There's a couple of BIG qualifications on your comments.
1) Vulfpeck slid through the YouTube music window about 2010-2012 that has since closed (that also produced Beiber, Jepsen, Psy with "Gangnam Style" etc.).
2) Vulfpeck were the backing musicians for Darren Criss who was very much a product of the standard system.
3) They are probably the antithesis that making new music is easier. They save a LOT of money because they can get away with doing minimal production because they are SOOO smoking good.
If you have to be at the level of Vulfpeck to make a living making music, then basically nobody is going to be able to do so.
I only mention Vulfpeck because they're at the pinnacle of their genre, not because they're the threshold. There's plenty of opportunity for anyone. Look at akageorge. (If you can—previously known as George Barnett, he seems to have reset his identity and thrown away much of his earlier material.) He's a self-evidently brilliant musician who can write and perform every part of a radio-ready hit. To the extent anyone makes money in music, he could make it if he bothered.
That guy is talented, but those songs aren't radio-ready hits. In large part because the music/recording is nowhere near the major part of what makes a radio ready hit. Radio hits are the result of advertising and marketing, not music creation and production.
Expensive marketing is effective for established acts that already have an existing audience—whether that be international superstars like Coldplay or relative newcomers like London Grammar.
But it's also true that traditional marketing is becoming increasingly less relevant for new acts. New music discovery used to be driven by radio, media and advertising. Those gatekeepers are now being challenged by algorithms and social media—and there's no sign of that trend slowing down yet.
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To my original point: making music is now an order of magnitude cheaper than it was just a few decades ago. And venues where an act to break out are more accessible than ever. I'm not saying the industry is now or ever will be perfectly egalitarian, but the distance travelled is monumental.
1) Vulfpeck slid through the YouTube music window about 2010-2012 that has since closed (that also produced Beiber, Jepsen, Psy with "Gangnam Style" etc.).
2) Vulfpeck were the backing musicians for Darren Criss who was very much a product of the standard system.
3) They are probably the antithesis that making new music is easier. They save a LOT of money because they can get away with doing minimal production because they are SOOO smoking good.
If you have to be at the level of Vulfpeck to make a living making music, then basically nobody is going to be able to do so.