I thought the general convention is associating the word clout in reference to A-list musicians, B-list, C-list, etc instead of record executives.
Yeah, but his question is referring to the music industry as a whole. You can't compare an A-list artist to a major shareholder of huge corporate music publishing company in terms of clout.
That will be a complete joke and it doesn't matter who it is and how many records they sold.
Nevertheless, it's obvious artists are the ones who put in work which then makes music publishing companies and records labels to have the current market valuation they have.
No artists mean no music unless the music industry replaces humans with robots.