This article takes an extremely violent and brutal cultural system - where millions compete for attention within a platform economy designed to concentrate visibility - and presents it as natural, fair, almost liberating…. “You should be grateful for the opportunity to lose.” He describes only two possible models:
1. old label gatekeeping
2. a hyper-capitalist platform market
The example about “100 professionals remain” is absurd, because it implicitly suggests that the function of culture is to produce superstars, everyone else is simply a failed applicant… but that’s never how at least indie music actually worked. Music is not sports.
“You wouldn’t have had a chance before” is also a really really bad argument. First of all, it’s a deeply neoliberal argument. Imagine applying the same logic elsewhere:
“You should be grateful for the gig economy. Before, you might not have had a job at all.”
Or:
“You should be grateful to be underpaid as a freelancer. The alternative might have been unemployment.” All it really does is legitimize bad structures by pointing to a hypothetical worse alternative.
It’s Silicon Valley ideology disguised as realism. I really dislike this tendency to describe platform capitalism as if it were a force of nature….
Spotify is not rainfall. It is a highly engineered corporate infrastructure built around engagement, scale, algorithmic visibility and market concentration.
A lot of people are mourning the destruction of cultural middle grounds: local scenes, independent media, sustainable DIY ecosystems, smaller touring circuits, slower forms of discovery, spaces where music could exist outside constant self-branding and content production.
The problem is not that more people can make music now. That part is beautiful. The problem is that nearly all musical life is increasingly forced through a tiny number of platform infrastructures optimized for extraction, speed, visibility and infinite competition.
That is not democratization. It is centralization disguised as openness. Yes, more people can upload music now. Everyone can open a shop in the desert - congrats. But access is not the same thing as meaningful visibility, sustainability or cultural health.
I agree with “Access is not the same thing as meaningful visibility, sustainability or cultural health.”, 100%.
This article is about access though. Just don’t expect it to be about what it’s not about. :-)
Maybe one day I’ll have the pleasure to provide my take on regional, national and continental cultural policies. That day hasn’t come yet, though.
As a music producer though, writing with full skin in the game, I know I prefer living in a world of democratic access and little revenue vs a world of limited access and likely no revenue.
Another world is possible. 100%. This article is about stopping being nostalgic about a damn eldorado that minor artists would be out of anyway.
This really helped clarify my thoughts. I think that's what's missing in this take. Forcing everyone to become a little business person on the tech oligarchs platform is not really democratization. Some kind of shared institution that seeks to bring good artist to light would be a better structure to aim for.
Thanks for the comment. I'd push back, though — I think the take misses something important about the history of art.
Every artist we celebrate today had serious economic backing. The romantic image of the artist working in isolation, free from any comfortable structure around them, is a myth that took shape in the 19th century. It still lingers, but it doesn't reflect reality.
Michelangelo, Bernini, Leonardo — funded by popes, kings, and wealthy families. The Dutch masters — funded by rich merchant families. The Pyramids of Giza — state-funded on a massive scale. Pretty much any form of art we still remember had a deep, two-way link with the ability to be financed.
That said, none of this means I don't think different economic models for music are possible — I do. But that's not what this article is about, as I already mentioned to Nicolaj.
Another example is what happened to photography with the advent of digital camera and then really good cameras in your pockets. A ton of mediocre pictures gets added every second but that does not degrade the quality of the best of the photographers.
> your core skill is maybe 30% of your business model. The other 70% is the rest of your business model.
Exactly because of these 70% trumping the other 30% is why we have (also) low quality music at the top. Being at the top almost does not depend on making good music.
But this is not new, and not exclusive to music.
It's just painful for people who are really in love with their art or craft, because they spent and will spend their whole lives seeing people way less skilled than them making top 5, while they will be pigeon-holed to their local or niche market at best.
At the same time, they don't want to spend 70% of their time building relationships and business strategies. So there's that.
I see you're making a good point, and I receive your comment as a further extension of my argument. Thanks for providing me and anyone reading such a good insight.
I just want to double down on this. The risk here is an increase in selection of business savvy self promoters over really amazing artists that aren't as good at that. There is still a need for some kind of institution that seeks out talent and helps bring it to light. What does that look like in the future? Everyone cannot be their own everything just because of some software tools.
First - really appreciated the clear thinking in this post, and particularly the push back against a pervasive yet rarely critically examined narrative among artists (musicians in my circle). I'm not sure I completely agree with your conclusions but mostly because there are factors you don't consider: like the fact that there ARE design goals built into these marketplaces and there are alternative designs possible that could distribute benefits differently.
But in response to this comment: the 30/70 rule you posit can be interpreted in different ways. If you believe artistry requires effort: then diluting your effort by diverting 70% to business skills that are not only not intrinsic to the art but are arguably common to many other artistic forms - then there is a net impoverishment to the art implied. This is why there are managers and agents - but they can only afford to participate for artists at a certain scale of the market.
Many artists believe that it's not: some good artists are good self-promoters and some aren't; it's that these are either/or skillsets, and that's why bad art floats to the top.
The fact that there are design goals built into these marketplaces is orthogonal to my argument. My focus here is that artists are trading an oversupply of access for what they perceive as scarce revenue — but the truth is revenue has always been scarce. That's not new.
And I'm deliberately not getting into the ethics of the platforms here — because if we open that door, we'd also have to open the door on the ethics of the producers and labels, who were hardly saints throughout the 20th century.
On the 30/70 question: yes, some of those functions can absolutely be delegated to managers and agents. That's still true today. I actually run a company called Scaling Tales where we handle personal branding on behalf of executive freelancers — so delegation is literally part of my own model. The point of the article isn't that you can't delegate. The point is that you can't ignore that part of the work. Pretending it doesn't exist, or that good art alone will float to the top, is what I'm pushing back against.
The power-law argument is compelling and the RIAA data makes it hard to dismiss. The democratisation-expands-downward framing is genuinely useful.
The counter I'd offer: it holds for music because listeners can still hear the difference. The signal stays legible even in a crowded market. With knowledge work, the signal itself is what's under pressure — good analysis and convincing-but-wrong analysis are getting harder to tell apart, especially at speed. It's not just more noise in the market. It's that the reader's ability to sort is degrading too.
So the guitarist's problem and the knowledge worker's problem aren't quite the same. One is market crowding. The other might be market confusion — and your model doesn't fully account for that distinction.
The loss aversion / availability bias framing is exactly right though. The crowd of struggling writers is visible. The counterfactual isn't.
The Market for Lemons is exactly the model I was groping toward — thank you for the shorthand. The mechanism fits: information asymmetry between producer and consumer that the market can't correct for, driving quality out.
The thing I'd add to Akerlof's frame for this moment specifically: in his model, the seller knows the car is a lemon. A lot of AI-assisted knowledge work is being produced by people who genuinely can't tell. The asymmetry isn't just between reader and writer... it's also internal to the producer. That might be a worse failure mode than the classic Lemons setup, because at least a lemon-seller could choose to signal quality. Here the producer doesn't know there's a signal to send.
It is an interesting perspective! You are right! Musicians became this(*) rich only when recording was invented and they suddenly shifted from mediocristan to extremistan — to use Nassim Taleb’s words.
(*) for nitpickers out there: yes, many musicians were rich way before the invention of music recording and selling, but you get the point if you are willing to. That was another… championship. Quantity makes quality.
Musicians become rich when the populace needs more bread and circuses to keep us distracted from our miserable way of living. Same reason footballers were only paid a pittance 150 years ago and it was something men would do after work not as work. We find when “artists” are getting paid more than farmers then the nervous system has flipped.
Definitely, it's not only true for music, but I wouldn't frame it in terms of winners and losers. Especially when it comes to art, there is no winning, there is no losing. The economics are just one of the games played (legitimately) on top of art.
Yeah, it's funny how we often mix up access with quality. More people making music doesn't mean the good stuff disappears; it just means we need to sift through a bit more noise to find it.
So many parallels to music - photography, writing, the movie industry, basically anything created and thought of as a craft. The internet snapping into existence democratized a lot of things for everyone else - and the platforms gave them the on-ramps and monetization tools (MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, etc.). But there will always be people at the top of anything after a few years, who will tighten the valve between the top and the middle/bottom of any market to meet the demands of shareholders/investors. New overlords always seem to appear at some point. AI is no different. Yes, AI slop will be everywhere, but non-AI slop was already out there - just look at all the lead generation crap thrust at the market the last 10 years.
One thing you seemed to miss, was the demands on a public company versus a private one. Spotify is a public company. Many record companies were public. They had to answer to shareholders, which has a lot to do with how things unfolded, what they did or didn't do. I'm not saying that is an excuse, I'm saying that it's a 3rd dimension to the argument (1 is artists, 2 is Spotify/the record labels, 3 is investors/shareholders).
It is an interesting and legitimate perspective. My article is more about the musicians and friends who complain about not making enough money in a world that is only an alternative to a world in which they would make no money. Far from me stating that this is the best of all the possible worlds, especially if we talk about digital markets. ;-)
I have wondered how music transferring from a primarily live to primarily recorded does to the market.
When anyone can have nearly free music at their party, restaurant, club, etc., how much does the market for live music sink for local musicians. Why get a local band, when you can play the hits over speakers? Why go see a mediocre local band, when you can play your favorite at home? This predates the digital/ streaming changes by decades, but it still reflects the massive increase in availability of music.
Good observation — and I think it goes even deeper than the live-vs-recorded shift. For pub and venue owners, the competition has long been DVDs, musicals, big-screen projections, recorded music, streaming — you name it. I've often explained the difficulty I had finding good gigs (both with my own bands and with bands I worked with) in exactly these terms: the competition isn't other bands. For someone whose business is selling beer and sandwiches to a constant rotation of customers, the competition is entertainment, full stop. That's why football, cricket, and soccer end up on the same screens — it's all about enjoyable time, not quality music.
This is true for the kind of venue where music can be piped through a speaker. Theaters and symphonic halls are a different conversation.
It can be written of all artistic domains: publishing is the first one that comes to my mind. How many writers are out there, often self-publishing? How many are actually selling? Same
Happened upon this on May 19, 2026. I've been an independent recording artist for nearly 25 years. Not famous. No hits. Rarely play live. And yet I have managed to turn my catalog into a business.
Spotify isn't the only DSP in the US. Why would any musician continue to subscribe to or promote their music on that service? After their thresholds... their fake bands... accusing artists of botted streams when they didn't do it... the AI music... Ek's investment in the war machine...
"Anyone can make music now" = I think what is meant here is "anyone can distribute music now". What's wrong with that? When I started, in the early 2000s, it was something like $69 or $89 to distribute an album, and it took several months to roll out. Since things like Distrokid and Routenote came along, it's been much cheaper and quicker to achieve worldwide distribution and collect royalties from anywhere. Again, what's wrong with that? There is a genre for everything.
I know where that's going. I know how some musicians are. Somebody is a snob and wants to be a gatekeeper to get rid of all the competition: "We hate it when our friends become successful. And if they're Northern, that makes it even worse."
"Musicians don't get paid enough" = I'm still waiting for a musician to make the business case on this topic. I've been listening to noise on this subject for almost 15 years. Exactly how much should musicians be paid? Who shall set the wages? Where will the money come from?
The reality is: don't sign bad contracts, but be open to different ways to pitch, license, and curate the songs in your catalog. Don't let anything sit on a shelf. Don't subscribe to businesses that have repeated hostile attitudes towards artists and composers. Don't buy ads from billionaires. If you make mistakes, pivot and don't do it again. Pay your quarterly taxes. Listen to your CPA. Stop being jealous of others. It's a big world out there.
Good article but it misses a key point. Spotify has made very much money from and has built a large part of its ubiquity on those small artists, the very ones the old system ignored. Labels didn’t make any money from the small artists they didn’t sign, by definition. In the same way, those small artists had nothing to do with the labels’ success as platforms the way they do with Spotify
Love this article, it is very accurate. There is one caveat, session musicians, sound engineers, producers etc will feel the difference financially as AI use becomes more accepted in music creation process.
Thanks—and you're right. As with all professions that are ancillary to another, in this case, all the roles that exist to help bring music to the public, we'll feel their loss.
Just like we already feel the absence of the many luthiers and instrument makers in general who were still working a decades ago.
Phenomenal post. I feel like I don't see music discussed in aggregate this clearly very often
Musicians would still do it for the love of the game, of course. The fact that many of my musician friends (im not one) can supplement their income at ALL is awesome.
Music is fundamental to humans
I will say, sometimes genres I listen to get a bad rep because many untalented producers flock to it and pump out garbage. This always happened but it's worse now for sure. But theres still so much good new music that it's not worth complaining about
As for code- im not sure the jump is that clean
Maybe this is controversial but a lot of the vibe coding wave is people who don't realize they are customers.
Let me put you on game- it's an essential strategy in selling software to frame your product as a tool. You aren't paying for a product, but rather a tool to carry out your work.
It's a jedi mind trick to get people to take responsibility for the output of your software and still pay out the ass for it
That's what these "vibe coding" tools are. People pay thinking it will help them turn that app idea of theirs into a reality.
Like. Music has intrinsic value.
So democratizing music = more music = more value
Slop apps have no intrinsic value
So democratizing writing code = more apps = ??? Certainly not more value
The transformative part of ai is not going to be the mountain of slop it creates, but rather the way it reshapes existing patterns of work. Not ai => new software, but how do we harness ai to carry out what we were going to be doing anyway, freeing us up to do more
Broadly I think that yes it is going to dramatically empower everyone to do more, so I'm being nitpicky. But I just want to give musicians more credit than slop farmers
I would insist on my analogy, if you allow me to do so.
Let me explain:
Slop apps will be left alone because no one will be willing to pay for them.
Customers in developer's clothes? They will have their skin in the game: if they make slop apps, they'll pay the price. If they will be satisfied with their own work, then value will have been created.
The analogy?
The very same is for music:
Music has no intrinsic value. There are tons of music I would cancel from Earth and so everyone of us — no matter how tolerant and omnivorous you are: there is a limit which each of us can't go over and still call it "pleasa..", no, "*valuable* music".
Everybody is free to create their own music, but listeners won't listen to it if it's not... valuable to them, just as much slop/non-slop apps.
I’m half agreeing with your takes but my main pushback on all of them is that you’re sounding a whole lot like my old economics professors. In the sense that I’m nodding along but those theories always sound great in a vacuum with just one player (your striving musician or complainer) but are missing the greater game theory and incentives and other actors at play. Would love to nerd out more with you if you’re keen!
This article takes an extremely violent and brutal cultural system - where millions compete for attention within a platform economy designed to concentrate visibility - and presents it as natural, fair, almost liberating…. “You should be grateful for the opportunity to lose.” He describes only two possible models:
1. old label gatekeeping
2. a hyper-capitalist platform market
The example about “100 professionals remain” is absurd, because it implicitly suggests that the function of culture is to produce superstars, everyone else is simply a failed applicant… but that’s never how at least indie music actually worked. Music is not sports.
“You wouldn’t have had a chance before” is also a really really bad argument. First of all, it’s a deeply neoliberal argument. Imagine applying the same logic elsewhere:
“You should be grateful for the gig economy. Before, you might not have had a job at all.”
Or:
“You should be grateful to be underpaid as a freelancer. The alternative might have been unemployment.” All it really does is legitimize bad structures by pointing to a hypothetical worse alternative.
It’s Silicon Valley ideology disguised as realism. I really dislike this tendency to describe platform capitalism as if it were a force of nature….
Spotify is not rainfall. It is a highly engineered corporate infrastructure built around engagement, scale, algorithmic visibility and market concentration.
A lot of people are mourning the destruction of cultural middle grounds: local scenes, independent media, sustainable DIY ecosystems, smaller touring circuits, slower forms of discovery, spaces where music could exist outside constant self-branding and content production.
The problem is not that more people can make music now. That part is beautiful. The problem is that nearly all musical life is increasingly forced through a tiny number of platform infrastructures optimized for extraction, speed, visibility and infinite competition.
That is not democratization. It is centralization disguised as openness. Yes, more people can upload music now. Everyone can open a shop in the desert - congrats. But access is not the same thing as meaningful visibility, sustainability or cultural health.
Nikolaj, I see your point. Really.
I agree with “Access is not the same thing as meaningful visibility, sustainability or cultural health.”, 100%.
This article is about access though. Just don’t expect it to be about what it’s not about. :-)
Maybe one day I’ll have the pleasure to provide my take on regional, national and continental cultural policies. That day hasn’t come yet, though.
As a music producer though, writing with full skin in the game, I know I prefer living in a world of democratic access and little revenue vs a world of limited access and likely no revenue.
Another world is possible. 100%. This article is about stopping being nostalgic about a damn eldorado that minor artists would be out of anyway.
This really helped clarify my thoughts. I think that's what's missing in this take. Forcing everyone to become a little business person on the tech oligarchs platform is not really democratization. Some kind of shared institution that seeks to bring good artist to light would be a better structure to aim for.
Thanks for the comment. I'd push back, though — I think the take misses something important about the history of art.
Every artist we celebrate today had serious economic backing. The romantic image of the artist working in isolation, free from any comfortable structure around them, is a myth that took shape in the 19th century. It still lingers, but it doesn't reflect reality.
Michelangelo, Bernini, Leonardo — funded by popes, kings, and wealthy families. The Dutch masters — funded by rich merchant families. The Pyramids of Giza — state-funded on a massive scale. Pretty much any form of art we still remember had a deep, two-way link with the ability to be financed.
That said, none of this means I don't think different economic models for music are possible — I do. But that's not what this article is about, as I already mentioned to Nicolaj.
Another example is what happened to photography with the advent of digital camera and then really good cameras in your pockets. A ton of mediocre pictures gets added every second but that does not degrade the quality of the best of the photographers.
Exactly!
Still, 15 years ago we could hear grumpy people complaining about "everybody shooting photos nowadays"!
This here is the core of the whole conversation:
> your core skill is maybe 30% of your business model. The other 70% is the rest of your business model.
Exactly because of these 70% trumping the other 30% is why we have (also) low quality music at the top. Being at the top almost does not depend on making good music.
But this is not new, and not exclusive to music.
It's just painful for people who are really in love with their art or craft, because they spent and will spend their whole lives seeing people way less skilled than them making top 5, while they will be pigeon-holed to their local or niche market at best.
At the same time, they don't want to spend 70% of their time building relationships and business strategies. So there's that.
I see you're making a good point, and I receive your comment as a further extension of my argument. Thanks for providing me and anyone reading such a good insight.
I just want to double down on this. The risk here is an increase in selection of business savvy self promoters over really amazing artists that aren't as good at that. There is still a need for some kind of institution that seeks out talent and helps bring it to light. What does that look like in the future? Everyone cannot be their own everything just because of some software tools.
I think we'll figure it out, but it'll be bumpy.
Exactly so.
First - really appreciated the clear thinking in this post, and particularly the push back against a pervasive yet rarely critically examined narrative among artists (musicians in my circle). I'm not sure I completely agree with your conclusions but mostly because there are factors you don't consider: like the fact that there ARE design goals built into these marketplaces and there are alternative designs possible that could distribute benefits differently.
But in response to this comment: the 30/70 rule you posit can be interpreted in different ways. If you believe artistry requires effort: then diluting your effort by diverting 70% to business skills that are not only not intrinsic to the art but are arguably common to many other artistic forms - then there is a net impoverishment to the art implied. This is why there are managers and agents - but they can only afford to participate for artists at a certain scale of the market.
Many artists believe that it's not: some good artists are good self-promoters and some aren't; it's that these are either/or skillsets, and that's why bad art floats to the top.
How would you respond to this "belief model"?
Thanks for the thoughtful pushback. A few things:
The fact that there are design goals built into these marketplaces is orthogonal to my argument. My focus here is that artists are trading an oversupply of access for what they perceive as scarce revenue — but the truth is revenue has always been scarce. That's not new.
And I'm deliberately not getting into the ethics of the platforms here — because if we open that door, we'd also have to open the door on the ethics of the producers and labels, who were hardly saints throughout the 20th century.
On the 30/70 question: yes, some of those functions can absolutely be delegated to managers and agents. That's still true today. I actually run a company called Scaling Tales where we handle personal branding on behalf of executive freelancers — so delegation is literally part of my own model. The point of the article isn't that you can't delegate. The point is that you can't ignore that part of the work. Pretending it doesn't exist, or that good art alone will float to the top, is what I'm pushing back against.
And then there's the Barbell effect: the top artists earn more than ever and part of the revenue now goes to the long tail, hollowing out the middle.
The power-law argument is compelling and the RIAA data makes it hard to dismiss. The democratisation-expands-downward framing is genuinely useful.
The counter I'd offer: it holds for music because listeners can still hear the difference. The signal stays legible even in a crowded market. With knowledge work, the signal itself is what's under pressure — good analysis and convincing-but-wrong analysis are getting harder to tell apart, especially at speed. It's not just more noise in the market. It's that the reader's ability to sort is degrading too.
So the guitarist's problem and the knowledge worker's problem aren't quite the same. One is market crowding. The other might be market confusion — and your model doesn't fully account for that distinction.
The loss aversion / availability bias framing is exactly right though. The crowd of struggling writers is visible. The counterfactual isn't.
A model that fully accounts for that distinction and that I have used for two decades now to position myself:
The market for the lemons.
If you don't know it, look for it on Wikipedia. ;-)
The Market for Lemons is exactly the model I was groping toward — thank you for the shorthand. The mechanism fits: information asymmetry between producer and consumer that the market can't correct for, driving quality out.
The thing I'd add to Akerlof's frame for this moment specifically: in his model, the seller knows the car is a lemon. A lot of AI-assisted knowledge work is being produced by people who genuinely can't tell. The asymmetry isn't just between reader and writer... it's also internal to the producer. That might be a worse failure mode than the classic Lemons setup, because at least a lemon-seller could choose to signal quality. Here the producer doesn't know there's a signal to send.
Musicians making money was a brief anomaly. They’ve been poor for most of human history, but blessed with a wealth that muggles can’t understand.
Mozart died penniless and was buried in an unmarked grave.
Ask your guitarist friend if he’s really about that life or not.
It is an interesting perspective! You are right! Musicians became this(*) rich only when recording was invented and they suddenly shifted from mediocristan to extremistan — to use Nassim Taleb’s words.
(*) for nitpickers out there: yes, many musicians were rich way before the invention of music recording and selling, but you get the point if you are willing to. That was another… championship. Quantity makes quality.
Musicians become rich when the populace needs more bread and circuses to keep us distracted from our miserable way of living. Same reason footballers were only paid a pittance 150 years ago and it was something men would do after work not as work. We find when “artists” are getting paid more than farmers then the nervous system has flipped.
That's is not only true for music, any art form has winners, losers and goes up and down
Definitely, it's not only true for music, but I wouldn't frame it in terms of winners and losers. Especially when it comes to art, there is no winning, there is no losing. The economics are just one of the games played (legitimately) on top of art.
Yeah, it's funny how we often mix up access with quality. More people making music doesn't mean the good stuff disappears; it just means we need to sift through a bit more noise to find it.
So many parallels to music - photography, writing, the movie industry, basically anything created and thought of as a craft. The internet snapping into existence democratized a lot of things for everyone else - and the platforms gave them the on-ramps and monetization tools (MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, etc.). But there will always be people at the top of anything after a few years, who will tighten the valve between the top and the middle/bottom of any market to meet the demands of shareholders/investors. New overlords always seem to appear at some point. AI is no different. Yes, AI slop will be everywhere, but non-AI slop was already out there - just look at all the lead generation crap thrust at the market the last 10 years.
One thing you seemed to miss, was the demands on a public company versus a private one. Spotify is a public company. Many record companies were public. They had to answer to shareholders, which has a lot to do with how things unfolded, what they did or didn't do. I'm not saying that is an excuse, I'm saying that it's a 3rd dimension to the argument (1 is artists, 2 is Spotify/the record labels, 3 is investors/shareholders).
It is an interesting and legitimate perspective. My article is more about the musicians and friends who complain about not making enough money in a world that is only an alternative to a world in which they would make no money. Far from me stating that this is the best of all the possible worlds, especially if we talk about digital markets. ;-)
I have wondered how music transferring from a primarily live to primarily recorded does to the market.
When anyone can have nearly free music at their party, restaurant, club, etc., how much does the market for live music sink for local musicians. Why get a local band, when you can play the hits over speakers? Why go see a mediocre local band, when you can play your favorite at home? This predates the digital/ streaming changes by decades, but it still reflects the massive increase in availability of music.
Good observation — and I think it goes even deeper than the live-vs-recorded shift. For pub and venue owners, the competition has long been DVDs, musicals, big-screen projections, recorded music, streaming — you name it. I've often explained the difficulty I had finding good gigs (both with my own bands and with bands I worked with) in exactly these terms: the competition isn't other bands. For someone whose business is selling beer and sandwiches to a constant rotation of customers, the competition is entertainment, full stop. That's why football, cricket, and soccer end up on the same screens — it's all about enjoyable time, not quality music.
This is true for the kind of venue where music can be piped through a speaker. Theaters and symphonic halls are a different conversation.
It can be written of all artistic domains: publishing is the first one that comes to my mind. How many writers are out there, often self-publishing? How many are actually selling? Same
It can be told in any market based on copiable artifacts: books, records, patents… anything that can happen far from the author.
Happened upon this on May 19, 2026. I've been an independent recording artist for nearly 25 years. Not famous. No hits. Rarely play live. And yet I have managed to turn my catalog into a business.
Spotify isn't the only DSP in the US. Why would any musician continue to subscribe to or promote their music on that service? After their thresholds... their fake bands... accusing artists of botted streams when they didn't do it... the AI music... Ek's investment in the war machine...
"Anyone can make music now" = I think what is meant here is "anyone can distribute music now". What's wrong with that? When I started, in the early 2000s, it was something like $69 or $89 to distribute an album, and it took several months to roll out. Since things like Distrokid and Routenote came along, it's been much cheaper and quicker to achieve worldwide distribution and collect royalties from anywhere. Again, what's wrong with that? There is a genre for everything.
I know where that's going. I know how some musicians are. Somebody is a snob and wants to be a gatekeeper to get rid of all the competition: "We hate it when our friends become successful. And if they're Northern, that makes it even worse."
"Musicians don't get paid enough" = I'm still waiting for a musician to make the business case on this topic. I've been listening to noise on this subject for almost 15 years. Exactly how much should musicians be paid? Who shall set the wages? Where will the money come from?
The reality is: don't sign bad contracts, but be open to different ways to pitch, license, and curate the songs in your catalog. Don't let anything sit on a shelf. Don't subscribe to businesses that have repeated hostile attitudes towards artists and composers. Don't buy ads from billionaires. If you make mistakes, pivot and don't do it again. Pay your quarterly taxes. Listen to your CPA. Stop being jealous of others. It's a big world out there.
🫶
Good article but it misses a key point. Spotify has made very much money from and has built a large part of its ubiquity on those small artists, the very ones the old system ignored. Labels didn’t make any money from the small artists they didn’t sign, by definition. In the same way, those small artists had nothing to do with the labels’ success as platforms the way they do with Spotify
I agree.
Love this article, it is very accurate. There is one caveat, session musicians, sound engineers, producers etc will feel the difference financially as AI use becomes more accepted in music creation process.
Thanks—and you're right. As with all professions that are ancillary to another, in this case, all the roles that exist to help bring music to the public, we'll feel their loss.
Just like we already feel the absence of the many luthiers and instrument makers in general who were still working a decades ago.
Phenomenal post. I feel like I don't see music discussed in aggregate this clearly very often
Musicians would still do it for the love of the game, of course. The fact that many of my musician friends (im not one) can supplement their income at ALL is awesome.
Music is fundamental to humans
I will say, sometimes genres I listen to get a bad rep because many untalented producers flock to it and pump out garbage. This always happened but it's worse now for sure. But theres still so much good new music that it's not worth complaining about
As for code- im not sure the jump is that clean
Maybe this is controversial but a lot of the vibe coding wave is people who don't realize they are customers.
Let me put you on game- it's an essential strategy in selling software to frame your product as a tool. You aren't paying for a product, but rather a tool to carry out your work.
It's a jedi mind trick to get people to take responsibility for the output of your software and still pay out the ass for it
That's what these "vibe coding" tools are. People pay thinking it will help them turn that app idea of theirs into a reality.
Like. Music has intrinsic value.
So democratizing music = more music = more value
Slop apps have no intrinsic value
So democratizing writing code = more apps = ??? Certainly not more value
The transformative part of ai is not going to be the mountain of slop it creates, but rather the way it reshapes existing patterns of work. Not ai => new software, but how do we harness ai to carry out what we were going to be doing anyway, freeing us up to do more
Broadly I think that yes it is going to dramatically empower everyone to do more, so I'm being nitpicky. But I just want to give musicians more credit than slop farmers
Thanks!
I would insist on my analogy, if you allow me to do so.
Let me explain:
Slop apps will be left alone because no one will be willing to pay for them.
Customers in developer's clothes? They will have their skin in the game: if they make slop apps, they'll pay the price. If they will be satisfied with their own work, then value will have been created.
The analogy?
The very same is for music:
Music has no intrinsic value. There are tons of music I would cancel from Earth and so everyone of us — no matter how tolerant and omnivorous you are: there is a limit which each of us can't go over and still call it "pleasa..", no, "*valuable* music".
Everybody is free to create their own music, but listeners won't listen to it if it's not... valuable to them, just as much slop/non-slop apps.
I’m half agreeing with your takes but my main pushback on all of them is that you’re sounding a whole lot like my old economics professors. In the sense that I’m nodding along but those theories always sound great in a vacuum with just one player (your striving musician or complainer) but are missing the greater game theory and incentives and other actors at play. Would love to nerd out more with you if you’re keen!
Please do!
I'll follow you down this rabbit hole — which I suspect won't tell us that apart!
Really well articulated, something I’ve been saying forever but unable to put into words like this. Awesome piece!!
Thank you, Joel.