Totally agree. From what I've been able to tell, there are five ways to make money with music: performance, licensing, merchandising, advertising paying directly for content.
Performance--people pay tickets for concerts.
Licensing--companies paying artists to play their music during TV/movies/commercials.
Merchandising--Artists selling concert t-shirts and posters for $60 a piece is the canonical example.
Advertising--Artists building their own "brand" and using their brand to shill other products. Beyonce comes to mind most recently. I've been seeing her all over the place selling everything.
Direct pay for content--The business model the RIAA is based on and that is dying.
Generally, music is now a digital download, and the artifice of the "Album as artform" is finally breaking apart. Truly some albums were art, but most were filler crap that was packaged around a high budjet single or two. People are barely willing to pay for a digital single much less entire albums.
Performance--people pay tickets for concerts.
Licensing--companies paying artists to play their music during TV/movies/commercials.
Merchandising--Artists selling concert t-shirts and posters for $60 a piece is the canonical example.
Advertising--Artists building their own "brand" and using their brand to shill other products. Beyonce comes to mind most recently. I've been seeing her all over the place selling everything.
Direct pay for content--The business model the RIAA is based on and that is dying.
Generally, music is now a digital download, and the artifice of the "Album as artform" is finally breaking apart. Truly some albums were art, but most were filler crap that was packaged around a high budjet single or two. People are barely willing to pay for a digital single much less entire albums.