Much of what you say is true, but then the live music scene is dominated by an oligopoly for ticket sales (Livenation & Ticketmaster) and for bookings (GoldenVoice). Commercial venues tend to sign contracts with these big players and that's killed off most local and regional booking agencies that used to set people up. It's better than it used to be in some respects, but also centralized and excessively driven by analytics.

The problem is that people took Steve Albini's legitimate criticisms of large end of the music industry and threw the baby out with the bathwater. It's far easier to launch a music act in some respects, but at the price of destroying a lot of economic infrastructure and favoring the lowest common denominator, eg things like 'Gucci gang'.