Yes, I think this happens in all open markets with no regulation. It is the same in agriculture. The farmer grow the food with his time and work, but he has to go to a market, he is competing with all the farmers of the same market, imagine lettuce. As lettuce are easy to produce and cheap, like music, the market is paying 0,05 $ per lettuce, all the other farmers are creating this market. Later the first middleman go to this market and pack the lettuce, and transport it, asking for 0,5 $ to the supermarket, that sells you the lettuce to the consumer for 1 $.

Farmers want a minimum price for their lettuce, but this is against the rules of market to offer the goods and services at the lowest possible level. Goberns don't want to regulate on minimal prices. You can't sell lettuce for more price than the farmer around you. If the vast mayority of musicians and artist, upload their creations to streaming services, they are giving their hard work creations for pennies.

People want to maximize their consume. And that's what spotify is doing. Offering all the lettuce (music) you want for suscription fee.
I think there is no option to unionize from music artist in different countries, not like writers in hollywood. And that you can't differentiate your music from the music of other "farmers", so this industry will be allways condemned to the new waves of tech and market. With the pros of being the first disrupted (remeber napster, now AI), and the cons of being a cheap commodity for the big capital of Wall Street.

IMO, the unique way of changing all this situation, is rethinking the market. Creating something that incentives the shareholders, to share more profit with creators. There is a thread about Patreon, related with that.

 

You should ask him if that's from personal experience because my experiences and my peers are not remotely bad with payments. In fact, they pay very quickly.

 

That's the problem when society is dictated by a free market economy with minimal regulations (or more specifically minimally enforced laws and regulations). Every priority is driven strictly by profit and the most powerful companies and lobbyists control the advantage and set the rules. You wind up with monopolization, price fixing, distribution inequality, and unfair business practices. The markets are also subject to all sorts of manipulation that control/prevent freedom of choice that leave little alternatives. I'm just curious what would happen if youtube and facebook decided to get involved in music distribution since so many popular yt channels already feature patreon links. What if youtube did something similar to beatstars. Beatmakers and artists are already uploading huge amts of content and are sharing links directed toward their business landing pages. If youtube also allowed paid subscribers to sell their music via yt platform while also streaming videos, they would eliminate all the middlemen like distrokid and would give both spotify and apple a run for their money.

 

You dont have to buy , rutracker has every cd you can think on flac and lot of them on 44.1 24bit or 96khz 24bit or vinyls at that rates etc . When i discovered it 15 years ago , i sold all my cds .....