Even large shareholders, the ones who vote at shareholder meetings, pretty consistently favor short term gains over the long term health of the companies they invest in. It’s one of the weaknesses, in my opinion, of capitalism.
A company that’s in the business of making money off music is always going to lose interest in music as it ages, because the majority of music listeners, especially those willing to pay money to listen to it, will be favoring newer, popular music. Bruce Springsteen’s catalog may still be quite valuable today, but do you really think it’s going to remain as valuable for another 10 years? How about 20? And once it enters the public domain, the monetary value of those recordings will really plummet.
