Yes, in a purely free and meritocratic market it would. But the reality is that whoever has the most capital to invest in a release skews the market in their favour by getting a bigger share of finite attention/exposure, whether that’s radio plays or playlist placements.

Free market capitalism is an oxymoron and a failure in its own terms, not just in the arts but across the board. And there will be no music on a dead planet.

Music taste is super subjective and the barriers of entry are incredibly low now. There’s a lot of sour grapes in the art fields that I side eye. Like incredibly gates open for all and equality in their persona but among close friends they’re complaining about how much competition there is how they wish it was like how it was back in the where it was way harder and more expensive to get into music as if they’d be the one to make it through the gatekeepers like Harvey Weinstein and P Diddy

There’s a ton of good music. Every year thousands and thousands of new quality music artists put music on YouTube and music subscription services. If you live in a big city, look up all the music venues including small stage coffee shops, you’ll see hundreds of good artists you’ve possibly never heard of. All these artist either local or going on a national tour, they’re all mostly paycheck to paycheck.

Broke musician/singer/writer was the standard in the 90s and before. Broke musician/singer/writer is the standard today just there’s a whole lot more of them and the Internet to hear the bitterness of not succeeding in making a lot of money off ones art

Besides that, the “best” music spreads itself on its own to a small niche of people. On one hand because of the Internet, you can be incredibly cheap on marketing compared to the past. On the other hand there’s so much music out there that marketing and knowing the right people is more important than ever. More competition than ever before.

Like before you pretty much had to pay money to get money on radio, television, play in any venue, get your music heard by industry influencers to have a shot as someone selling their own music. Now you don’t have to but really from what I’ve seen, the Internet indie to mainstream success seems pretty dead to me so you have to spend a lot of money to actually make a career out of your own music. Even just being a freelance studio musician, good luck. World class classical musician, good luck getting into any orchestras that pays well. Better off private teaching and recording holiday music covers

Context, if it’s ten years and your most popular song on YouTube has 4 million views and that was over ten years, you made some money. Not a lot and that was spread over ten years. You better have another income stream besides album sales and Internet streams or else you’d be homeless. Got to your hard. Sell merch. Write songs for other people. Work at Wal Mart. 4 million views in ten years is both an incredible success and not much money. That’s not even taking into account how much money was spent on production/studio time/etc to get 4 million YouTube views in ten years

So traditional music industry is incredibly important to success because they market. They have money to place music where people hear it. Most people don’t search for music they like, they stumble on it passively which means what’s marketed to them. What gets in Spotify playlists. What is on radio and television. What’s used in a major movie. Used by their favorite super popular influencer. Today you have greater access to reaching people but so does everyone else so marketing and networking matter an incredible amount and that’s where traditional music companies come into play