There are lots of smaller independent record labels making good money from streaming - and some making really quite large amounts of money from streaming, often with very small teams.
A lot of people talk about tiny payments from streaming, comparing it to the "old model" where a CD would be sold for $20/€20/£20. However, the actual economics of those album sales are not as straightforward as they seem. The label would get nowhere near $20 for the sale. In fact, the label often got well under half of the retail price, with significant chunks of the retail price going to the retailer and the wholesaler - with another non-significant cost going on manufacture.
This began to crumble with digital downloads - suddenly people realised that they didn't need to stump up for a whole album's worth of tracks, some of which - to a greater or lesser extent may have been "filler". So where before a label could press albums and be relatively certain on the return, with digital downloads a lot of people started cherry picking the tracks they wanted to buy, rather than buying the whole album, and although manufacture and shipping records around the country was no longer required - saving a bunch of cash - it meant labels took a significant dip.
In a software context, the music business simply moved from up front licensing to a subscription model.
That's definitely had impact on the wider economics of how revenues stack in the recorded music business, but it's not as catastrophic as some people might pictured it from the outside.
If you want to run a label, though, looking at streaming payments means you're going to fail, because this isn't the challenge. And it's also not the whole of the business, there are other revenue streams for labels, like synchronisation, public performance revenues, and physical music products which, although a tiny proportion of music revenues overall, can be a significant revenue stream for strong independent labels with an engaged audience/customer base.
The challenge is signing artists who are going to create recordings that people like - and then finding audiences for that music, engaging them, creating content and campaigns to keep them interested, and building long term revenue streams, and selling them stuff. A&R and marketing are more important today than they have ever been - if you don't have great talent, and you don't know how to market that talent, then it doesn't matter if streaming pays a cent a stream or a dollar a stream - you're not going to have a business model.
(My credentials: one of my businesses advises a large number of independent record labels on copyright, digital revenue streams and strategy)