Well.......
I do think that paying the artists, paying the songwriters and all that is not a bad thing. They deserve the money for their creativity, and in the marketplace the guy who writes Stairway to Heaven makes a big pile of money. Nothing wrong with that.
However.....
It didn't work out like that. It worked out so that the major labels wallowed in cash, and created a system where it was possible to make a gold record and still come out owing the record company money. I know people its happened to.
I like live music, not only for the artistic sense of people playing music for other people with all that it entails, but also (full disclosure here) because I've made most of the money I've ever made in my life doing live music shows, so I have a dog in that fight as it were.
The Grateful Dead let people record the shows and pass them around. It was lazy in the beginning - they just didn't care - and by the end, it was a revolutionary idea. For "B&P" (Blanks and Postage) we traded those things among ourselves for years and years. When they finally got the idea (they were nothing if not slow) to use their tapes and put CDs out (3 CD sets for like $20) they sold a pile of them, and that collection, called Dick's Picks, is now up to volume 25 or something. As it turned out, the only people doing this - people like me - already had all the stuff they recorded anyway so its not like they were losing money, but --- we did buy more tickets to shows, leaving them in the end multi-millionaires (all be it the hard way, they did have to perform for it) though ticket sales, rather than record sales.
Using that model, a lot of band Phish, Govm't Mule and others now have sites set up, and you can download the pristine sound board tapes for like $20 a show (with some art work, set lists and the occasional bonus like a track from practice or sound check) No record company. No having to create huge inventories that may, or may not sell. You only sell the ones that people want, and your cost in doing is almost nill. That's the new model.
For the life of me (and I should write this all in caps because I tend to scream it IRL) I don't understand how the major labels didn't go to Napster and back a truck full of money up to the guys desk and dump it telling him "go buy a small country somewhere, but this is ours now." They had everyone who mattered (early adopters in tech terms) at the same place and the same time. In suing the Nap, what they did was like hitting mercury with a hammer. It did not end it, it scattered it in a way that it could never be put back together again. It may well prove to be about the MOST STUPID BUSINESS DECISION IN THE HISTORY OF BUSINESS. After all, its how they solved every other problem they faced, by buying it out. Why this one time they didn't buy it, but in the end ruined it, proved that the old boys, who knew that everyone had a price, were BUSINESS MEN, NOT BUSINESS SCHOOL GRADS - and that kids, is a hell of difference.
In terms of 'experimental music' most of those people had a hard time getting it released because the majors were not interested in anyone who wasn't selling 50K units the first day out of the box. So the people who might sell 10K over three years, were out in the cold. The corporationization of the radio industry did not help either. I know "DJs" on the radio stations (big ones) who never play a song. They go in, record a script for a few hours, and that's it.
So these people were very early on into the net model, thinking (opps, they thought, another difference from the Hookers and Blow A&R guys) that if they didn't make money, at least - at the very least - they might get people to at least HEAR their stuff. So they went to the net.
Then..... Then the RIAA starts a series of lawsuits that even given the history of lawsuits in America are really dumb.
So... now, its all over, Baby Blue.
