At the same time they got caught red handed disregarding copyright themselves multiple times (Sony's rootkit which used some linux copyright IIRC, or the case of several major record labels releasing compilation albums of music without artist consent and copyright in Canada are just two examples). By their own calculations used against file shares the damages should have amounted to billions, but they got away with not so much but a slap on the wrist. I wish some judge would have really made an example of some of them.
The purpose is to incentivize creative works for the public benefit with the limited time exclusive rights, not retroactively extend copyright years after the death of the author to enrich their rights-holders in perpetuity every time expiration comes up.
As it is, you can't even make something public domain yourself - the best you can do is add a permissive license since all rights are reserved by default without registration.
But this is getting somewhat off topic.
The specific wording of the US constitution was (is?) a nice little bit of fluff but it didn't really change the nature of copyright at all when it was published.
There was a governmental agency (Hadopi) that costed millions of euros and due to the stupid law managed to won I think one case for 2000€.
They got merged into another useless agency and was forgotten. I am not sure whether they still exist, nobody really cares.
This is how pay of our tax money is spent in France, on subsidized sandboxes for politicians.
After the internet whatever argument the record companies had was way weaker and their unwillingness to update (instead attempting to fight everything legally) cost them enormous returns.
Taken to an extreme, you see David Bowie who floated the royalties of all his records as a financial instrument that you can buy. [0]
What's the music equivalent of abusive lootbox and gatcha mechanics? Those seem to drive a lot of the free-to-play profit..
In music its give away the songs and pay for the merch, shows, access to artist, etc.
The market for the latter is huge. The music is the viral hook you can use to take advantage of the internet's distribution in order to get the attention to create fans and drive them towards the other stuff.
With the internet you don't even need to rely on mega-pop stars, there's enough people at scale for a lot of niche audiences.
Part of what gets distorted by Taylor Swift and Dave Chappelle is the larger context. Similar to VC the vast majority of label supported musicians are economic failures. The big winners pay for the rest of the failures.
With modern distribution this is mostly a bad deal.
Since the 'Non Fungible Taylor Swift' [0] is really in control she can subvert this (until contracts get updated), but generally people can just go direct now and do their own marketing or negotiate better terms for investment.
I'm not fan of the music labels or how their clinging to an outdated business model for decades has set back their market cap by probably billions (compare to free to play videogames), but the way this is often portrayed by the rare breakout artists is similarly warped and one-sided. You never hear from the failures the label funded that didn't make it.
[0]: https://stratechery.com/2021/non-fungible-taylor-swift/