>"we now have more people creating quality music than ever before in the history of the world"Where exactly are you getting this? I find it extremely unlikely, and I'd bet the opposite. Just because it's now easier to discover artists, does not mean that there are more of them. My position is based on the many former artists I know who abandoned what they did b/c of the futility of being able to support themselves.
There are absolutely more bands now than ever before. In the olden days, you needed a studio full of expensive gear, and sound engineers to work the gear. You needed production facilities to press LPs/CDs and you needed distribution and promotion deals to get your name out there and make something for people to buy. All of this necessitated a big investment, so the concept of the record deal was born, and the labels grew fat and happy, mostly because they exploited the hell out of the struggling artists, with onerous contracts.
Even just being a garage musician was more expensive back then, as instruments and gear used to cost a lot more than it does today.
Today everyone with a PC can record music inexpensively. Reaper is an absolutely fantastic DAW and very fairly priced, and high quality audio interfaces with good preamps can be had for a couple hundred dollars. That's not to say that these people will produce anything of notable quality, but the bar is so low now that basically anyone can give it a go.
For promotion, you can very successfully go by word of mouth on social media, instead of relying on traditional promotion.
For distribution, it is easier now than every before. Anyone can create a Bandcamp profile and upload their music. Bandcamp handles the layouts, tagging, re-encoding and provides streamlined shopping, both for downloadable tracks and for physical merchandise. Their terms are easy and uncomplicated, there are no long confusing contracts, and they're extremely friendly and easy to deal with, in my experience. They take a 15% cut, which reduces to 10% if you sell over a certain amount per year: https://bandcamp.com/pricing
>But the issue is bigger than just creating the most amount of art. On a moral level, an artist should have some ability to control how their art is distributed. Just because it can be easy or free for others to enjoy it doesn't mean that everyone is entitled to it.
Yes, the artist should absolutely have control over how their art is distributed, which is why the big labels need to die, along with their onerous contracts and manipulation.