That's somewhat ridiculous if that is the reality. All of CD manufacturing, shipping, retail overhead is eliminated in streaming. In reality streaming should pr

That's somewhat ridiculous if that is the reality. All of CD manufacturing, shipping, retail overhead is eliminated in streaming. In reality streaming should produce more money for talent, eliminate overhead, and put more pressure on recording companies profit margins. The height of the CD was ludicrous. A CD cost 15-20$ in the mid nineties, and cassettes, a more expensive and complicated medium, were half of that. So a lot of the collapse isn't EVIL PIRATES, it is that the industry was sitting on a massive monopoly and cash printing machine, and digital collapsed that profit margin. Music production used to require million dollar+ recording studios that the labels had a semi-monopoly on. Even in the 1990s, you could get usable recording equipment and software from a PC and Microsoft Windows. Radio payola is mostly the last gasp of label control, although that seems to be going strong. The REAL killer of music revenue is the rise of video games and way more television/video accessibility. First of all, there isn't one TV in the home like it was up to the 1990s. TVs are cheap, and smartphones are ubiquitous. Video games. tiktoks/youtubes, and TV dominate the media of the youth, and music is a peripheral/decorative aspect of those. Essentially music filled the world of bored teenagers once upon a time, but boredom has been destroyed in the modern world (replaced with media saturation ennui).