Some good food for thought.
https://medium.com/cuepoint/the-devaluation-of-music-it-s-worse-than-you-think-f4cf5f26a888
https://medium.com/cuepoint/the-devaluation-of-music-it-s-worse-than-you-think-f4cf5f26a888
In the LP era it was the other way around, particularly with rock music. Bands toured to promote the album, making very little money from touring and then hoping to shift big units on vinyl, which would bring in the real money. Now, the bigger bands make their money from touring and the merchandise they sell with it and, if they're lucky, supplement it with music sales. I've been reading these 'death of music' articles a lot in recent years. Music wont die. The charts have always been full of crap and sheep will buy it. That's never changed. Niche markets such as classical will continue because there's always gonna be people to listen to it. Pieces like the one I just read remind me of that guy who used to stand on Market Street, in Manchester, with his 'The End is Nigh' placard. Every week, till the day he died he'd stand there, prophecising the end of the world. I've seen similar threads on here and I treat them with similar disdain and roll my eyes.I've read many opinion pieces like this in recent years. But I notice one thing that hasn't changed too much in the music world. Musicians who are successful in attracting audiences to their live performances are still successful financially, and the biggest live performance stars are as rich and famous as ever, or even more so than ever. Recordings are often more a publicity tool than a direct producer of wealth.
You make great points in your second and third paragraphs, but as for your first, well, you didn't grow up when I did in New York, or in Chicago or Boston, for that matter. Back in the day, WNCN in New York, WFMT in Chicago and WCRB in Boston were great classical music stations that went much deeper than the predictable classical hits or easy listening choices. Yes, you wanted to own some beloved favorite LPs, but there was really no need to compile your own complete library unless you were a serious student or musician yourself. All that began to change for the worse as early as the mid 1960s. The pyramidal structure you describe was well in place by the 80s. But at this point, with streaming and download services, conventional classical radio has lost much of its purpose anyway, at least for serious listeners.I may get nostalgic about Golden Age TV but definitely not about "free" music from those days, when the FM dial was almost as useless as short-wave and AM played nothing but hits until you were sick of them. FM got better but the internet really changed the landscape.
All commercial entertainment has a pyrimidal structure. They want to impale us upon the peaks. Best to check out the foundation where the buskers hang out... but they don't want you to think that way...
Sports has confronted the same scam, I grew up where there were no professional teams and amateur sports were highly respected and attended. But kids nowadays are raised to respect only "the best" and treat the rest as losers. And we know what athletes will do to be "the best"...