Then, if a band sold 10,000 copies of an album, it could earn about $50,000 in revenue, Toomey said. “Today, that band’s entire album would have to be streamed a million times for the same financial return,” said Toomey, who finds similarities in the tech industries’ current drive to push AI and the digital music transformation of the early 2000s.
“We quickly learned the so-called tech revolution in music was never designed to deliver for us,” Toomey writes. “Instead of enabling artists to live off their work, most musicians’ income from physical media like CDs and records tanked, and digital royalties paid fractions of pennies on the dollar. Today, I can see this history repeating itself across every sector.”