> What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful income from their recordings. I me

> What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful income from their recordings. I mean, if you look back before radio, the amount of money artists made from recordings was $0 (Okay, maybe some money off of sheet music or player piano sheets). So in the grand scheme of human history, the primary income of musicians has been from their performances. That was true before recordings, and that is true again now. For a weird blip there was a cartel propping up the value of their recordings (of which the industry profited more than musicians). But this isn't a collapse of anything more than it's a regression to the mean - the marginal value of a copy of something approaches to 0 over time. When you hear about artists complaining about royalties from streaming, it was a very, very, very elite group of musicians who ever made money just from dropping albums. You are only hearing from the winners of the Label system. Most bands ended up "owing" money to their record labels. (The way record deals worked, you got paid an advance for songs/albums. But you only kept ~10% of album sales. From which you had to pay back your advance + recording expenses + marketing costs.)