Artists are labor for labels, if labels figured out how to get paid better, the vast majority of their artists would not be paid much better. The point of the label in a for profit system is to capture value by intermediating between producers and consumers. Musicians by themselves are often very poor at capturing economic value.

Since the producers are obligated to maximize profits for their shareholders under most corporate structures by supreme court decisions, their focus will be to reduce labor costs while maximizing total revenue from consumers.

There are no winners here except the distributors. Some kind of artist cooperative is a necessity. Then at least the smaller creators will get paid fairly.

It's also worth noting that part of the reason the UK has/had such a vibrant music scene is the dole. That is, they pay their artists to let them do their thing.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/money-are-y...

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/role-of-th...

Creators haven't stopped creating at all. The reason that people look back on earlier decades as agolden age is that then there was comparatively so little music produced that various demographics could broadly agree on a canon of "great bands/albums". These days, there is so much music being produced that groups of people -- even if they share a similar background -- might have no overlap in what they are listening to.

On the contrary, this is a great time for music of all kinds.

Right now, I'm following maybe 10 or so artists on social media, youtube, bandcamp, etc.

I pay a handful of them $1-$10 a month via patreon in return for them releasing their music for free via youtube (I generally also get clean, high quality versions out of this).

There's another handful I follow who release albums on Bandcamp and I can listen, and if I like it I can pay $5-$10 to download and keep forever.

I don't use Spotify or similar services, but my friends who do tell me about a huge world of similar small artists and variety of tastes they discovered through that service.

The music industry no longer takes a few select artists and makes them superstars everyone has heard of, yes. But in return there's something for everyone, and lots of artists making ends meet rather than a few artists getting rich. I think this is a net positive.

> It might when creators stop creating - which, arguably, is already happening.

This is ok, perhaps even desirable. Ultimately, the market for music is already so oversaturated that more artists aren't really "needed" (that is to say, there is much more than enough music to service demand, not that more good art isn't valuable), and most non-elite artists would welcome reduced competition.

> There aren't many people arguing that the 2010s have been a better decade for music than the 60s to 90s.

Well either way that is a totally subjective argument that cannot ever be concluded definitively, there is so much more music produced today than in the 60s-90s that it'd be impossible to even make a fair subjective judgement regarding which decades produced "better" music. Certainly, I think everyone can agree that stronger economic incentives do not necessarily mean better work is produced and there are those who suggest that the opposite is true.

Stronger economic incentives may actually result in more bands/ artists being manufactured by labels, which generally produced worse music.

Costs of prediction are pretty low now, everything except the cheapest indy albums sounds great.

> There aren't many people arguing that the 2010s have been a better decade for music than the 60s to 90s.

That may be true for music, but simultaneously, we have another "golden age" of western TV series (both live-action and animated). What's the difference? From what I can see, TV series are just as heavily pirated as music is.

>What's the difference? From what I can see, TV series are just as heavily pirated as music is.

The difference is those series have still enough paid subscribers to make the production costs and handsome profits worth it.

But producing music these days is extremely cheap, it's not like decades ago where it required time in a million dollar studio to produce something that sounded decent. Meanwhile TV the opposite is true, budgets have soared with the increasing use of spectacular sets, CGI and special effects.