>vs media that, once manufactured and distributed, essentially costs nothing to maintain

Eh, not really, it costs it's own storage and care. This is not free even if you have discounted in to the rest of the cost of your life. Not destroying LPs for example is a good bit of work.

With music itself, it's electronic storage is insanely cheap. One middleling server could easily contain just about the entirety of all mankinds works. Parallel distribution really is the bigger factor, and I guess that costs almost nothing itself. Marketing and software around marketing likely is the majority of the cost here.

Trying to compare a cellphone to a record is just not a really workable thing. People are going to have the cellphone anyway. The fact it is a media player is a welcome bonus.