Someone said in the comments that “the voices that cried the loudest about this were people at the top of the food chain”.

In reality I think those were just the voices that were heard more. Because obviously being at the top of the food chain gives them more visibility. Plenty of small-scale artists cried too, but nobody heard them or cared for.

Regardless of what people NOT in the music business will say, the thing, from all I’ve been able to gather, goes like this:

1) Album sales ―which before mp3s used to be a decent way for a small scale independent artist to make a living (shifting even 50.000 units was enough to live on as an independent artist in the eighties and early nineties)― have dried up.

Top acts sell this myth in their interviews that if you weren’t in the charts, or you barely made spot number 46 for example you might as well not exist. That, in IT terms, is like saying that 37 Signals is not a “real company” and only Google and Facebook are. Just because they were used to limos and champagne release parties doesn’t mean the thousands of artists outside top-100 didn’t make a living and create their art.

So, yeah, there WAS a huge, booming scene outside the “Billboard Top 100” (not to mention the UK and regional European scenes, and obviously elsewhere in the developed world), and those musicians could make a decent living too.

Mp3 and streaming have killed that for the most part (the “decent living”, not the scene part).

1.2) A small aside regarding this:

You’ll hear musicians tell horror stories about how the company took all their profits, and even charged them for recording costs, held their advance etc (e.g. the classic rant by Steve Albini). That was something that mostly happened to first-time stars and star-struck kids.

Musicians with some experience in the game, independent lower-volume selling acts etc, could always go to an independent label, have better contracts and a personal experience, etc. And of course those independent musicians also didn’t need 1.5 year in the studio to make an album, blowing most of their time (and advance money) on hookers and coke.

2) In the early days of mp3 (and still today) you heard people saying “piracy hasn’t harmed album sales, I buy more music now, since I can hear more stuff before I decide what to buy” etc.

Those people were either outliers or telling BS — the declining numbers of both CD and digital sales all this time disprove their claims.

3) There’s another suggestion often heard to “make money from playing live”.

First, for smaller bands (that weren’t the Rolling Stones or the Grateful Dead), live shows were a loss leader for album sales — and it’s not much better now. In fact, in most of the world, people — when adjusted for growing up — go to fewer live shows that they used to.

Second, while this might work for some, it’s a very american thing to assume that musicians exist to “play live”. In Europe there were lots of electronic musicians (not DJ/EDM style) having decent album sales that never cared for playing live.

There’s also the issue that a musician with 30.000 fans buying their albums around the world, might not have the required number of fans in any single town (apart from his hometown or some mega-city like NY) to hold concerts. And with the 30.000 fans becoming 2.000 people still buying his CD (and 28.000 just downloading it of somewhere) the artist is now screwed.

Then there’s the inane “sell merchandise” “solution”, as if a musician is just some merchant, and if one thing (selling music) doesn’t work, he’ll just pivot to selling some other stuff.

Not to mention that all those ideas are based on very US-centric perception, where all music that matters contains guitars and plays live, and all musicians are selling to 13 to 25 year old kids (because those are the primarily buyers of BS band merchandise — not 40 or 50 year old jazz, blues, electronica etc fans).

4) Streaming just made all of this worse.

5) I’m not saying we can go back in time. Or that we have some duty to provide musicians with a living if their business model doesn’t work.

I’m Just stating this, to recap: independent musicians that used to do well income-wise in the album days, are fucked up in the digital/streaming/piracy days.

That doesn’t stop them making music (especially since you can now create something from your home studio that used to take thousands upon thousands in studio time and you can release on your own on the internet), but it does stop them making a career in music, in the way musicians in the 70s, 80s and 90s used to.