But wait: Recordings and concerts aren’t the only ways for musicians to make money.

Publishing—that is, the rights to a song’s sheet-music composition, rather than the finished track—brought in revenues of $2.2 billion in 2013, according to the latest trade group report. That’s relatively flat from an inflation-adjusted $1.9 billion in 2001, the last year for which numbers were available. But treading water is still significant given the precipitous decline in the record industry over a similar period. ASCAP, which licenses composition rights, posted a record-high $1 billion in revenue for 2014, buoyed by streaming. The royalty rates ASCAP and rival BMI collect from online providers such as Pandora have recently become a focus in the courtroom and in Congress. Publishing rights were also at issue in the “Blurred Lines” trial, and they’re what Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne gained when they received after-the-fact songwriting credit for Sam Smith’s Grammy-festooned 2014 song “Stay With Me”.

The history of publishing rights suggests musicians would be unwise to count on those as steady income, though. Music wasn’t included in the first modern copyright law, England’s 1709 Statute of Anne; Johann Christian Bach, who sued successfully in 1773 to remedy that situation, died so deep in debt that his lenders tried to sell his body to medical schools. (They failed.) Though the U.S. Congress started allowing music to be copyrighted in 1831, professional songwriters still found it difficult to scrape by on royalties alone, with one mid-19th-century composer likening the idea to “simple starvation.” Technology complicated the situation once again with the rise of player pianos, eloquently criticized as a “substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul” by composer John Philip Sousa. After a 1908 Supreme Court ruling that player piano rolls didn’t fall under copyright law because they were mechanical, Congress created the right to what are still known as “mechanical” royalties a year later.

To this day, the rate for publishing sheet music is up for negotiation between songwriters and publishers, with a commonly reported figure in the handfuls of cents per page. That hasn’t improved with inflation. Mechanical royalty rates are based around a rate set by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board, which adjusts its numbers periodically. In 1976, the rate was 2.75 cents (about 11 cents today). For physical formats and digital downloads, that rose to 9.1 cents for songs five minutes or less in 2009 (about 9.9 cents adjusted for inflation). Streaming rates differ, and ASCAP has been facing off against Pandora in particular for a higher share of revenues. On February 5, the U.S. Copyright Office released a 245-page report calling for a radical overhaul of the music copyright system, with sweeping implications for musical compositions and sound recordings alike.

Another way of cashing in on music is by cashing in on everything but music. Krugman predicted this “celebrity economy” in a 1996 essay. The critic Simon Frith has written that “star-making, rather than record selling,” is the record labels’ primary purpose. Madonna, ever the pioneer, signed an emblematic "360 deal" in 2007, where she and Live Nation would share in the promotion and the earnings from all revenue streams, not just records.

But these opportunities are not limited to platinum-sellers. Starbucks may have stopped selling physical CDs, but as far back as 2012 it commissioned a Christmas album featuring Sharon Van Etten, Calexico, and the Shins alongside Paul McCartney. Flying Lotus has his own radio station on Grand Theft Auto V. Last year’s Adult Swim Singles series spanned from Giorgio Moroder to Tim Hecker, Mastodon to Diarrhea Planet, Speedy Ortiz to Deafheaven, Run the Jewels to Future.

Artists’ fees from such brand partnerships will vary based on a range of factors, but these arrangements show no signs of fading away, particularly as the payout from records keeps dwindling. “Everybody thinks that bands licensing their music is such a bad thing,” Jason DeMarco, VP and creative director of Adult Swim, told me. “But if it’s done with care it can be a good thing for the band and for the brand. It doesn’t have to suck.”

Enigmatic rapper Lil B recently detailed his first-ever brand partnership, with the vegan food company Follow Your Heart for a new emoji app. The radical optimist, who gives away his music for free online, announced the team-up during a lecture at MIT late last year. “I’m not putting ads on my videos,” he said. “The only stream of income I'm making is live engagements with you guys and the companies that support me. I'm beautiful with that.”

Still, artists’ advocacy group the Future of Music Coalition told The Huffington Post a few years ago that only 2% of U.S. musicians’ total income came from “brand-related revenue.” And artist revenues from licensing their music in films, TV, video games, and commercials has actually fallen 22% over the past six years, from an inflation-adjusted $242.9 million in 2009 to $188.1 million last year.

Lil B: "Fuck Ya Money" (via SoundCloud)

The famous quote that “information wants to be free” is frequently taken out of context. “Information also wants to be expensive,” continued Whole Earth founder Stewart Brand in the very next sentence from his 1987 book The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. “That tension will not go away.”

In 2012, Jana Hunter of Baltimore dream-pop explorers Lower Dens wrote on her Tumblr: “Music shouldn’t be free. It shouldn’t even be cheap.” When I spoke with her earlier this year, she was a bit sheepish about what she called the “capitalist” presentation of those remarks. She told me, “What I meant to say is we are living in a society where everything is valued, and, within that context, why is music a thing that we have decided we shouldn’t be paying for?” Still, she continued to have pointed views about the music economy.

“What makes it so frustrating for musicians is that if you really try to center your life around making something creatively, then this becomes a huge distraction and it comes into direct conflict with what you’re trying to do,” she said, referring to the complexity of the business side in the time of streaming. “It derails you creatively.”

She expressed a concern that music, which prior to Edison was practically inseparable from rituals and other social functions, takes on a more fleeting value in a streaming setting. “We are living in a time where the things that are presented to us are presented as very transient, very temporary,” she told me. “Streaming is definitely a way of reinforcing that. You have a temporary context with music, and then another piece of music, and then another piece of music, and you don’t have a tangible, long-term relationship with that.”

Temporariness of some sort has been a norm across the history of recorded music. The business has always been messy. But as someone who buys records—and still hoards a massive iTunes collection—I could see her point.