A popular “musician” is just a front person for an entire organization of producers, videographers, lawyers, promoters, that can get you into venues, choreographers etc.

It still takes a lot to produce a hit and the money is still made from concerts

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/11/137705590/the-...

I can imagine a lot more stories like the one of Billie Eilish and Finneas producing her first album at home...

> This is no humblebrag bedroom studio that turns out to have been professionally outfitted. It’s just a regular bedroom, with a bed against one wall, where Eilish sat to record her vocals, facing a desk and bookshelves and O’Connell’s modest production setup: Apple Logic Pro X, a Universal Audio Apollo 8 interface and a pair of Yamaha HS5 nearfields with an H8S subwoofer

On social media, the common story is bedroom producer because it is so easy for a major entity to promote anyone they want to stardom with a solid budget behind them.

Many of the most popular influencers on social media are corporately backed with songwriters and million dollar production units behind the bedroom cameras. You can usually only tell this when you search BMI and see how many songwriters and engineers names are listed on hit songs.

The hit making "bedroom producer" with 50k+ followers is now mostly smoke and mirrors...

Even a million is nothing. Insta and Twitter followers these days go for about $7 per 1000.

It doesn't cost $45B these days to be loved by a few bot accounts.

You completely forgot to mention her parents.

They eclipse whatever she was doing in her “regular bedroom”

Producing the music is the easy part. It’s everything else I mentioned.

In the indie video game world, you can work on your game for a few years, then once its done, tested and polished, a publisher will want 30% for doing a few months of organizing the release. They value their time at perhaps 1000 times more valuable that your own. Its outrageous.

They spend 1,000 times more than you to build out a network. 30% is lower than what Walmart would charge you if you were lucky enough to get listed. Most people raise prices to cover these and advertising costs. If you tried to replicate that network the time/effort would outweigh the costs.

Spending years on an indie game was never going to be that profitable. I hope you build the game for other reasons aside from profits.

err.. no they don't. An indie publisher is typically one or two marketing dudes sitting in an office somewhere and pretty good at writing press releases. Walmart is a massive retail chain with.. like.. millions of employees and like.. thousands of brick and mortar stores.

Oh, perhaps you thought I was talking about the platforms like Apple, Google, Steam and the like. I don't begrudge them their 30%