[franl]

Found the video where Russ says he was making around $100k per month before any label involvement: https://youtu.be/OebNTkTfzHU. I know this is the land of “that’s just survivorship bias!” And I certainly agree that luck and timing plays a massive role in billionaire level startup success, but this guy in particular is a few orders of magnitude of success below that (even if he’s still an outlier). I’m sure he still benefited from luck and timing, but he also was methodical about creating music non-stop, getting better at production, rapping, and writing, and marketing himself. My point being show me someone who has worked as hard and as smart as he has, who picked a niche of music that has large audiences (aka high Total Addressable Market), and who released as much content as him, and I will show you someone who is having non-trivial streaming success - again maybe not $1M+ annually - but something material beyond just scraping by. That doesn’t mean Big Tech is absolved of sin in how it distributes profits or exerts monopoly control or whatever, but I think we often overlook the opportunities these networks have provided for people that would otherwise live in obscurity with no audience whatsoever.