The music industry examined

The music industry has always extracted more value from musicians than it has returned to them, and this is structural rather than exceptional — a fact that the serious musician must account for rather than resent as a personal injustice. What changes over time is the shape of the extraction and the occasional emergence of conditions in which artists can act more directly. To understand the industry is to understand what it cannot do for you, which frees you to build what it will not.