The problem with your analogy is that a popular artist will get rich. Here you will only get "rich" if you get whales to upvote your post. Many of us got more than 50-100 real upvotes from minnows and dolphins and the total paid sum was nominal. Just some minutes ago a meme got $850 with a @ned vote.
I'm not saying no one should upvote memes, I'm just saying the system needs a lot of tweaking. What about great forgotten posts? Who upvotes them? There are 0 rewards for voting undervalued and overlooked content.
I think if you make a post highlighting undervalued content it would do well.
Some of them are a real smash indeed. Some were so good that I "revolted". The post highlighting the undervalued content got >1000$ and the undervalued posts got something like 30$ on aggregate. Yet he was theoretically benefiting them as he was directing people to their articles. What more could he do? In any case I proposed to him to give some of this money to the 5 article writers.
If he manages to get popular. Sometimes he won't become popular and it's not because his work is not good. It happens.