Nothing about today’s music business is natural. Every structure you advise on is the fossil of an old fight over money.
Before any of the detail makes sense, fix the shape of the story. The music industry has been re-plumbed roughly once a generation, and each time, the new plumbing was built around wherever the money happened to be.
The pattern repeats. A new technology appears. It creates a fresh way to make money from music. Whoever controls that channel captures the lion’s share. And when the technology is eventually displaced, the legal and institutional structures it left behind do not vanish, they harden into the rules everyone after has to live with.
That is why the modern business can feel like an archaeological dig: separate and arms, collecting societies, , catalogues traded like bonds. None of it was designed from scratch. Each layer is the residue of a past era’s money. Learn the eras and the structures stop being arbitrary, they become legible.