[zozbot234]

That's quite ironic in a sense, because "the publishing" is the very thing where there's a huge amount of perfectly-serviceable music that's totally in the public domain, with zero "rights" or "royalties" to contend with. And it's not just 'boring', classical pieces, but music in popular styles too. This whole setup is ripe for a "disrupt from below"/"commoditize your complement" play where someone purposely brings those old 19th century (and before!) songs from IMSLP back in style as the perfect troll move.

Heck, the record labels might do it at this point - after all, they'll still have the rights to the actual performed audio ("the master").