The music business is more unfair than ever

Streaming apps revived the industry, but record labels collect the profits

The music business is booming and it’s doing so thanks to streaming. But the tech pioneers who made this possible in the last two years aren’t making any money, and neither, really, are musicians: It’s legacy businesses — the music companies that own the catalogues — that are collecting all the profits. Something has to give.
 
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reports that US retail music sales were up 17 per cent year-over-year in the first six months of 2017, to $4 billion. That’s still very far from the industry’s revenues at the height of the compact disc