Indeed.
We are currently looking at different entrepreneurship models. Many songwriters—many of whom are also singers nowadays—are turning to self-production in order to keep part of their rights and also earn as much money as possible.
Rather than transferring all of their rights, they give licences, but that practice is not yet current in the publishing world. As long as the situation does not change, the fate of songwriters will not truly improve.
However, as I said, if the private copy regime had evolved with technology, the millions of copies that are made on tablets and telephones, which have replaced the compact disk and the cassette—which were around when the regime was created—would generate more royalties, which would help the songwriters.
In the current state of affairs, you need millions of views or hits on YouTube or Spotify before you can generate royalties of $150. Where is justice in that for a music creator? Without their creative activity, no one would have had any work to develop. The singer is certainly important, but he or she would have had nothing to sing if the songwriter had not created the work. The producer of sound recordings could not have produced anything had the work not existed.
It seems people want to relegate the concept of creation to the back burner. For a 10-song album, only one dollar will be paid to the creator, despite a total sale price of $15, $16 or $20—albums may only cost between $10 and $15 these days, those that still sell. I'm sure we all agree that that is not enormous.