I guess if you only see hobbyists working on a regular basis, you are likely to think they aren't very good or if only they put in a few more hours a week they would be more successful. Well, no shit, Sherlock. If you can't make a living doing art, it will take longer to home your craft into it's highest form. If you don't have time to constantly promote, it doesn't matter how good you are, chances the right people will be exposed go from slim to nil.
Fortunately, there is this fancy new tool which lets artists unintentionally give away their work for free to people that is a relatively recent invention over the past few decades.
Fixed your post for you. I stand 100% by what I said. If you want to make money, go into business or STEM. Then after you make your fortune, you can retire to the countryside and write novels or make artwork to give away for free to people. There is no longer any money to be made in the Arts.
And you can trot out the one or two people who have managed to do the impossible, but they are such a small number that they may as well not even exist. It's like people saying you shouldn't wear your seatbelt because of that one guy who didn't wear his and was able to escape from a fiery car wreck because the seatbelt didn't bind him inside the car. It's ridiculous to focus on miniscule exceptions and completely ignore universal truths in the process.
The Internet has absolutely increased both my visibility as well as the amount I would have otherwise spent on the arts.
With respect to music, I have heard and purchased CDs from many obscure artists that I would never have heard of without the Internet providing them free publicity (other than their time input). With rare exception, every band I have gone to see live in the past 5-10 years has not been associated with a major record label - this basically means, without the Internet, they don't exist in a way I can consume. This entire niche of music exists because of Internet publicity.
You can claim it's not the case. But for me and the dozens of bands I've seen live, in person, over this time period, their ability to exist in any meaningful way was exclusively dependent on their ability to advertise, market, and promote themselves online. Not being associated with a major record label meant you were pretty much out of luck for a musician pre-Internet. If you were lucky, you could play in a bar and get exposure and hopefully sign with a big company (you realize this is how the Beatles got popular, working with an agent to get signed on with a major record company). There's even
an entire wikipedia page dedicated to this concept. Notice how often "the Internet" is listed as a reason it is possible for them to survive.
There are independent authors here posting
on this board of their financial success with writing content - even part time! Are you calling them liars?
In the physical realm, the Internet has made insane benefits to independent sellers. Look around on etsy - there are hundreds upon hundreds of people selling their products in a way they simply could not have before. Anecdotally, my wife and I have bought pottery from a seller hundreds of miles away. That sale would have not been possible pre-Internet.
Your objections simply aren't founded in reality. You lament, "to restore" without having made any clear evidence that the arts ever
were consistently and systemically profitable for anyone who wanted to be an artist. You can't "restore" something to something it's never been. Plus you are straight up ignoring evidence, whether anecdotal or comprehensive, which is contrary to your dogmatically held viewpoint.
The problem here isn't a lament about the arts being profitable. It's that you want the arts to be profitable regardless of one's skill, abilities, or effort. You want artists to be horribly mediocre or bad and still make money doing it.