Ted Gioia, writing on the collapse of music journalism:
Before streaming, everybody in the value chain needed new music. The record stores would go broke if people just listened to the old songs over and over.
And the same was true for record distributors, record labels, radio stations, nightclub owners, and music writers. Everybody needed hot new songs and rising new musicians.
Of course, fans also benefited. Life gets boring if you just listen to the same songs year after year, decade after decade. But there was no risk of that. The music industry worked tirelessly to find exciting new music, and share it with the world.
That business model is now disappearing. The people who run the industry killed it—and now we live with the consequences.
The irony is that exciting new music is still getting released—but almost nobody hears it. The system actively works to hide it.
And occasionally an artist breaks through the industry inertia, and proves that fans still want exciting new music experiences. But here, too, entrenched interests do almost nothing to support this—and much to hinder it.