I think it has surprisingly little about content but with marketing and connections. I feel it is especially apparent on youtube where crappy content can thrive and excellent content can be buried where only a handful will see it.
Not terribly different from the old days.
Problem is, once you get over bad, once you've followed the rules that everyone else has followed, is where marketing and connections start to make a difference. But still, nobody's really going to care until and unless you can come up with something truly different that's also good. Bring an idea to a style from another style and make it cohesive. Play around with different types of lyrics and beats and energy levels.
I have a friend of mine whose been playing music for years put out an album of well, aggressively mediocre country-rock. No amount of connections and marketing is going to get anyone to care about it. There wasn't anything wrong with it, I just had zero interest in listening to it more than once. He needed to bring an order of magnitude more effort to the composition process to even come close to mildly interesting. This stuff literally fills the slush piles of music agents.
Once you have something new, good, and different, then marketing and connections again start to become important. Because there's literally nothing else that can move the needle.
Marketing helps, but it doesn't make you.
Not necessarily. I think my content is good, but if few to no people hear it, much less pay me for it, I don't have much incentive to continue making it. Or if I make it, I rarely bother to release it anymore. I just make it for myself, and no one hears it but me. It's just not worth my time to go to all the trouble of editing and mixing it, releasing it, making cover art, thinking of titles, uploading it, and maybe trying to get listeners for it if almost no one will ever hear it.
I think a lot of other musicians are in the same boat. We can't afford to make music for a living, so have to do it as a hobby, and if we struggle to get listeners even the hobby might not be rewarding enough to pursue in the long run.
Lots of good content can get buried in the avalanche of trash. It might eventually get "discovered", but that's far from certain. It might not happen in the artist's lifetime or at all.
There's still a lot of room for improvement in the field of content discovery.
Look what that has done to "Online Content-with-a-capital-C" at large.
If you launched an ad-supported website today and wanted to make any real kind of money from it, how many page views would you need? And how would that number impact the type of content you created for that site?
Before, if someone signed you, you were pretty much guaranteed some form of success.
I don't think that virality being required is a problem, all the songs I still listen from 20 years ago, and which are still played, I loved the first second I've heard and I would have shared them back then.