I've done a lot of SEO and my experience is that you can get great amounts of traffic if you think creatively and approach things the right way. If you want to gain traffic by ranking well for "music downloads," good luck! If you, however, research the music niche and find 5 keywords with low competition and 20,000 monthly searches, you could easily build good traffic.
One example - I have a health site, and realized that I could write an article on medications when they were officially named - as until then, the name was a closely kept trade secret. This type of trick could lead to gaining traffic over established players like WebMD who were less nimble.
Ultimately, you need SEO, you need great content, you need everything if you want to succeed. But SEO still works very well and still offers plenty of room for people to outmaneuver and perform the big names.
One example - I have a health site, and realized that I could write an article on medications when they were officially named - as until then, the name was a closely kept trade secret. This type of trick could lead to gaining traffic over established players like WebMD who were less nimble.
Ultimately, you need SEO, you need great content, you need everything if you want to succeed. But SEO still works very well and still offers plenty of room for people to outmaneuver and perform the big names.