Fair enough on the contract details. Neither of us know the language used in the artist contracts. I'm willing to bet many of those were drawn up in the age bef

Fair enough on the contract details. Neither of us know the language used in the artist contracts. I'm willing to bet many of those were drawn up in the age before digital distribution, hence the arguments. I'm not confused by the concept of purchasing ("buying") a license. I get that! But if the label is using one concept to determine the royalty rate, but switching to a difference concept to determine the customer's rights, then there's still a problem. Again, I don't know the details of the artists' contracts. But I do know this is probably relevant for some subset of artists whose contracts don't deal directly with digital distribution. In those cases, when terms like "license" and "sale" are used to denote different things, there's a problem if the labels use "sale" on one hand, and "license" on the other hand. If they sell me a license, the artist should be paid the "license" rate.