I understand the point that this post is making, and certainly don’t defend the greedy practices of record labels (which have always been greedy) but I don’t see much discussion about the other aspect of the supply/demand equation: since the barrier to entry is lower than it’s ever been in history, there are many, many more artists selling their works than ever before. Digital marketplaces like iTunes stock a vastly larger library of songs than brick-and-mortar stores ever did, and the many platforms available to listen to music ensures that consumers are exposed to a wider variety of artists than they would have been in the days when the radio stations mostly played popular music from a relatively small group of already-popular artists and you needed to have a publicist who could shell out in “payola” schemes in order for your song to ever get heard on the air.
I’m not suggesting this is any kind of golden era for artists- far from it. But the basic math suggests that if you’ve got a whole lot of artists entering the market, and a finite amount of money being spent by consumers on music, the median (and average) incomes of those artists is going to go down pretty much by definition, with or without nefarious acts by the record labels.
