yea, but it’s still so artificial, still based on manufactured scarcity. And remind again what the “cost” of the music is to the label that makes it soooooo hard to make profit? What’s that failure rate again? 95%?

I get that the labels have the ‘music people want to hear.’ I get that a fluke of history is still history and that adding ‘fluke’ is irrelevant (if not redundant.)

Meanwhile, what you’re describing, as likely as it seems, is a prelude to business as usual – prelude to the past. If the streaming services start making money, ‘get real’, then they just become the latest player is the old, faustian lottery model, only with streaming. They will have succeeded at corrupting the ‘Net while fending off the disruptive potentials for real fairness, equity, properly distributed profits and a cultural output we don’t have to apologize for.

hrrumph.