What ppl in the fiat world dont understand is you dont need 1m streams to start earning or get a billboard hit. Well... maybe you do in the legacy world because the cost to enter is so high. But we have the technology and the solution is easy. Scale down your expenses and you can lower the bar on receipts. Gross earnings dont matter if you don't net.
You can have a smaller volume of listeners with a higher proportion of paying fans and still come out ahead. By all means keep grinding out streams on legacy media if your goal is to one day have the privilege of paying 50% gross earnings to a label.
Then anything that scales up again is just icing on top.