I struggle to imagine what you're saying. In the old days if you had 100 monthly listeners that meant you were likely getting on your local radio station at great effort. You had no shelf space at the record store. You were not searchable on the web. The long tail seems irrefutably better served by modern methods.

Artists struggling to make a living on the back of a single success is, if anything, a product of the longer tails of music being a catered to. The gains are much more spread out now.

It's maybe a niche argument but I'd suggest looking at the one hit wonders of today vs yesterday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_one-hit_wonders_in_the...

imo the one hit wonders of yesterday were fairly significant hits. The one hit wonders of the 2010s are vastly more ephemeral in my personal opinion. Probably mostly driven by the fact that they used to be conveyed by pop radio and now I don't hear pop radio EVER. But I also have some doubts that most of these 2010s songs will be able to carry a band forward like the one hits of the 90s.