It strikes me that the thing that doesn't get discussed in many of these discussions is that it isn't about creativity. He's attaching the view of 'creativity w

It strikes me that the thing that doesn't get discussed in many of these discussions is that it isn't about creativity. He's attaching the view of 'creativity will disappear because the creatives can't get paid'. But creativity isn't a market. They are two distinct things, and the problem with trying to sell your creativity now is that it is easy for anybody to do it. The supply side has changed significantly while demand hasn't. A record store only had so much space to put so many artists, and therefore a label could pick-up an artist, promote that artist and that artist would get bought buy lots of people because that was the album that was available. The new reality is that the scarcity of prime real estate on the shelf, where all the money was made, is now gone. In fact, the internet isn't sucking the creativity out of the world, quite the opposite. It is allowing anybody to share their creativity, and as a result, those who used to make a very large income from the scarcity of distribution are no longer able to command the market as they did before. I'm not going to argue if current music is better or worse than the music during the old ecosystem, that is all personal taste. If we look back at the age of the big record labels making huge dollars, the artists complained then as well. They complained that the labels took all their money, that the labels weren't letting them express their creativity and forced them to make the same music again and again. It's why many top artists formed their own record labels as soon as they were big enough to get away from the big 4. Now, maybe artists have been taken advantage of by Spotify, just like they had been by labels previously, but this is the business agreement they've entered. If David Byrne doesn't want to share his creative efforts in this manner, nobody is forcing him to, but I'm sure there are 100 lesser known artists who will take his place. It's simple supply and demand, he's on the wrong side of the equation these days.