technology improving labor peaked in the electro-mechanical age.

after that, it was about the boss cutting employees and total man power hours, gradually over time to meet profit margins for the company. nothing more .

- farming with no till methods and traditional means is actually more effective (higher nutritive value, better results,) than monocropping and typical petro-chemical agri-business. There is a decade or so of research and reading backing up this claim. Eating poisoned, fastly produced food is a long lasting error.

information technology makes the overall process more efficient, but guess what? the musicians dont see any of that money. it's not much better with streaming.

Example from the CD era.

when TLC went multi platinum with their album that had waterfalls on it, they only saw 16 cents per album sold. Between the group of them, each one made about 66,000$ on that album. Which is horrific, considering as you said cd's used to cost between 16-22+- USD.

as far as streaming goes, royalty contracts aren't a lot better there, and most artists have turned to either direct sales, or things like bandcamp, which aren't great but an option certainly for those that don't have a tech inclined friend.

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as far as hyperinflation goes, that's a complicated topic and if govt wasn't corrupt shitheels it wouldn't even need be discussed.