I don't agree at all. I've found the YouTube algorithms as good for discovering new singer-songwriters as when I used to see live music a few times a week in Ne

I don't agree at all. I've found the YouTube algorithms as good for discovering new singer-songwriters as when I used to see live music a few times a week in New York decades ago. Many, or even most, of the women that come up in my feed are no more conventionally beautiful than the people you cite. How mainstream was someone like Janis Joplin? She was on the radio, but she was also somewhat counter culture. The women (who don't deserve to be written about as evidence of success without beauty) have hundreds of thousands of subscribers just on youtube, many millions of listens, and I hear their music in stores, commercials and coffee shops. In addition to there being many more avenues for reaching a large audience outside of record labels, there are also quite a few mainstream performers who aren't conventionally attractive who became famous through pseudo-grassroot paths like television contests.