There was a brief period in history when Being In A Band was a big deal. That's bracketed by, perhaps, the British Invasion and Myspace Music. Before that, musicians were low-paid background music systems. After that, anybody could do it at garage-band level. In between was the brief era of the Rock Star. The nostalgia here is for that era.
Yeah. There seems to also be the implicit assumption that (recorded) pop music, whilst only a relatively recent phenomenon, is here to stay. It isn't. It had a golden age after recording and reproduction technology became cheap enough to own and before streaming services came along, gave us too much choice and siloed our tastes. I don't think I'd change much — I mainly listen to 'weird' stuff that probably wouldn't have existed, let alone be discoverable, without such services — but the pop era does seem to be over. No one cares about 'the charts' anymore. In my parents' day it was a primary cultural reference point that seemingly everyone followed; now almost no one I know would be able to tell me what's in the top ten at the moment.
True. It’s not just in music. There is almost no such thing as mainstream culture anymore — it’s exciting for individuals, but also quite worrying, especially when it comes to politics and description of factual events. No wonder democracy seems to be steadily going down the pan.
Josephine Baker was a star. Bach and Mozart were stars. Pythagoras was more famous for music than math, during his lifetime (well over two thousand years ago). The decline of a particular business model is a legit observation but it doesn’t change this fundamental aspect of music.
Not a new observation.