Filthy rich and powerful labels may own the final product, but they can’t own your creation process. At least, it’s not common to sell the creation process for an art piece because it’s usually not marketable, not easily so.
I still think this is the best thing we have as artists: the time we invest in our work is valuable, and we can leverage it. If we show our trials, our errors and failures, our successes of course, however big or small they may be, it will help people see the value in our art even more.
However my reasoning falls totally flat as the quality or popularity of an art piece can never be directly paralleled to the amount of work that was invested 
but it’s a possible promotion strategy nonetheless !
How would we go about it ? Taste/appreciation is so subjective. Like in love or friendship where a sign of appreciation depends on the individuals involved and their context, a sign of appreciation from a person to an art piece can be very complex and take many forms. You may never leave a single like or comment under an artist’s publication, never give them any money, but still thoroughly enjoy their work.
For example: i love music, i really do. I listen to music about once or twice a month, the rest of the time i’m the one making music. Some tracks stay with me for days or weeks, i hum them out loud or hear them in my mind. How would you build an online discovery system which accomodates that ?
Do we need to teach music lovers how to interact with a system we deemed “beneficial” so that every person involved, listeners and artists alike, enjoy the process and benefit from it ? This isn’t a rethorical question by the way, i’m really wondering: we’ve been taught to interact with art and media in general in a certain way… should we unlearn that ?
EDIT: just read the other topic about promotion on the Fediverse, lots of post that could be cross referenced here, but i’ll just quote Icaria this time: