I disagree. It was 6 in 1998 and 3 by 2013.

Conglomeration of internet spaces and the surrounding corpo entities ultimately fucks over independent distributors. Streaming may have given indies a modest boost but that is likely what pushed the big 6 to conglomerate into the big 3 in the face of a changing market. They’re playing the long game

Look at other examples: google search has been utterly destroyed by the conglomeration of both google as a company as well as ad networks. Now the independent companies that were thriving because of google search boosting them are on life support or outright dying because google no longer has to cater to them and can now outright cater to business interests that will pump their bottom line. Amazon marketplace is killing many small businesses because the conglomeration of amazon businesses has reached a point where they can undercut and copy those small businesses to kill them off and increases amazons bottom line. Youtube has reached a critical mass and pushes sponsored and corporate creators, it is essentially impossible to grow a channel organically at this point without some kind of backing.

The streaming services are going the same route. Do you think apple, spotify, deezer, tidal, etc won’t tweak their algorithms for additional funds from warner? It may not even be about money, it might be about keeping sony music happy because they are essentially a cartel that controls 1/3rd of your catalog. So then the indies slowly but surely go back to relying on word of mouth exclusively. But good luck with that because facebook, tiktok, youtube, etc, is where all this discussion happens and warner/sony/universal is far more likely to have an in with google or whoever than podunk indie label with 10k in the bank. It won’t even be that they silence the indie labels, they’ll just say “when people search for new reggae push these artists in the algorithm”

The future is grim dude. It’s why I use soulseek and torrents to find music. Fuck algorithms. Ill go to shows and buy merch