Honestly I dont know that I believe that narrative, music labels have been cheating the talent out of the proceeds of their work since Edison phonograph. Labels claiming to the artist that they dont make any money while they use creative accounting to charge any and every expense to the artist and is a long and storied practice in the industry. Artist are expected still to pay x% of sales revenue for "breakage fees" on digital downloads example. Breakage fees having been introduced to cover the loss to the breaking in transit of early brittle shellac phonograph records. ID dont know about you.but tje think the breakage cost of a mp3 file should be on the scale of negligible to nonexistent.