It's helpful to think about it historically. Long ago, there was no recording industry, and music was heard only by people sitting in the same room and at the same time as the person creating music. As music was not ubiquitous, standards were necessarily lower. The very idea of hearing music at all was enough for most. The draw was not "this band will be here" or "we will perform the works of this composer". Just saying "there will be music" was enough. "Music! Wow, I'm there!" Most music was performed and heard by people who knew each other personally. That was the world's primary experience with music. It was very cheap to produce, but there was no economy of scale. Play the song once, it's heard exactly once. Economics for musicians back then were very simple. It was either "I will pay you 100 quatloos to play for this long". "Deal". Or else the music was merely part of a larger event, and no money was involved at all.
The recording industry of course changed all that, making it suddenly economically viable to produce music based on its ability to generate income without a musician present. The economy of scale (perform once, listen to a million times) introduced a new way to earn a living from music, but that economy of scale was offset by a lot of expense involved in the recording, production, distribution and promotion of the product. It also raised the bar for the quality of the music. To maximize profit, it made the most sense to invest in the best musicians available. Unlike the pre-recording days, musicians were competing for business with people in far-flung parts of the world. Being good enough to play in your home county wasn't enough anymore.
That system worked for a lot of people, and it changed the world's perception of music as something recorded and sold as a physical product rather than as a real-time experience. But it also created a long chain of middlemen and middle-machines, all of whom needed to be paid, so the economics got really complicated, (and still are to this day). Suddenly most of the "music" industry was not made up of people creating music. There were now engineers and producers and executives and distributors and DJ's and truck drivers and record store owners and tape recorder manufacturers and on and on and on in a long chain of people positioned between the musician and the listener. The actual musicians were just a single part of this chain, standing way at one end of it.
(Digression: It also created a marvelous bubble in the history of the art itself by encouraging and promoting the best of a certain type of music: Pieces that are short enough to fit within the limits of the technology of records, and which was ideally suited to listening on poor-quality devices (cheap radios) in poor conditions (moving vehicles and noisy households). Also, music which was instantly likable and memorable upon initial hearing and also good enough to bear repeated, unbidden listens. This gave us "Help Me Rhonda", "Over the Rainbow" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Those triumphs couldn't exist without the constraints of the recording industry. Another bubble was the shared experience of everyone knowing the same songs across a wide swath of the culture. At the same time, everyone knew "Bridge Over Troubled Water" all across the U.S. The days of that kind of broad, shared, and concurrent musical experience are almost over for good.)
Now, with home studios and digital streaming, things have gone to a third paradigm, which is more akin to that of the original pre-recording days. The "distance" between performer and audience has collapsed back down again. In many cases, across all music subcultures, there is again no distance between performer and listener, eliminating the need for most of those other middlemen. There is no longer a physical product to be manufactured, making the economies of the whole venture completely different. Most of the music industry has been focused on the physical product. Now that that product is not in demand, it's a new game. At the same time, computing technology has made it so people like me who can't play drums or guitar or bass or bassoon, can make music with those sounds without needing to rely on people who have spent their lives mastering those instruments. People will say "There's nothing like live music by skilled performers", and that may be true. But in 1940 that was also true, yet hearing players on a record or the radio was close enough for most people, given the fact that it was so much less expensive. Today, my bass isn't as good as a live bass player's would be, but I can come close enough.
So can everyone else, and that's the problem with the economics. There's free corn falling from the sky. A lot of farmers need to decide to do something else for a living.