The period between about 1970 (when the huge generation of Baby Boomers started buying records in fantastic numbers) and 1995 (when the first web browser starte

The period between about 1970 (when the huge generation of Baby Boomers started buying records in fantastic numbers) and 1995 (when the first web browser started making large scale piracy of intellectual property trivial) was the only 25 year period in the history of the world when large numbers of artists managed to get fantastically wealthy. Looking back through the entirety of recorded history, that had never happened before, and it likely never will again. More artists became fantastically wealthy in those 25 years than in the previous 2000 years. It looks very likely that, with the invention of the web browser, we're back to historical norms. This article has lots of data backing up that return to the mean. Being a musician or actor is still a good thing, but it's once again not a very probable way of getting incredibly rich, just as it has been, on average, for the past 2000 years.