To put some more perspective ..
"As it may sound weird but technology is to be blamed”
When the Compact Disc came out, the record industry quickly discovered that people would buy stuff on CD. Unfortunately for the music industry, people quickly discovered that they could easily copy CDs. People would buy a CD, take it home and copy it, then sell the CD back to the store. They could easily burn CDs for their friends.
A few years down the road, the internet became available. The MP3 format was created to compress the size of music files so that they could be easily downloaded and shared. The internet opened up a lot of new opportunities for music but also brought unfortunately corrupts who steal someone else hard work, sell someone’s work for free or cheap.
The growing ‘freemium model’ popular among internet users who mostly prefer no-cost subscriptions, may subscribe to the artist’s youtube channel or like a video but may not necessarily buy artist records. Rather, will search on the internet and eventually get a piracy | free downloadable version to enjoy.
In the decade since peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing site Napster emerged in 1999, music sales in the U.S. alone have dropped 47 percent, from $14.6 billion to $7.7 billion.- From 2004 through 2009 alone, approximately 30 billion songs were illegally downloaded on file-sharing networks.
Of the total revenues generated from recorded music ($17.3 billion) in the year, 2017, digital (streaming) accounted for more than half of the global recorded music market revenue.
