The perception is that success in the field is driven largely by factors other than the quality of music. It'd be extremely interesting to see a Richard Bachman / Steven King [1] type experiment with a Desmond Child, Max Martin, or whoever else.
Keep their existence completely out of the picture, and have them scout and produce talented no-name, but require the no-name to use only the sort of avenues that would be openly available to anybody/everybody: YouTube, Tunecore, social media, etc. Would the new party now be meaningfully likely to have a real breakthrough?
A lot of the public believes that what you're talking about already happens, for what it's worth. "Industry plants."
Something can be extremely catchy yet widely panned as low quality in music, so even within "just the music" there are several dimensions at play regardless of marketing, etc. Such as whether it's timed right - are there enough people ready for that song at that time?
The idea that "most people will just listen and be fans of whatever the big media companies put out there" doesn't stand up much examination or conversation with "most people."
People do often make breakthroughs on soundcloud, TikTok, whatever - do you think having the invisible support of a Max Martin would lower their chances? You'd need to do your experiment a hundred times or thousand times or so before you could really compare the success rate of your plants to the rest of the crowd, but it's hard for me to believe that they wouldn't have an advantage. The music industry isn't known for their charity, if they could get away with not paying those people without another label beating them in the market, why would they?
But the qualities of the song are not what make it popular. With "pop" music there are far more important forces at play, namely the quantity and quality of the song's publicity. One of the big things you get with a big time producer is big time connections and a lot of "airplay" in mixes, commercials, TV shows, etc. You also open the door for more collaborations with other popular artists.
Occasionally you'll have a song that breaks through due to sheer catchy-ness, but this is the exception rather than the rule.
In practice you need both. Max Martin himself has produced and songwritten for plenty of no-names, but for an artist that has the requisite marketing support, bad or uncatchy pop songs can absolutely ruin an artist who would otherwise make it big.
This is admittedly very niche but I see your point.
Also: I remember a time in the early 00s when almost every song on MTV began with Rodney Jerkins whispering “DARKCHILD” over the music.
Ultimately isn’t it just branding though? Would you buy Coca-Cola if it had some other label on the bottle? Or watch Mission Impossible 14 starring Some Dude? I’m not sure there’s a lot of fields where things are really competing on their own merits rather than the accumulation of their past successes.
Keep their existence completely out of the picture, and have them scout and produce talented no-name, but require the no-name to use only the sort of avenues that would be openly available to anybody/everybody: YouTube, Tunecore, social media, etc. Would the new party now be meaningfully likely to have a real breakthrough?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman