It's much easier to be "original" in your artistry than it is to copy. Being original means just doing whatever pops into your head, improvising on a keyboard or whatever. But to the extent you're truly original, chances are good that your art is going to be a completely solitary endeavor. Unless you somehow manage to re-invent most of what others did, it's probably going to be kind of crude and there will probably be little interest in it.

To copy or to imitate is harder. It takes actual work trying to sound like someone else, learning someone else's music or style. It's also far more likely to lead to making something that actually sounds good.

But ideally you should be doing both. You absolutely should spend time trying to sound like or learn the style of other artists. You may find that you just can't imitate someone, in which case you then attempt to imitate someone else, and someone else, etc. Ultimately you should go from imitation, to incorporating and finding "your own voice". You should be far more worried about sounding crude/rudimentary and just not very good, than in sounding unoriginal.

To the extent you go towards highly original, it's almost certainly going to be a solitary hobby.

But, sometimes you just have stuff in you that has to come out. It's not that you're what to be a good musician or painter or whatever. It's that there are images or music that's just already there in you. Music your subconscious wrote in dreams, etc. And you're just want a solid copy of it. Something so you won't forget it. Or you want to flesh it out a bit. Sometimes you don't care at all if anyone else is ever even slightly interested.

Or sometimes you start out doing the latter and then over the years slowly forget and then end up eventually thinking, gee I should have done the former. I should have spent more time trying to imitate. But you've just forgotten that being popular, and for that matter, sounding particularly good had pretty much nothing at all to do with why you went to the trouble to do this in the first place.

It had nothing to do with it... but then it did start to matter a little bit. You did start to care just a bit that no one really wanted anything to do with your music. And so here and there, you gradually started getting interested in being popular. Imitating so that you could be popular instead of expressing exactly what was within you and doing so in complete isolation.