1. The music production industry is a business and it needs money to continue. Lowering the price of music provides less money for the music producers to produce more music. You seem to think that music production is better than ever. I disagree. I see current music production as being focused on lowest common denominator pop and rap that I think sucks artistically. I don't want to listen to the majority of the mass market music produced today. The ECONOMICS tie these things together. The music industry is a business.
I agree with most of your points about streaming and the devaluation of music, and think streaming is pretty terrible for artists trying to make a living. But, with respect, I think your economic analysis is faulty and I need to stick up a little bit for modern music here.
The major label stuff is, as you say, pretty lowest common denominator, and if music were like film (requiring many millions of dollars to produce a top notch product) your economic argument would be a good one. But it doesn't require millions to
produce a very good album, it just costs millions to promote one. The cost of actually producing music is lower than it's ever been because recording equipment is available for a few hundred dollars that would put the most expensive studio equipment from the 70's or 80's to shame.
The cost of production is so low in fact that it's led to an enormous boom of "bedroom production" of really very competently made music. More and more people are making music at home or in small studios, and a lot of it is really excellent. Self-publishing is easier and cheaper than it's ever been. So the supply side of the curve is doing just fine, primarily because music doesn't cost anywhere near as much to produce as it did ten or twenty years ago. The ability to record music cheaply has not cheapened music, it has introduced competition into a semi-closed market by reducing barriers to entry. It has opened the door for a lot of talented artists who never would have gotten a major label deal to start small labels or just do it themselves. But because they're doing it themselves, they can't spend millions on a media blitz: you have to find them, they won't find you.
I think if you focus on the music available through mass media (radio, tv, etc.) you can get the misleading impression that modern music is a wasteland. It's not. There's an ongoing renaissance of truly incredible music, but you'll never hear it if you don't go looking for it. I worked in radio for several years in the late oughts, and still follow music pretty closely. I think the future will look at the music output of the late 2000's and early 2010's the same way we currently think about the music output of the 60's and early 70's; they just won't be talking about what was on the radio
I think streaming is a nightmare for artists because it pays terribly, but so far I don't think it's squelched innovation in any meaningful way. But in part that's because people still buy digital downloads which pay much better for artists than streaming does, and there's a lingering physical media market (but that's not as profitable for small artists as it used to be: in some cases they make less on physical media than on downloads). So those other revenue streams may be "confusing" the picture, and if streaming completely takes over, we may begin to see economics really start to bite, but I wonder about that too. The big industry may die, but artists don't really need the industry, and as long as artists can make money gigging (like they've always done) there will be some artists making music. I wonder if what streaming will do in the end is just kill the middlemen. I guess we'll find out in a few years one way or the other.
I agree that streaming leads to a casual/devaluated consumer approach to music, though, which I don't appreciate. FWIW I have no interest in streaming for the most part because I want to support artists as directly and substantially as possible. The way to most effectively do that will vary from artist to artist (some make more on physical media, some make more on digital, some make the most on merch, etc), but it's never, ever streaming.
