Something I don’t think gets discussed nearly enough is that artists were getting royally fucked even during the “golden age” of the music industry. I’m sure most of the people on this thread have read Steve Albini’s notorious takedown of the major label model but in case anyone hasn’t, the long and the short of it is that when CDs were bringing in untold riches, labels would sign any old shite and throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at promoting it and the vast majority of those artists would never break even.
I feel like I bring this book up all the time but So You Wanna Be A Rock’n’Roll Star by Jacob Slichter, the drummer from Semisonic, is a comprehensive and very easy/depressing read of how even in the 90s a band could go platinum - American platinum, 1 million records - and still break up owing their record label millions of dollars.
What’s changed? Major labels don’t take as many risks, they sign fewer artists, and now they’re fucking those artists on streaming rather than recoupable debts. The rise of the ‘360 degree deal’, where artists now have to give a portion of all earnings to the label, including those that were previously theirs alone e.g. touring and merch, is just another sign that while streaming is an indicator of industry problems, the bad guys are and have always been the record labels.
Ultimately the only way to ‘fix’ streaming is to get rid of it and make people buy albums again, and that’s clearly not going to happen. Labels/publishers need to pay a higher proportion of the earnings they make from streaming to bands, and consumers need to start seeing merch as part of the cost of gig-going rather than an optional thing they might buy if they like the design of a shirt.
It’s very rare that I would ever cite MC Lars in any context, but in 2006, he had a lyric “Music was a product/Now it is a service” in a song about how he was still able to make a living as a touring musician despite people not buying CDs anymore. Labels have been failing to reckon with this shift for the better part of a decade and a half.
For a look at ‘alternative revenue streams’, we can look at the more creative responses to the COVID crisis. The Spanish Love Songs patreon, where you get access to demos, a podcast, and once a month get to vote on a song for the band to cover, has been very successful for a band of their size.
TL;DR - unless you uninvent the internet, it’s hard not to see the era where artists made millions of dollars selling records and CDs and toured in order to support those sales as an aberration, and the model whereby artists make money touring and selling merch and make new albums in order to support those tours as the way things are going to be for the foreseeable future.
