[matthewhammond]

Streaming is really just another payday for the winners of the popular music boom of the 60s, and more particularly the IP holders. They got to have their cake with the original vinyl sales, eat it again in the CD era and now they can rent it out permanently via streaming. And they're not interested in sharing any of that out with emerging musicians.

In the past, there was enough of a barrier to just getting music onto disc and out on the airwaves that labels would have to invest in 100 acts just to have one breakthrough. So they'd need to take some of the winnings from their biggest selling artists and reinvest them in new acts to stay in the game. But now they can get income from streaming rather than sales - there's much less incentive to keep new records and artists coming through. If anything it makes more sense for them to just sit on their back catalogue and squash anything new.

So nobody's going to invest the comparatively large amounts needed to get unknown bands into good studios to record albums any more, let alone fund them through the difficult second and third albums often necessary to get traction. Emerging musicians can only do what they can at minimal cost - hence much more of a move towards electronic and bedroom production. That can have great output now due to tech advances in home recording, but it's not gonna be the same as putting musicians in fully kitted studio. (And things like a shift to high-loudness, low dynamic range are another side effect of the ways that music is distributed and consumed, plus advances in what's possible with digital recording and limiting).

The article kinda touches on this stuff but what it doesn't really seem to acknowledge is this is just what's good for the industry. Big labels are perfectly happy picking the winners that blow up on Youtube - it just saves all their development costs. The whole thing just works for them - their interests aren't in having a diverse range of music produced, allowing for a living for artists that aren't their big cash cows, preserving particular genres or recording styles etc.