In the physical media era, when you bought a record/CD you owned it forever and your marginal cost of listening to a song approached zero over time. Most dollars went to new music.
Now, it's close to a 75/25 split of dollars going to back catalog vs new music on streaming services.
If you're a new musician, you're not competing against new music, you're competing against the entire history of recorded music. You're fighting for a piece of a pie that the Beatles are still taking a chunk of.
And the labels are a part of the problem there, they made the deals with the streaming services that allows back catalog to dominate.
This is why making a new game is probably a terrible idea... but hey, world is casino!
[1] https://newzoo.com/resources/trend-reports/the-pc-console-ga... and widely reported e.g. [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1je98mm/pc_gamers...
You need to let things become public domain so people can make new. You need it to be unprofitable to just keep selling the exact same bits in perpetuity.
not a big fan of all music streaming services, but they only keep about 30% of their revenue. the rest goes to the labels, and this is where most of the problem is. before the 2000s, very small artists hardly earned any income from the sale of (physical) media. I don't like the new platforms such as Spotify, Tidal, etc. either – but this kind of discussion often just distracts from the mafia-like structure of the major labels.