But is it not also an issue of them finding us?
We talk for granted that we are all part information researchers. We are justly capable of elaborate standalone complex organized searches through the internet for talent and meaningful message.
This not even a tenth of the population involves themselves with, as when was the last anyone saw a piece of media content with more than a million likes and compare that with when anyone has seen a piece of media content with more than 10 million views.
The reality remains very few people have the ability, much less the willingness to seek out artists that they could feel deserve their support.
As much as marketing should NOT stay a service offered in exchange for fiat (money), the technology for gratis media curation on a large scale does not exist. Sybil (reputation) systems still depend too much on healthy majorities and can't guess the thoughtfulness (or impulsiveness) of a rating given by a user. (Newgrounds.com attempts this by measure quantity rather than quality of experience as a reviewer)
Unless artists have the ability to really shove their donate buttons in the faces of regular people, libre models won't scale properly.
This remains why patreon advanced our ideological position without doing any more than what paypal was already doing for cheaper. Having a cryptographic key signature, sounds like fancy technology, but all it replaces is a serial number and an on-screen paypal link. The point remains not what technology is used, but how we organize reminders and notices in our economy. Not everyone is a researcher, some people do in fact depend on notices from abstract entity like "the government".
If all someone has to do to donate to an artist, is scan an extra QR code at checkout or ask to have their cash converted to cryptocurrency as a part of the store facilitating their donation, and all the store has to do is complete that conversion, plug in the play stick into a device that expects the first frame of the video to be a QR code signature, and transfer the cryptocurrency to that artists wallet, then this makes it so someone doesn't even need a computer to donate to the arts (which they would need to use liberapay or patreon, at least until liberapay implements their api).