You are so right that it affects artists in other media. And a young Bob Dylan is a great example of someone who might have scorned the social media/content creation games.

In the literary world, Joan Didion is an example of someone who, to my knowledge, never played those games. She lived for years into the social media boom, but seems never had a Twitter or Facebook account (unless a publisher created one for her).

What's really interesting is that now a lot of artists are using social media--particularly YouTube--as a way around that promotional-industrial complex. Some new bands, for example, can't get labels to sign them because they don't have Billie Eilish's millions of Instagram followers, so they're bypassing the system and uploading their songs directly to YouTube. And some are doing really well that way.

That way, they're supporting your point: They're saying, we want to focus on making art we see as worthwhile, and if the record labels don't like that, we'll take our art directly to people. It will be interesting to see where all of this goes.