| > ...most people most of the time want music they don't have to think too much about or devote toouch attention to. I agree with that statement - dedicating significant energy to finding new music is a fairly niche hobby. However, I don't think easy-to-find necessarily equals label-owned music. I often listen to music for hours at a time in the background while I'm working or relaxing at home. I'll aim for an artist or mood and then I'm happy to let 'related tracks' from artists I've never heard of play indefinitely. If there's a track I really like I'll look at who the artist is and make note. I listen to a ton of "indy" music this way. Mostly, I never know who the artist is. Sometimes I discover new artists. All of this is very low effort on my part. In fact, it would be significantly more effort to listen to megastar pop music or classics. I'd have to find a way to play the tracks - YouTube most likely, which means a ton of poorly thought out ads, or else paying for the songs directly, which usually is just slow and annoying. I'd wager the biggest hours of music listening are for background music - at work, in stores and restaurants, while studying, while lounging around the house. I'm sure some people always want to listen to the same ten albums on repeat every day, but I suspect most people are driven more by ambiance. Indy music will do that job just fine. Of course people will always want to play nostalgic hits. But I suspect that's a smaller driver of music consumption by hour of attention (or at least partial attention) than many people assume. That means the labels have way less power than people assume. |