In a way, the move towards a digital market created as many problems as it solved for some of us in the small music publishing game. In the physical only era, I may have had less “shelf space” and less of a global reach but OTOH I sold more units in part because I knew who I was talking to at the distributors I dealt with and the retail outlets I serviced directly or my mail order customers.
The people I dealt with knew their markets and would promote releases pretty well based on this knowledge. This is no longer true with any of the digital music distribution outlets. Now there is pretty much zero chance I’ll get something pushed by a retailer as I’m just one of thousands of others they deal with.
There’s also a new part of my workload on the production side since for what I do most of my sales are still physical copies. In some genres, your end consumer isn’t primarily the end listener, its people doing what is broadly covered by the term DJ and many of them still want a physical copy of the music. This means that I have to mix and master twice, once for digital and once for physical. This may not sound like much work but it often really does double part of the time required to take something to market.
Additionally with digital I also have to get someone to do “cover art” which I did not need when I was only releasing on vinyl since my primary end consumers expect nothing more than a white paper sleeve.
I don’t have fancy charts to back this up, but I can tell you anecdotally based on my experience and what other small labels have told me is that that “piracy” has narrowed the sales window for a new physical release to about a week. If you haven’t sold enough units then to cover production costs you have to hope that “long tail” sales of physical and digital will cover costs eventually.
Warp was one of the biggest of the small and so had the cash to invest in their own digital distribution relatively early. Those of us who did not have that cash were beholden to the big digital distributors for the most part.
This still isn’t universally true or possibly not broadly true. Some people want to buy music online but that has not eliminated the demand for physical distribution.
I do agree with your point on formats though.
