In the current world, it seems the "artist" has taken the form of a hive mind (artists and songwriters) while the "instruments" are the mechanisms of production and distribution - and monetization: microphones, pickups, mixers, autotuners, amplifiers, filters, mastering artists, distribution companies, Logic Pro, digital-to-analog converters, headphones...

Unless they're seeing a live symphony or literally sitting in the recording studio with an artist, the vast majority of people (99.999%) aren't hearing music performed by the named artist. They're hearing music recordings generated by teams of people and performed by a computer.

Local musicians (the main source of music for people earlier than about 150 years ago) just cannot compete with the supranormal stimulus of pop/rock/soul written and performed and mastered by students of psychology and music and distributed by capitalists.

It's kind of like most of the stuff in a US grocery store. It's overprocessed and it's not really food, but people buy it anyway because their TV told them to.