Comment by yobbo

Things were different in 1960s/1970s since at that time there weren't huge catalogues of works owned by a just few media companies, although there were far fewer channels (with less and more expensive bandwidth.)

In our time, most of the rights to 100 years of pop culture is owned by three big media companies, and they own stakes in distribution channels. The catalogues give them power to bargain for promotion in various channels. That's how it used to work in radio [0], and is suspected to work in music streaming [1].

I suspect revoking extensions to copyright/IP laws [2, for example] would change the picture.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

[1] https://www.billboard.com/pro/playola-promotion-streaming-se...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act