Music was once scarce. Before the days of MP3 and P2P file sharing, you didn’t have the ability to hear songs whenever you wished unless you bought them.
Today one does not even need to download songs, as platforms such as VEVO and YouTube host many of the most popular songs of yesterday and today.
The industry was faced with a definitive problem in an age of liberal copy and distribution technology: finding new ways to monetize digital music files that lacked scarcity.