You are delusional. The indies you were talking about was not the music the real public wanted. That was what Apple and Steve Jobs was able to accomplish by inventing a way to convince the big music publishers who HAD THE MUSIC THE PUBLIC WANTED, not the fringe music who could not get published on the major labels, to be willing to put their catalogs on line. THAT was a major sea change in music. You are being disingenuous by claiming anything else. . . and deliberately distorting history.
You claim minor players without major engineering abilities made the major strides but you are wrong. Just because they may have had a product out first, does not mean they "developed" it. Developing it means making it WORK. . . making it into a product that works for people. Not a product that if you do these steps exactly right it will work for geeks, but a product that works with the general public that they want to buy and use. Show us where Apple has ever claimed to have invented the smartphone? The MP3 player. You will not find Apple claiming that. Only Apple haters claim they say that.
Apple redefines the market and refines the products until they are making the best in the categories. . . and people want to use them because they are easy to use and provide value and work.
Hundreds of thousands of users belie your personal fantasy.
The RIAA was not in any way living on the same Peter Pan cloud where you personally live, and that is why they squandered millions and got themselves in Dutch with the courts trying to shut MP3.com down. They were corrupt but not stupid. They knew there was no way in hell they could afford to pay for the rights to the music of every talented act out there...and they were right.
Their inability to shut down independent music through judicial fiat directly lead to the current state of affairs. Young people now listen to a vast tableau of acts and decent writers and musicians now retain the distribution rights to their music.
Delusional? No. It is not myself, MP3.com’s vast customer base 20 years ago, and the RIAA who are delusional about what customers wanted. That played out and it shattered the power the record companies had.
If there were any merit of any sort in your pathetic little I’ll thought out screed the record companies would still be dictating terms.
But they aren’t, now are they?
Next time, (before you post on this topic) have someone competent go over what you wish to say and correct it for you.