Back during the Napster days, Howard Stern had the Foo Fighters on. He asked them what their thought of the whole Napster vs. Metallica legal debate.

Dave Grohl told him he was 100 percent for Napster, explaining that they barely made a dime from record sales, and instead made the bulk of their money from touring and t-shirt sales. And that very few musicians were in the same boat as Metallica, actually making money from their album sales.

So from that point of view, the more people who were exposed to their music meant the more folks who might want to go see them in concert.

there’s no one in any seat of real power in the “music industry” who is a musician.

That's not strictly true. A number of popular musicians started their own labels and cultivated their own talent. Dr. Dre, Hay-Z and Beyonce, Snoop Dog, NIN, The Beetles and Rolling Stones, Eminem, Madonna, Mackelmoore...

What's really changed over time is distribution. Digital music has huge margins, but prying them out of the near monopoly of Spotify and YouTube is much harder than simply selling CD/Vinyl copies of your songs at your shows

That “fuck it” era is Reaganism. Every industry did the exact same thing at that time.

Movie industry as well. People with the money don't care about the product as long as it makes them more money.

Or if they do care, they interfere with the artist's vision to put in their own thoughts when they have no education or experience in filmmaking.

Then we end up getting the Emoji movie in theaters.

Right before MP3's, record labels treated a lot of their albums as products to sell. This required a marketing budget to go along with it including a lot of promotional material like music videos and concert tours for promotional purposes. The drop in revenue due to MP3's killed that model and it never returned.

Concert tickets are so expensive because record labels took control of that part of the revenue stream to find their promotion/marketing business. And promotion is no longer a small activity run by a band's groupies. The reason that Trent Reznor signed with a new label after he went independent was because he wasn't able to compete with the marketing arms of these companies.

I fear this is happening to every industry

It makes me sad that all the profits get vacuumed up by everybody but the artist.

The average worker experience

Those days are over sadly. Ticketing and venues are largely consolidated now.

Touring has always been a boondoggle. Artists could make bank if they were selling out shows, but the baseline venue prices have skyrocketed out of reach for most fans. The producers, promoters, engineers, technicians, roadies, not to mention lodging, travel, and food, a lot of people expect to be paid before the artist makes a dime.

It's why I make it a point to buy merch when I see a band I like on tour. They probably earn more from it than the actual tour itself.

Ya. They don't care.
And now they got a permission to not do anything at all as artists can make money from side hustles.

We as a alsociety failing to fight the predatory business models.

Lily Allen, who started selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans over summer. She had the idea after seeing that her feet had a perfect five star rating on WikiFeet, a photo-sharing foot fetish website. Subscribers pay £8 a month to access her posts. In October, Allen claimed that shots of her well-pedicured trotters were earning her more money than Spotify streams – and that’s saying something, considering Allen has over 7 million monthly listeners and more than a billion streams on her top three songs.

Feet pics apparently.

To be fair, artists are one of the original intended uses for OnlyFans. While it is sexually focused now, that's more a side effect of it being one of the very few creators subscription sites at the time it started up.

It looks like it's just crazy foot people and she's not actually exposing anything lol.