"While Big Tech sites like Spotify claim they’re “democratizing” culture, they instead demand artists engage in double the labor to make a fraction of what they would have made under the old model. That labor amounts to constant self-promotion in the form of cheap trend-following, ever-changing posting strategies, and the nagging feeling that what you are really doing with your time is marketing, not art. Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — now have to be entrepreneurs, too."
Discussion
Marketplaces always benefit lopsided compared to the person participating in the marketplace. This is especially true for legacy platforms (walled gardens).
A marketplace should never be a primary means of sales. More like a nice bonus.
Even nostr doesn’t fully solve this yet until we have some sort of bulk dm or something that mimics email subscriptions.
It is just math, there is so much music (and art in general) being released every second that no one can really listen to a tiny fraction of it, even if it all was brilliant (which it isn't).
The capacity of people to listen to music has grown, but there are also other things than music that you can consume in that time (youtube, games...). So the pie is not that much bigger then it used to be in the 90s (the greatest period for making money from your music), but the competition is astronomicaly bigger. So you get roughly the same nr of artists at the top as there always were, then some grey zone and a huge black hole of media that no one cares about and never discover to get even one partial view.
No company can change this. You are either interesting in many other ways than just "I'm also making music" or you don't make it.