Yeah, the theory of the long tail was that the marginal cost of that old, low volume stuff was nil.

I guess the truth was that it didn’t scale.

> I guess the idea is, why would you long tail when you can Pareto Principle?

IMO, that's not a great point. The music is already made - that's the hard part. It just needs to be licensed.

Maybe there are other channels that are more profitable than streaming, but I'm guessing that a lot of older/niche music is just locked away for no good reason.

At a certain point, I have to imagine that most artists would prefer their music be listened to if they aren't going to make money either way.