sorry, but this is all types of wrong: > Sounds like they won the lottery by getting perpetual visibility on poorly made albums thanks to how poorly optimized

sorry, but this is all types of wrong: > Sounds like they won the lottery by getting perpetual visibility on poorly made albums thanks to how poorly optimized discovery and publishing was back then. Wont ever happen again with how much better those processes are today. first: better for whom? optimized for what, in particular? Spotify is better optimized for funnelling the money that artists earn towards Joe Rogan than any other system in human history. but that's not an absolute good; that's optimization for a particular purpose. second, it's wrong because the lottery those folks won was not a discovery or publishing lottery. I'm not even sure how (or why) you think the publishing side of the music industry is any different than it was in 1978; maybe you're not using "publishing" the way the industry uses it. but discovery wasn't a problem back when it was incredibly expensive to record music in the first place. that change has nothing to do with Spotify or streaming or anything like that; it happened because digital recording technology (mostly) replaced analog recording technology, and each type of recording tech got commoditized, i.e., smaller and cheaper. that had to happen for a discovery problem to even exist; in 1978, recording studios were almost industrial machinery. I guess that's just two types of wrong, maybe three depending on what you're trying to say with the word "publishing" there. on the bright side, this is legit: > doesn't sound like that old system actually was good for the music industry that's pretty true. but you can say about it about the modern equivalent also.