Seems like they're always bitching about something. How about innovating, guys?
Look only as far as YouTube to see what content creators do when the money well dries up - a lot have turned to selling products/advertising themselves with direct deals (dollar shave club, Nord VPN, etc). Another method is through "merch", something Disney for example has been doing for years.
Besides, many Countries simply don't respect media copyright full-stop, it wouldn't harm creators to learn to hustle for other (potentially wider) markets.
To be clear, I think you are right, people want the product. Just I think the music industry product is actually facilitating groupthink about popularity. Even then they have a 99 in 100 failure rate.
It used to be about distribution. Seems pretty clear (from anecdata) that artists these days selling independently or even on platforms like bandcamp (which is awesome) make more on a couple hundred sales than artists with record companies make on a couple thousand.
And i think you are right that innovation won't help them. Or at least, this is actually the way they innovate.. Through bullying and legislation. And to that end, I hope they go to hell.
That the artist might not get most of the money, is not an argument, since the artist already signed agreeing to that.
Companies exist to serve their customers. The companies that forget this tend to decline.
No problem then, because those who get their songs off of YouTube are not their customers (or, in any case, are not their customers for those particular songs).
We already have content from the music companies to streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, which is exactly what Netflix does.
In fact we had streaming services for music long before Netflix was a thing (e.g. Real's), so theirs is hardly "forward thinking".