When the labels held an oligopoly on access to the public, it was absolutely coercive when the choice was between having your work published while you got screwed vs. never being known ever.

This is one of the reasons the labels were so resistant to music on the internet in the first place (which Thomas Dolby and David Bowie were experimenting with in the early 1990s and why they hired US ICE to raid the Dotcom estate in New Zealand because it wasn’t just about MegaUpload being used for piracy sometimes. (PS: That fight is still going on, twelve years later.)