The problem is that solo indie doesn't work well in any medium.
Everything worth doing benefits from having team members. I think novelists are the closest to still doing things solo, but they still have publishers, editors, beta readers, proofreaders, sensitivity readers, people who check their research if they care about historical accuracy, etc.
I think there was a slow-motion bubble from maybe the 1980s until the 2010s where solo indie game dev worked because:
- Video games were hard to make
- Computers were hard to use
- The tools sucked
- Almost nobody knew how to program
So if you were a smart person who could program half-decently, you had the makings of a game. Now the world is better, and the solo style is left behind.
I don't know much about music, but I speculate musicians would say the same. You might be able to play a bunch of instruments, do your own mixing, publish yourself on Bandcamp and whatever, but dollar for dollar most of the industry is singers who don't write their own songs, backup dancers with no names, and session musicians who are in the studio when the recording is done.
Calling it "clone culture" misses the point: Games are easy to make now. Indie dev is probably never going to be as hip as when Braid came out. And even Jon Blow didn't do it solo, he bought the music and I think contracted an artist for Braid. Specialization works, scale works.