But, hey, the quasi-communists who thought they were somehow liberating the music from the evil rich people ended up dragging all of the music industry down into poverty.
Ariana Grande, Adele, Billie Eilish, etc. I believe someone called Kendrick Lamar has been popular recently?
Are they rock stars? No, people tastes are a bit different now, but they are stars and they are rich. You not knowing them is a different problem.
Just becaus you don’t know them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There are way more than hundreds of “rock stars” that are getting rich now. There are also way more “rock stars” now than there ever was.
On the other side, in the first half of the 20th century, artists were more likely paid a one-off pittance to come into a studio and record a song, and then the record labels profit from it to this day.
Music is worth less now because the supply is vast and the demand is relatively limited. Pretty simple economics. And most artists have always made their money from touring...while concert prices are more eye watering than ever.
It’s true that in the top 50 richest musicians, most of them were already rock gods before Napster. But they all are rock gods.
But then you have people like Swift, Robbie Williams, Dave Matthews and Dave Grohl, most of which were on the cusp. But Grohl for instance worked hard for more than a decade after Nirvana broke up, and I would be very surprised if a lot of his money didn’t end up coming from a combination of the Foo Fighters and royalties. Commentary on one of those net worth sites: the Foo Fighters “have consistently been one of the highest-grossing touring acts in the world for more than two decades.” So yeah.
Data about “net worth”, especially on free clickbait websites, is garbage speculation with no evidence or basis in reality. It’s not like those website makers have any access to someone’s brokerage accounts and list of assets they have title to or the debt they have.
Boo hoo. Let me play a song on tinniest violin in the world for them.