I'm not so sure. Certainly that they get publicity is something special and very recent (almost post-2000's recent).

However, by far the largest change has been the removing three or four zeros from the capital costs of recording and small scale distribution. These days you can record and do $whatever for sub-$50 (sub-$100 at worst). It used to cost a few hundred dollars just for one 60 minutes track of studio/master grade tape (aka mono)- now the storage is so cheap its de minimus. And, its hard to find something incapable of playing it back (ESPs can push mono 16bit 44.1kHz out after reading it from USB mass storage or SDIO/SPI), distributing 700meg of PCM audio via AWS might be on par with producing stamped audio CD's- but it scales from $0 to infinity. And, good news: we don't distribute PCM anymore- at worst it's half that size, at best <8%.

I can go on.

What hasn't changed are venue fees, heck, ticket fees are worse than ever. Paid advertising has gotten worse over the past 20 years for audio artists (and probably others). And I've typed too much so I'm sure theres more.