Bandcamp and the iTunes Music Store are not the 2012 equivalent of record labels. Lowery spent a good deal of time trying to dispel exactly that misconception. The record labels financed albums. They provided advance payments to artists. They accepted the lion's share of the downside risk of investing in a music recording: if the music didn't sell, they were left holding the bag. As Lowery is at pains to point out: for most musicians, the labels never made a satisfactory return on their investment. Things only worked out in the aggregate.
iTMS does none of this. iTMS doesn't pay artists to record albums. iTMS accepts albums fully-formed from artists, holds no inventory, is exposed to no downside risk, and collects 30% (and forces musicians to incur 9% fees to "aggregators").
And for the nteenth time: Lowery is not upset about iTMS. He points out that the economics don't make much sense, but he understands how the market works (perhaps better than you do, since he's a musician, a music industry veteran, and a former quant). But iTMS (a) isn't the whole story of the tech industry, and (b) for damned sure isn't replacing record labels.
It's the mentality of this comment --- "Copyright, Constitution, Copyright, Youtube is the Radio, Copyright bad, iTMS is the record label now, it's Copyright's fault" --- that spurred Lowery's rant. The whole point of it is that once you dig deeper into those claims, the whole story falls apart: businesses are getting something for nothing, consumers are getting something for nothing, and artists are getting nothing at all in return for substantial investments of time and actual capital. How can we stand for this? It seems so amoral.