>>2625618I agree with that being what they are now, but it's worth remembering that they established themselves by being the only people who could forge connections between talent and distribution networks. There used to be a much greater value in that, when the world was analog and scrounging information and hidden gems was limited to extreme specialists who could physically find that information in the world.
Now with the internet age, that shit is nigh on worthless, but their inertial clout allows them to continue, and they use every inch of that leverage to maintain their existence long, long after the market has moved on from needing their services.
The record labels across the world have one reason to exist: to continue to exist. That's all they do now, maintain their existence. Because corporations are machines mankind builds to produce and maintain capital. They only have that single motivation as an extant entity, and that drive to continue living to produce has a will that is not maintained by any single human, or even a group of humans running the stage. The corporation, at it's core, will continue to move forward, even when it's existence means killing that which it purports to create, because a corporation entity cannot ever acknowledge the concept of death.
It's why supporting something like Hololive, which is a small-scale, intensely new idol label with no connections to the hollow colossus of the real industry, is inherently better than supporting Top 40 record labels. They don't have that legacy of inertia.