When you’re growing up, it’s encouraged (especially for low to middle-income households) that you do something “sensible” in terms of your career. Everyone knows of the legendary “starving artist” who survives only on their passion for their craft and the energy of the universe. And then there’s the even more legendary successful artist, who is obviously part of the Illuminati or [insert cult here].

Her eyeball is shaped like a circle but if you take her fourth album cover, hold it out the window of a moving vehicle and turn it 74 degrees than you can see that her left nostril is shaped like a triangle. She’s a witch, burn her!

Art, especially music, plays such an important part of our everyday lives and yet the value of art and the artist is perpetually under attack.If you’re someone that can survive for more than two minutes without making noise than you’ve probably heard the sound of silence. No, not the song. You know that sound when it’s really quiet and your ears start ringing? That sound. Now imagine hearing that sound all the time. Imagine having to take a bus or a train and actually talk to the other passengers. The only way to fill the silence is with words and the words do nothing to stifle the dull ache of feeling like something is eternally missing.

That’s what a world without music would be like.

Music is a universal language, able to evoke emotions like joy, sadness, righteous anger, love, lust, wistfulness and empowerment. I’m not sure if that last one is an emotion but I definitely feel it when I’m listening to anything by India Arie. We use music to tell stories like in Hamilton and Pixar’s Coco. We use it to remember things like the alphabet or the elements on the periodic table. And yet, we don’t respect artists. We actively encourage children away from pursuing the arts and we avoid compensating the artists that we do have whenever we can.

Spotify’s pay per stream as of June 2017 was about $.0038 for musicians not signed to a label. That means that after 100 streams you would’ve made 30 cents. After 1000 streams you’d have enough to buy a pair of pre-broken headphones from any bodega on the planet. Pretty exciting, huh?

Since it’s rare for people to pay for music in this streaming age, it’s easier to see music as a right and not a privilege. We don’t think of the hours that a songwriter or producer or music engineer had to slave over a song without being properly compensated, cause that would bum us out while we’re trying to shake to Shakira. And no one wants to do a sad Shakira shake.

But it’s hard out here for talented people that want to eat when the world says that you should just be talented for free.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the arts being on the same level as every other field. Arts can be used to strengthen the work that goes on in fields like mechanical engineering and one supporter of STEAM suggests that it can help to encourage otherwise uninterested students to engage in STEM material.

But I don’t want art to be included because we’re using it as a means to an end, or a tool for any other discipline. I want people to respect the art and the artists for what they bring individually.