Lil Nas X's career has been the one thing that has completely and thoroughly convinced me the music industry, sales, etc, is 100% fixed.
There is no way in hell he moved that many units. I've asked gay people. Who is his biggest audience? It ain't straight black people, it ain't whites, and gays have a variety of different tastes. They don't have the numbers to make him go viral like that. Also, I did my own little research. His first controversial video had 69 million views. I went through the comment section. It was a bots factory. I kept noticing almost the same comments and similar responses to 'who is buying it?' and the responses were almost always 'I bought it'. Click on the profiles, no history.
How can you have the number one song and no tours? He is doing one I think but he can't headline shit. Who is going? Finally, white rap fans only buy black rappers music that black people co-sign first. Black people ain't f*cking with dude..or her..or whatever.
Regards to hip hop specifically, the original rap industry acted like old Civil Rights negroes when it came to white acceptance. The Grammys and MTV wouldn't acknowledge rap. They kept complaining to the Grammys to acknowledge them. Eff the Grammys. At one time the biggest honor in rap was best rapper, album from The Source Awards (white owned magazine by the way at the time, maybe still is) and then later the BET awards. The rap industry should have stayed street. And not give a f*ck about the Grammys.
Then the black rap labels sold out to the major white ones. It wasn't like they were broke. They were millionaires: Def Jam, SugarHill Records, etc, all of them, but they didn't feel like they made it till they were accepted by white daddy. Now look at rap? It's f*cked up.
BET sold itself to Time Warner and that was a wrap after that. There are no more major black owned media companies other than sell out Byron Allen's company. At least half of OWN (Oprah's company) is white owned.
Mainstream media is scared AF a black person with some sort of loyalty to black folks will own a major media company. It's why they didn't want Bill Cosby anywhere near NBC.