I was a roadie on my friend's metal band around 2000-ish, they were not in any record company and just sold their CDs through DIY, during live shows, word of mouth, etc. My point is not all bands are in a record company, most are just doing it via DIY. Now, these indie, DIY bands, whatever you call it can now upload and share their music worldwide. That's a huge win.
Do any of the streaming platforms let you direct fans to your own website/Bandcamp to make a purchase?
How do we decide what number is "fair", or what we as a society want? Surely it's not reasonable that every band that's just started out in a garage should be making bank.
I don't think that it's more difficult to be a professional musical artist or musician today than it used to be, although the business model may be different. But even if it is, I think that's a decent compromise for all the benefits the streaming services bring.
I have a few friends who were selling CDs back in the 90s for their own bands, none of them make almost any money out of it. Even the ones that got some kind of distribution deal to some specialised record shops, it wouldn't sell any meaningful amount to even cover the costs of printing the CDs.
The lucky ones with a label deal got almost no money after covering recording, printing, distribution expenses.
The only kind of people who ever made money from selling albums are exactly the same making money from music in 2024: big artists, with a lot of marketing and hectic touring schedules.
Nothing has changed in that front, at least now musicians can put their songs up for the world to consume instead of just the patrons of a corner shop in their neighbourhood.
I don’t personally mind music services too much. I don’t use Spotify because Apple Music comes with our family plan, but I might use it otherwise. It has value for me because my daughter listens to a lot of different music, but for me personally I frankly only listen to the same old songs most of which weren’t even released in this millennium. So for me spending the equivalent of buying an album every month wouldn’t really be worth it otherwise.
I do think Spotify might eventually suffer from things like Apple and Google bundling music services with other things. I don’t think Apple Music is particular great, but I do like the other things that comes with the family plan so we would have it with or without music. At least until they keep raising the subscription to the point where I’ll actually be annoyed enough to set up something different for storage and purchase sharing. Which is soon. But as long as we have the bundles service there is very little reason to have Spotify, and I suspect we’ll eventually pay for YouTube since I’m the only one in the family who still watches it through Firefox (Adblock), at which point we’ll have YouTube music or whatever it’s called. Spotify hit the market with good timing, but how many young people are going to chose it in the future?