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The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

(thewalrus.ca)
300 points pseudolus | 3 comments | 28 Jun 25 22:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.975s | source
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parpfish ◴[28 Jun 25 22:58 UTC] No.44408859[source]▶
How many financially self-sustaining musicians should there be? Streaming has caused the number to fall, but recorded music before that likely made it fall as well.

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?

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billy99k ◴[28 Jun 25 23:16 UTC] No.44408966[source]▶
I suppose we can say the same thing about all jobs when AI gets good enough to take them over.
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whstl ◴[28 Jun 25 23:31 UTC] No.44409053[source]▶
We will start thinking about jobs when the tech feudal lords find out there's no more growth, because consumers to their products are being replaced by AI.

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.

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ryandrake ◴[29 Jun 25 01:31 UTC] No.44409657[source]▶
> We will start thinking about jobs when the tech feudal lords find out there's no more growth, because consumers to their products are being replaced by AI.

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.

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cardanome ◴[29 Jun 25 02:32 UTC] No.44409898[source]▶
Rich people selling stuff to other rich people is just moving wealth around, it does not generate wealth.

I sell you stuff worth 5 billion, you give me 5 billion. Nothing happened. Maybe you even consume the product so there is less wealth.

Only labor can generate value. Work is what transforms a thing into another thing that has more value than before. Machines and AI do not create value.

You might wonder what would happen if they had an general AI, maybe actual autonomous robots? Would those create value? Well, at first whoever got the first AGI would get incredibly rich but if everyone had access to that tech, the prices for everything that can produced with it would plummet down until they are the cost of running the AI.

Rich people get richer by employing poor people. So they can extract the value they produce. If they don't employ anyone, they are not making any profit. (Well for actual free markets, you can of course make profit being a monopolist and stuff or just do crime.)

So yes, rich people are screwed. That is why they buy bunkers in New Zealand. That is why we see the rise of fascism, because they will have to tighten the screws to keep the ship running a little while longer.

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1. fragmede ◴[29 Jun 25 05:14 UTC] No.44410525[source]▶
Why keep any ships running other than their own? kill off 90% of the humans, starting with the poor, using robots, after robots can make new robots and fix themselves and do all the other jobs?

If we're looking at extremes, I don't think the ultra rich are in as bad a position as you want them to be.

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2. ringeryless ◴[29 Jun 25 10:34 UTC] No.44411933[source]▶
a lot of ifs there, most of which aren't really in the cards: aka laborless robotic self reproduction? seriously? if we have learned one thing in the last decades it is that complex systems need to be rebooted sometimes because <state>

silicone valley is grifting its own rich people with paper bomb shelters.

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3. whstl ◴[30 Jun 25 17:01 UTC] No.44425544[source]▶
If there’s a constant in history about rich people is that they can’t even wipe their own asses without a slave/servant, so they still need the person responsible for pressing the reset button on the robot.