Who Will Survive in America: Winners and Losers in the New Music Industry

I think the essay could be improved by making its argument clearer. At the beginning of your story, five companies controlled more than 90% of the world's popular music. Now, four companies do. Musicians have many more choices for distribution, but large "service platform" companies, some of them controlling hardware and software used by consumers (like Apple and Google) and some of them embedded in national popular culture and commerce (like TenCent) sublicense exclusive or non-exclusive rights to distribution from those companies. "Streaming," which is basically slow downloading accompanied by technological restrictions over redistribution by consumers, has been sold to people as "convenient." It means, in technical and legal fact, spying on their use of music and eliminating their rights under the "first sale doctrine," which has been crucial to the "copyright bargain" since the early 20th century.

So I'm not sure who has won and who has lost, or why, on the basis of your analysis. Perhaps rather than beginning with an anecdote and moving immediately to broad generalities you could state at the outset the idea you want the reader to take away, and use most of the remainder of your essay to present the facts that support your proposed conclusion. In the process, I suspect, you will raise some questions that, in a short essay, should be left to the reader, perhaps qualifying or making more multi-variate the proposition from which you began.