The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

Should we stop thinking about music as a job and start thinking about it as a hobbyist art form? Nobody is out there lamenting that you can’t make a living off of landscape painting. It’s a fun form of self expression that people will do regardless of the economics, so maybe the problem was ever thinking you could make a profession out of it?

Some are already worried: https://fortune.com/europe/2025/06/09/bnpl-loans-klarna-ceo-...

"How many jobs there should be for X" is not a question that can be answered by people whose main intent in the last few years has been to put others out of a job while claiming they're making the world a better place. Aka, us in tech.

The future feudal lords will just sell to each other and ignore the jobless, moneyless masses. We don’t like to hear this, but normal people will likely become less and less economically relevant, to the point where their total economic activity will one day be a rounding error next to the economic activity of the top 0.0N%.

I worked with a founder who dealt with only a small number of very rich customers. He would say “We only sell to the rich because they have the money.” The future looks like a more extreme version of this.