Pandora. The compulsory license is enforced by the United States Copyright Office, and what it does is make it so that artists cannot opt out of having their music played. Instead of having to negotiate with every single songwriter for every single song, a site like Pandora can pay a single blanket fee (based on a statutory license) to both performers and songwriters for every song and be able to play everything.