Aside from all the middle men nibbling at artist take, its also a symptom of trading on fundamentally un-scarce resources. A better business model is selling access to the scarce things like the artist themselves. Trying to maintain stranglehold on a particular order of zeros and ones is always going to be tough.
That’s part of the reason that artists have made a bigger push toward selling merch as a means of making a living. But that feels so arbitrary and unsustainable to me.
Why should I buy a tshirt from somebody because I like their music? Fashion design is its own unrelated art form.
