[PeterisP]

Because this matches their usefulness - in services that scale to a huge audience, the less-than-the-best aren't useful much.

Assuming that I'm going to read 50 books of a certain niche genre that has 5000 writers worldwide, the best 50 writers in that niche have a significant economic value (and thus deserve huge rewards, because we want them to continue writing) the next 50 have some value, and the remaining 4900 writers in that niche are useless, they can do it as a hobby if they want but we're not going to support them much - we don't need their writing, because someone else can do it better. Why would I ever want to read the 101st (according to my preferences) best book if I'll never get the time to read the 100 books that I'd like more than that? It might as well have never been written as far as I care.

This is the inevitable result of abundance, of having more choices than you'd possibly need. Think about this from the perspective of food - if you want an apple, and are walking by a tree that has a hundred apples of various ripeness. The few most ripe apples are useful - you pick one of them; if you want a second one or have a friend with you, then you might want a few more... but the 90% that aren't as attractive have zero value if the tree has more apples than anyone could ever want to consume. And this is the case for writing; there's more fiction writing than anyone might ever be able to read, thus you're inevitably reading just a small fraction of it, and if something's good but worse than the many alternatives, then it's worthless.

The same applies in any industry that scales. I want to watch a top-10 footballer, but the top 10000th is useless to watch (although they're really good, they're among the best 0.1% of the millions of soccer players worldwide); the same goes for music, software, all kinds of creative works.

[mulmen]

You are way down the rabbit hole of the JK Rowling example here and have completely missed the overall point. My argument is that the difference between the books you want to read and the rest is smaller than the economic outcomes would lead us to believe.

To make this even more clear, economic gain is disproportionately allocated to a few individuals at the expense of all other participants. It stops being a meritocracy and becomes a lottery for the producers funded by the capitalists at the expense of all other participants.