If you check out discussions from zines at that time (especially Punk Planet, but also MRR), you had a good deal of discussion on that very issue. Who was going to end up benefiting. There was an interview in one issue with the Sound Opinion guys (one or both of them) about how the digitalization was trending around the time of all that going down around napster and the direction it ended up taking (corporate control). I think stuff like patreon and band camp was going to be the next thing to help indie artists outside the mainstream, but enshittification is coming for that too…
That was ALWAYS the big issue from the 80s… once you got indie labels across the post-punk spectrum, distribution was the issue. There were all these indie shops (like Wax-n-Facts and Wuxtry, later Criminal here in the ATL… a couple others), but how did you get your records to them. Of course, going back to the 70s, these record shops also started their own labels (here in ATL, again, Danny Beard’s DB Records, out of the back of W-n-F). But distribution was still the key problem… So, those were formed, too. There was… Ruth Schwartz’s distro Mordam, Rough Trade in the UK… a couple of others that I’m blanking on at the moment… I know one really big one I’m missing… But you could do worse by reading Alan O’Connor’s book on punk music production…
As an academic book it’s a bit pricey, but worth it if your interested in this history and how it’s changed over the years…
