The convenience and low costs of music streaming services have made them a hit with users. Musicians have benefited, too, because the services offer an effective platform for them to advertise their brands and distribute their product to a worldwide audience. But a debate is raging within the industry about fee scales as well as the alleged lack of transparency regarding payment structure.

The issue has been percolating since the advent of Napster in 1999, but the debate came to a boil when pop superstar Taylor Swift recently decided to restrict her new album, "1989," from streaming service Spotify.

Swift's shunning of the popular service has had a ripple effect across the industry, prompting other artists to speak out – like country mega-star Garth Brooks – who last week called YouTube "the devil" in a Rolling Stone Country interview. "They claim they pay people," he reportedly said. "[But] they're not paying anything."

Meanwhile, Spotify founder Daniel Ek recently defended his company, saying that Spotify has paid out $2 billion to artists since it was founded in 2006. Spotify did not respond to HNGN's request for comment.

Gregory Butler, a music industry veteran who has composed music for television shows, including "Punk'd," "Project Runway" and "Top Chef," who has worked with Train, Daniel Lanois and Ashlee Simpson, and now works as the vice president of business development for WholeWorldBand, a new interactive music-sharing platform, said people can decide whether or not they like Swift or her music. "But she's speaking to a very simple point: that music has value," he said.

"What Taylor Swift is saying is important," Butler said. "She's an extremely intelligent person who stepped up and said this has value. Her voice is more powerful because she's speaking to a group of people who are more likely to take that music for free."

Listeners have grown accustomed to hearing music for free, and artists are beginning to question a business approach that continues to devalue their art.

But even as the sale of CDs and paid downloads continues to plummet, the demand for streaming has increased. In the first six months of 2014, album sales fell nearly 15 percent from 2013, the LA Times recently reported, citing Nielsen Soundscan. At the same time, Americans streamed on-demand music videos 36.6 billion times – an increase of about 35 percent from 2013.

Jazz vocalist Michelle Carr does not need to be reminded of this widening philosophical chasm. She released her first CD, "Change," "as record stores were closing" in 2006, she said. She had an album-signing and performance at a Tower Records in New York, and the store was closed a month later. The entire chain shut down, as did almost every other large music-selling brick-and-mortar outlet.

"At that time I printed 5,000 units to be sold," Carr said. "When I record now, I print 200 physical CDs, because 98 percent of my sales are digital downloads."

The shift from CD to digital formats just means listeners are consuming music differently, downloading singles as opposed to buying and listening to whole albums. But artists like Carr are still being compensated fairly – right? Wrong.

"When I read my breakdowns, 3,000 downloads, it's literally a penny. It's one cent," said Carr.

Part of the problem is that consumers are more willing to pay for a physical product – a CD, album or cassette – than they are for something they can't see and hold, like digital music.

"When they were paying $10 for a record or a CD, they thought they were paying for technology," Butler explained. "What you were paying for was the band recording and years spent working, and the record label paying everyone's salaries, including the managers and everything else on top of that. When the CD went away, people said the distribution is free, so what are we paying for?"

WholeWorldBand, a collaborative app that allows users to make music and video using only an iPad or IPhone, has positioned itself differently than services like Spotify, Pandora and YouTube. Users so far include music titans like Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones, Stewart Copeland of The Police and Dave Stewart, an all-star producer and founding member of the Eurythmics. Dutch heavy metal band Within Temptation used the app to promote its single "And We Run," with the band allowing other users to contribute their own musical ideas.

WholeWorldBand fits snugly into the current debate because of its unique pricing structure. If you create what WholeWorldBand calls a "Seed Session," you share in the revenue generated by everyone who contributes to the track. If you add to a "Seed Session" that was created by another user – and your contribution gets used – you get paid. 

"We're putting forward exactly how the business model works right off the bat and making sure people are entering into the arrangement with full knowledge," Butler said. "Any of the other services out there don't have that transparency, or they may have a version where they say it's this or that, but they're not really getting into numbers. When you go to our site, you can see exactly what you make and what we make. There is no curtain or man behind the curtain."

Regarding the more entrenched services, Butler said "the giant issue is they receive a bunch of money and you can listen to a bunch of songs, but there's no connection between the two."

The lack of transparency and consistency is what most troubles trumpet player and copyright attorney Dennis Angel.

"It's easy for Spotify and some of these other services to say they pay out a lot of money, but it's distorted because the artists on the top rung sell so many more records and have so many more streams than the average artists, so (Spotify and the other services) can make the total sound like a lot of money," he said. "But for 90 percent of the artists, it's very, very little."

Angel pointed out discrepancies in his own Spotify payment statements; his most recent records reveal there's an extra zero after the decimal point in the rate he's paid for some streams, he said. Two other curious points: the discrepancy relates to songs on the same album, and Angel has no idea why the discrepancy exists.

Angel said he's not sure how the payment models at the digital music services can be rectified.

"I'm not sure of the profit margins of Spotify and Pandora. They claim that they don't make a lot of money or some years they lost money," he said. (Last week, the New York Times reported that Spotify had more than $1 billion in revenue but had yet to turn a profit.)

"It takes a few years to get profitable, but when they do start making bigger profits, I would hope they would give a bigger share to artists. Obviously for Taylor Swift, she's made a statement. . . . It's interesting, because I was listening to the business channel and they were talking about music and they said that 1 percent of the musical artists in this country account for over 70 percent of the income. And the only real income is from performing live because the actual money for royalties is dwindling."

The questions are getting louder, and the answers are unclear. But one thing seems to be for certain: many in the music industry feel the system is broken.

"To be fair, there are people who have been trying and corporations that have been trying, and that's the important part," said Butler. "We can't fixate on the perfect solution, but we can fixate on a fair solution. Let's find a way to be fair. When you're not transparent, you're not starting from a good place."