I feel like this issue is brought on by the fact that it seems like copyright law hasn't been properly reexamined for the modern era. I support the notion that the ideal model is people pay the rightsholder in order to enjoy the media, and offering resale of pure-digital media instead leads to some weird "You make money based on the peak simultaneous number of owners, rather than the number of people who consumed it", which just doesn't make any sense to me as an economic model.

So yeah, you see labels calling the user purchase one thing, in order to make it line up with the intent of the consumer relationship, then on the royalties they call it a different thing to make it line-up with that intent. I don't feel the publishers are violating the intent of these relationships at all, it's just that copyright law being extremely out of date requires stupid language games. The correct solution is to re-examine copyright law to either establish that the intent is you pay the rightsholder to get access for you as a distinct individual, or that the intent is that you are purchasing resalable access, and be done with this nonsense.

I absolutely don't blame artists for trying though, the labels screw them so it seems fair that they should try to screw the labels.