The middle man is a load balancer for risk. The middleman makes a bunch of artists moderately rich, and they lose money on most of them and make money on some of them. They take on the risk of letting an unproven artist spend a few years doing something that could turn out to generate little money, and in return they get a big share of the ones that do make money. Now, thanks to the internet, the ones that do make it big can cut out the middleman.

Now there will be no middleman to take on the small risks of many unproven artists, and because of the relentless greed and ego of Chapelle and Swift many young artists will never have the opportunity that they did.