People who buy music tend these days to buy—or steal it—online, a song at time. But even if nobody achieves album sales on a Jacksonian scale, couldn’t he or she be an artist every bit as popular, every bit as loved, every bit as listened to?

Probably not. The pop-idol field—like every field that can lead to super-fame—is more crowded than it has ever been, and the variety of routes to stardom keeps growing. When the Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, more than 70 million people watched. Yes, the Beatles were that good. But at the time, there were three networks and the radio. No Facebook, Twitter, video games, movie multiplexes, Sirius radio, malls or a dozen other potential drains on an audience. There weren’t a lot of rock bands, either. George Harrison was the only Beatle who’d visited the United States before the group landed for that historic performance.

Likewise, Michael Jackson had MTV, which was the place for music videos, and as close to an Ed Sullivan platform as he needed. Of course, it’s been a long time since MTV played hour after hour of prime-time videos. Today, you watch music videos on YouTube, but because there are no programmers to curate what you see, every artist has to compete with thousands of others. And now that anyone with a computer has a miniature studio, and anyone with an Internet connection can post a song, there are more genres, subgenres and artists than ever.

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