What is the point of a music label? Is it just: “Promote music and share profit”?
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Back in the day the label was critically important.
You’re just some band playing music in local bars.
How do you rent expensive studio equipment and record an album?
How do you find a good sound engineering team to mix the album?
How do you print 500,000 records?
How do you distribute them?
How do you contact venues and arrange tour dates and contracts?
How do you get in touch with radio stations?
This stuff is complex, and in the pre-YouTube world bands really had no shot at getting big without help from the corporate side to handle all this business and manufacturing.
Then the internet came around and kneecapped the industry overnight.
The recording and live music side of the equation is still more or less the same, but profits on the albums themselves never recovered.
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