Here's an interesting article from the Quartz website, titled "An Epic Battle in Streaming Music is About to Begin, and Only a Few Will Survive." I'll pause while you read and absorb.
This article is a fascinating examination of the current and coming changes in the music industry, vis a vis the shift from CDs to digital downloads to various types of streaming music services, from the business perspective. What I find really interesting -- no, kind of appalling -- is that the word "musician" is only used once in the article, and then only as a descriptor for an industry advocacy group. It's all about the business models, with no regard at all for the people who create what the industry politely refers to as "content."
The article bemoans "the costs of the content," in that the poor big streaming music companies are forced to pay royalties on the "content" they deliver. There must be a way to drive down these costs, argues the article, or else the poor big streaming music companies will never make any money. (The payments for "content," according to this article go to the "content owners" -- record labels and publishers. Not musicians, apparently.)
This, I argue, is today's problem in the music industry. The companies trying to make a buck off the music -- today, they're tech companies -- have no regard or affinity for the music itself. It's just "content" (of which "a large proportion of those songs are apparently never played"). It's not art, it's not inspirational, it's not personally touching -- it's just content for their customers to consume. Musicians are apparently nothing more than workers in a factory producing this anonymous content. It ain't the Beatles, it ain't Dylan, it ain't Nirvana, it's just "content," who cares where it comes from?
Putting tech companies like Google, Apple, and Spotify in charge of the musical art form is about as bad as it gets. At least the old school record labels actually recognized that they were selling music from musicians to people who loved music. To the tech companies, this is just another scheme to enlarge their portfolios, "control the Internet," and enhance their stock price. If it wasn't music, it'd be ball bearings or digital widgets or whatever.
And when these yahoos are done playing around in the music industry playground, they'll just move on to something else, leaving behind the rotting corpse of everything we love about music. The tech companies with their deep pockets won't even notice; the musicians with much less cash on hand will not be able to survive.
