Music-video YouTube case-study Foxes and Fossils

Problem

The music industry in flux again, there appears to be a mounting effort to eliminate downloads in favor of streaming by the major services.

1. CD-Baby does not sell CDs anymore, they are honoring downloads purchased earlier, but going forward, they are distributing exclusively to streaming services.
2. Pressing a link to most iTunes search result links no longer takes you to the download page, it will take you to the Apple Music streaming service.
3. Amazon has developed a high quality streaming service; however, they still offer downloads and CDs.
4. Google Play has announced they will be shutting down their download service.
5. YouTube has developed the streaming service "music.youtube". It is unclear whether or not you can keep your music off of music.youtube after uploading a video, artists can distribute albums and singles to the platform without a music video.

This development can have harsh consequences to independent musicians, instead of receiving seventy cents on the dollar for a download, the artist share is reduced to hundredths of a penny per spin on a streaming service and hope that fans will spin the stream repeatedly.

Tradition (indie) path

The "traditional" path for independent artists has been to create quality content for YouTube and simply provide a link to iTunes for monetization, many artists did not monetize their content