yes, that’s largely true. and i’d say the extent to which labels profited over artists historically is pretty fucked-up. but, riaa itself aside, labels do serve a real purpose and are a valuable player in the space, like them or not.. and going from having the labels asymmetrically commanding industry profits (largely derived from record sales) to artists now doing the same (largely derived from other streams like touring, merch, …) may feel like ‘justice’ but isn’t an optimal state. they may have excess profits to coast on for a while but, in the long term, if both artists and labels can’t monetize the end result is less good music out there.

this disconnect in the market has hindered progress for too long (and i do blame the labels for it), but the solution should be shifting to a more equitable split of overall profits that reflects the value record companies generate in building-up an artist’s brand..

I have no disagreement with that. The problem is that the RIAA, and by extension the labels, make it really hard to sympathize. I have a long list of things that aren't much individually, but it boils down to not treating customers with contempt. Logically, I know that labels offer value in the market. Emotionally, I view them as greedy bastards looking to screw everyone from artists to end-customers, as long as they get theirs. Emotion overwhelms logic, and the manifestation of that is when I see a chart such as the one in the article, I just can't bring myself to care much.

You could always tape your records, but you couldn't CD your tapes, meaning a lot of re-sales of the same content. Now you can rip your CDs.

Of course, the RIAA probably expects people to re-re-repurchase content for every type of device they're using. How they charge $2 for a ringtone based on a single that sells for $0.99 is beyond me.

Not hard to see why the RIAA is less than jubilant about the situation. Of course $5B of that revenue disappeared before iTunes even got under way, so I don’t think PAID digital downloads are that much to blame for the decline.

No, that was the model they used in the 50s and early 60s--singles were much more expensive than today's 99 cents, and very profitable, and the albums were intentionally designed to get a few more bucks out of a few hits. By the 70s, the decent groups didn't really try to write singles--it was all album-oriented music.

I can't imagine a Thick as a Brick or The Wall in an iTunes pay-by-the-song world.

After that population started to age, and now music has to target your mom (and also teenage girls and boys who "consume" music now), and chances your mom doesn't want to dive into conceptual albums.

That kind of made music stupid.

Do you also consider a novel to be a couple of short stories mixed in with a pile of filler? Or songs to be a couple of choruses surrounded by filler? What you say is true to some extent for pop artists who live and die by the single but there are lots of excellent albums where the different tunes are thematically related, and gain substantial extra depth from their juxtaposition. I much prefer albums, even in electronic music genres.

At $15US for a CD that consists of the two songs I want, and the rest crap

Maybe the problem is that you're listening to inferior music.

As for relying on touring, there are a lot of artists who are excellent musicians but who don't like touring or live performance - Kate Bush springs to mind, as well as many bands in obscure genres that can't build large enough followings to support a tour, and only perform occasionally. And new bands, for whom this is a particular problem. You don't just decide to go on tour and watch the money roll in, it's actually a bit challenging for new bands to find bookings which is why managers still exist. Then there's expenses that go with touring like a vehicle, gas, posters etc (for marketing) and so on, which have to be paid for up front. Add on the cost of hiring session musicians, stagehands, and so on and it starts to mount. Touring around a single US state and playing 20 gigs over the course of a month for a 5-person rock band requires about $10,000 up front. Chances are that if the band is good they'll break even after the first week or two, but people like sessions musicians and roadies have to be paid whether or not anyone shows up to the gig.

One of the things that record labels were good at was providing advance money for such things and doing the marketing required to build an audience outside of a local area that would support the expense of a tour in the first place. Musicians don't usually have much money. A manager will have the contacts and enough seed capital to build a band into local popularity with small tours, but scaling things up generally requires a much larger chunk of capital.

Think of a band like a startup, the manager like the lead angel investor, and a record deal like the series A. Some companies are well suited to slow but steady organic growth, others need that injection of VC money at the right stage in order to succeed. Companies like Twitter or Instagram can't necessarily rely on organic growth because their value derives from network effects at scale, and they could never afford to do that if they tried to extract money from their first 1000 users.

It's one thing not to like the RIAA, but most criticisms of arts industries on HN are severely uninformed about the economic facts of life in those industries. Musicians don't automatically make income from touring any more than programmers automatically get rich from stock options.