The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

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?

I suppose we can say the same thing about all jobs when AI gets good enough to take them over.

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.

> 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.

>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.”

So you worked with someone who you claim to be a direct -knowing even- participant in this trend. You presumably benefited from this work too. No?

It's impressive how many people bemoan the dangers they see in a thing, while continuing to contribute to its growth, again and again and again, as long as the personal benefit keeps working their way.

He's a real Adolf Eichmann, that one

This escalated quickly!