> While marketing helps, it's but a spark. But I think in your mental model of the internet, you removed all the marketers and influencers! People whose busin

> While marketing helps, it's but a spark. But I think in your mental model of the internet, you removed all the marketers and influencers! People whose business is marketing artists have the ability to get orders of magnitude more exposure for an artist than people who are artists. To deny this would be to deny the importance of concepts like SEO. People who market music select for the musicians who are the easiest to sell. This includes not only "musical goodness," but also image, age, and all kinds of other attributes that aren't part of the music itself. There are even famous record executives who have famously stated publicly that they wouldn't support an admittedly "musically good" artist because of her looks. And looks are just one attribute that adds noise to your metric. There's also a rich history of recording studios paying money to gain popularity for their artists. So unless you have an enormous corpus of evidence it appears that your metric is extremely noisy in the non-musical sense.