Girl Talk's been using an even more beneficent form of this model since day one, which means far before getting popular. Gregg Gillis has achieved enough succes

Girl Talk's been using an even more beneficent form of this model since day one, which means far before getting popular. Gregg Gillis has achieved enough success to be touring and making money. There's still a couple caveats though: 1) Girl Talk is remixing bits of other songs that people already know, thus there's familiarity. 2) Trying to go through any label and traditional distribution model very likely would not have succeeded anyway, so trying something different wasn't really a choice.