I agree that the asymetric power relationships between individual artists and the global corporations running media companies ( publishers, online platforms, etc) is unfair, and symptomatic of the problem with music. But I agree with the OP that it’s not the whole problem. Lest we forget, the late, great Steve Albini identified pretty much the same problem in 1993, and then less than a decade later, Courtney Love gave her take in 2000. All years before Spitify existed, or even the iTones store.
As Cory Doctorow noted in 2023, one can be right that there’s a problem, but completely misled about the nature of the problem. Usually because some species of corporate propaganda has intentionally misdirected you into a diagnosis that suits their commercial interests.
For example;
Let’s put this in a longer historical timeframe. What happened is that a generation of entrepreneurs convinced musicians they could get paid when they weren’t actually playing music, by getting royalties on recordings.
Musicians thought they were the “they” there, but of course the businesspeople actually meant themselves. As Albini and Love note, living off recording royalties has never reflected the way most people who play music make a living. But it is how a legion of corporate intermediaries have made enormous profits, and still do via streaming, video game royalties, etc.
This is a variant of the “you wouldn’t steal a car” line. As many a meme points out, I wouldn’t steal a car, but if I could download an exact replica of a car, knowing that the original car is unaffected? Hell yes I would, and so would you. Guilt-tripping has never worked here, and it’s not going to start now.
Labour can’t be stolen, only enslaved. Unless someone is forcing you to play live, it’s not your labour they’re taking.
What they’re taking is the royalty previous generations of extractors conned you into thinking you’d benefit from. To convince you to contract with them on a speculative basis, rather than having them pay for your labour when you perform it. The streaming situation is just the logical end point of that.
This is a variant of the long-debunked ‘each downloaded copy is a lost sale’ canard. Academics economists who wrote peer-reviewed papers on the economics of filesharing during the CopyWars consistently found that musicians whose works were downloaded more on filesharing networks increased their sales. The downloads were not, as the corporate propagandists claimed, displacing sales. People were using filesharing the way previous generations used radio/ TV stations, or library copies, or borrowed albums from their friends; to try before they buy.
When BitTorrent arrived and sharing movies and TV shows online became practical, further studies were done and they came to the same conclusions. By and large, people were using filesharing to discover new media, and when they found stuff they liked, they bought it.
Unless it wasn’t licensed for sale in their jurisdiction, in which case they couldn’t. Especially with video, which was by that point encumbered by DVD zoning and other technical obstacles to playing legitimately purchased media imported from other jurisdictions. So in fact it was copyright restrictions themselves, not firesharing, that was preventing sales.
Given all that, there is absolutely no downside to making recordings of all the world’s music available for discovery by anyone who might enjoy it. But what we need are ways for fans to express that enjoyment in dollars, and get a larger share of those dollars to musicians. I’ve made a couple of proposals here for how to do that;
IMHO putting our energy into experiments like these will be a much more fruitful use of our time and energy than trying to be the musical King Kanute, turning back the tide of free online availability of digital copies.