Had a similar thought, yeah, Spotify is like this. I don't know what the numbers are, but a very, very large majority of musicians make very little money off of Spotify (Weird Al Yankovic said he made enough in a year to buy dinner for himself).

On the other hand, Youtube is pretty good. You can make some money off of youtube viewings, but what it's really great for is building an audience. Musicians know that Youtube is a good tool for building a successful music career.

As for devaluing content with oversaturation, yeah, agree with this. Ironically, media is both the bread and butter of the internet, but it has also become devalued with the shear amount of it. Still, this isn't a problem of the media companies. Content creators can either chose to engage and or not, and hope they breakthrough.

And you kind of said it, "The great commoditization of eyeballs continues." Money makes the world go round, and nothing is free. If we want a vibrant internet, companies have got to find a way to make money (although, monopolies aren't a good thing, but paying for good content and services seems like a good idea).