You don't need to have to have your music reach a million people to make a living as a musician. The Grateful Dead for example had fans that numbered in the thousands, but those fans were actual fanatics that went to every concert and bought every piece of paraphernalia. Most artists today don't understand that model. They think success is about topping charts.
This overstates the case. The Grateful Dead might very well have had millions of fans; they just kept forgetting where they were up to in the count, and so started back at zero out of a basic sense of fairness.
