The record industry has always been subject to what’s now called technological disruption, and money disputes between the talent and the suits are probably as old as Robert Johnson’s fabled crossroads deal with the devil. That said, the modern history of the business traces a tale of major labels consolidating their power while other aspects of music’s ecosystem gradually withered away.

In 1977, the American recording industry outgrossed the Hollywood box office, hitting a then-high of $3.5 billion. Revenues climbed higher still in 1978, to $4.1 billion. Millions of people paid top dollar for the soundtracks to Saturday Night Fever and Grease.

At that time, the major record companies were defined as the six labels that also happened to own their own manufacturing and distribution arms. Independent labels, on the other hand, had to pay someone else to press their records, and someone else to distribute them to retail stores. Often, independent labels worked with independent distributors. But when the majors weren’t absorbing indie labels into their ranks, they were leveraging their clout to price out indie distributors, prompting a federal antitrust investigation and eventually forcing many of the smaller companies to shutter. “I’ve never seen such upheaval in my life,” the head of Cleveland-based indie distributor Progress told The New York Times in February 1979. Within eight years, Progress was out of business.

The record industry didn’t see such heights again until the ’90s, and new complaints about the majors’ influence followed. Sales in America climbed over the course of the decade, peaking in 1999 at $14.6 billion. In a 1993 essay called “The Problem With Music,” Nirvana studio guru and post-punk lifer Steve Albini explained how a band could make the record industry $3 million richer but still earn one-third of what they would have made working jobs at 7-11. In 2000, Courtney Love extrapolated the grim calculations even further, assailing the major labels for their allegedly exploitative business practices in a piece titled “Courtney Love Does the Math”; like Luther Vandross, Don Henley, and Beck before her, the Hole frontwoman eventually settled a lawsuit against her major label. Meanwhile, big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Best Buy muscled in on dedicated record shops, in turn cutting down shelf space devoted to controversial or emerging acts.

A slowing U.S. economy and the public embrace of unlicensed file-sharing networks like Napster combined to devastate the music industry in the early 2000s. But labels soon figured out how to make the internet work to their advantage. Despite short-term but very real financial anguish, the economics of leaving physical CDs behind actually turned out, in the long run, to be sneakily better for record companies (if not for artists) than the old model. IDC, a market-research firm, reported in 2000 that for every CD sale, 39 percent of the purchase price went to the label, while 8 percent went to the artist, and another 8 percent went to the publisher and songwriter. The firm correctly predicted that once digital download sales took hold, the labels wouldn’t be the ones to lose their take. Deutsche Bank, in its report on the music industry from earlier this year, estimated that for every $100 of consumer spending on CDs or vinyl, a label’s profit is $8; for every $100 spent on iTunes downloads, it’s $9; and for every $100 spent on streaming, a label’s profit is $13.

All of this past precedent and number-crunching strongly suggest that if more money will soon be pouring into recorded music, the record companies will be standing there holding out their platinum records like collection plates trying to catch it. “Labels are going to reap the rewards,” says Scott Rodger, who manages Paul McCartney, Shania Twain, and Andrea Bocelli. Despite decades of being swallowed up by conglomerates, indie labels are still very much included; depending on the survey, indies held somewhere between 32 percent and 40 percent of the global market share in 2017. “Being an independent does not put you at any disadvantage,” says Glassnote’s Glass.

Yet like in decades past, it’s the majors—now with in-house publishing and merch businesses to go along with their distribution arms and deep-pocketed parent organizations—who look positioned to throw their weight around. Deutsche points out that, a decade into streaming, the top 10 artists with the most Spotify followers are all backed by a major label. As Goldman Sachs bloodlessly put it in 2017, the majors are going to wring the greatest rewards from streaming because, “for every piece of content that is being monetized,” as much as 60 percent of royalties goes to them.

There was a brief moment in time when it looked like artists could have taken more control of their own fates. In 2007, Radiohead famously self-released their album In Rainbows at a pay-what-you-want price for downloads. Around the same time, Prince was going directly to fans with online subscription clubs. But then Prince returned to Warner in 2014. Two years later, Radiohead jumped to XL. Last year, Taylor Swift signed with Universal after spending her entire career at the (Universal-distributed) Nashville indie label Big Machine. And today, even the biggest self-released artist on Spotify, Chance the Rapper, still has a far smaller following than the most popular artists on the platform.

Since Universal acquired EMI in 2012, the majors are down to just three. One is Universal Music Group, which generated $7 billion in revenue in 2018 for French media conglomerate Vivendi. Another is Sony Music, which brought in $3.8 billion in 2018 for parent company Sony. The third is Warner Music Group, which reported $4 billion in revenue last year as part of Soviet-born billionaire Len Blavatnik’s privately held Access Industries.