It looks like iTunes is set to stop selling downloads. It seems they have been trying to shove streaming down our throats for a long time now.
https://www.digitalmusicn...tunes-music-downloads/
These days I always try to buy a CD or buy a download from Bandcamp.

The streaming companies are making a fortune at the artist's expense. Band are becoming reliant on a small group of fans that pre-order, crowd fund or sign up to Patron.

/Rant Off

This doesn't surprise me unfortunately. It's less for  them to do. The customer tells the server what to play for one flat fee. No more concern for how many sold to whom. Not as many customer complaints because selection and delivery is up to them. If a person wants a hard copy it might become similar to the old days when there were cassette recorders that could record off the radio, only now it can be done digitally. 
 
I hate to be the pessimist, artists looking to make a livelihood from record sales better start looking for that day job unless you hooked up with a big label and obtained noticed public aware distribution. Lots of distribution is unnoticed. JMHO.
 
Working bands with good managers can still do it.Internet involvement is probably at a minimum there. A website that sells t-shirts and CDs. Once you begin streaming you give it all away for pennies.

I saw a comment by Adrian Belew, he said one streaming service sent him a cheque for 47 cents, the stamp on the envelope was 87 cents.

still using cdbaby here.

Here is the article where I first saw the iTunes change
https://medium.com/@norafrancescagermain/the-art-of-making-music-wont-survive-the-model-of-free-much-longer-35490ef3abdd
 
Also I totally miss-quoted Adrian Belew and grossly overstated his earnings.

To quote Adrian, “They send you a 17 cent check in an envelope with a 38 cent stamp on it.”

 

I'd rather have old guys with cigars running the record industry (like it was)... than Apple and other streaming outlets.  They've killed the record industry with $.99 downloads. 
Many large bands no longer make money making/releasing records... and thus have no desire to do so.
This has driven concert ticket prices thru the roof.

batsbrew
still using cdbaby here.

Me too. I'm still waiting on that .35 payout but they won't mail money until it gets to $1.00. Shoot. I guess that pack of gum might need to wait.

Jim Roseberry
I'd rather have old guys with cigars running the record industry (like it was)... than Apple and other streaming outlets.  They've killed the record industry with $.99 downloads. 
Many large bands no longer make money making/releasing records... and thus have no desire to do so.
This has driven concert ticket prices thru the roof.

It wasn't that good in the old days.
 
When my old band's album was out in 1994, it went for £12 retail in the shops. That was an 100% markup on the £6 they paid the record company for it. The band got £0.25 per album.
 
So I personally got 5p per album, despite me writing over 80% of the material.
 
At least now bands can sell CDs for £10 via their websites, spread the word on facebook, put teasers (e.g. mono and/or low-fi versions) out on Spotify, iTunes etc., and get the lion share.
 
The only good thing about the old days was the investment they made in the bands' careers, but then so many of them were ripped off by the record companies and/or management.

The streaming model is like depending on radio play to support the musician. That revenue source was never very good except for the current top 40 songs, which were played on thousands of stations over and over every day. While streaming makes it possible for literally millions of songs to be offered to the listening public, it also means that there are literally millions of stations/streaming devices instead of thousands, and each of the millions of songs is competing with every other offering. Aside from the amount of pay for play issue, this dilution of the audience makes it less likely that an individual hit will have as much play, as when the record companies only released and promoted a few thousand songs a year and the radio stations only played a small subset of those. So even though a musician can now make his self-recorded masterpiece available to billions of people, he is still in the financial position of a street musician depending on only the few people who walk past him and drop a dime in his guitar case. Even the streaming mega-hits are reaping much lower rewards than in the days of CD albums, and the vast majority of those hits are not viral listener discovered product, but recording company (or concert organizer) contracted 360 deals for which they provide heavy promotional support.

In the case of CD baby, they stream on all of the major streaming platforms. People need to know you're there in order to buy your records. Unless you did something to really stick out online you will be buried under piles and piles of similar genre. Like slartabartfast said, everything is much more diluted. Only super funded acts get the top slots on Google. Otherwise you might be mentioned on web page 1006. No one looks that hard for music anymore. That's what the record company backed acts are hoping for, that you'll only look three pages in, see something you like that 
they are backing and listen to it. 
 
I guess it isn't much different than in the old days when they slipped a little extra something to the DJ to play an album, only now it's on a much larger scale.