It’s just much more profitable for record labels to have a few superstars than thousands of mini-stars. A usual person won’t follow and buy from 100 music artists. They’ll buy from 1 to 10 or whatever. Having large fandoms allows you to sell more tertiary things like plush toys and shit like that, it wouldn’t be feasible to do that for thousands of artists.

Large fandoms also make people feel like they belong, when there’s a Swiftie fanclub in any small town with dozens of people there’s a community, if only 1 person in a town were a fan of a specific artist, even if there’s 1 in every town, the networking effect would just be basically nonexistent.

And in general there’s just too many amazing musicians. People love making music and as such there’s an oversupply. In addition to the above points that’s just capitalist supply and demand in play.

Well, it’s not “growing” per se, but we produce fertilizers which are “plant food”, so you could say we grow food for our food even for plants.

The last time I remember stuff like this happened, it was because of addon conflicts, fresh Firefox with only ublock origin “fixed it” for many people, indicating some other addon was the problem.