For whom - for Taylor Swift? The average artist experience is pretty miserable: it's harder than ever to break through because there is more competition - two or three generations who looked up to rock and pop stars and imagined that this could be a viable career.
One in a thousand talented artists will get lucky, but I suspect the ratio is historically low. Everyone else more or less needs to find another job.
There are other things that probably push artists toward the cultural mean. You're no longer trying to cater to the tastes of a wealthy patron or even a record studio executive. Now, you gotta get enough clicks on YouTube first. The surest way to do this is to look nice and do some unoffensive covers of well-known pop songs.
The tension the parent referred to is the concept of "selling out" as a bad thing.
Your comment supports this. While you may talk about how it's harder to "break through" or "get lucky" than it was, it presents both of those as good things.
There used to be other measures of success for musicians other than financial.
One in a thousand talented artists will get lucky, but I suspect the ratio is historically low. Everyone else more or less needs to find another job.
There are other things that probably push artists toward the cultural mean. You're no longer trying to cater to the tastes of a wealthy patron or even a record studio executive. Now, you gotta get enough clicks on YouTube first. The surest way to do this is to look nice and do some unoffensive covers of well-known pop songs.