08/17/2026
QUESTION: Can a culture be filled with music while musicians become economically disposable? The answer seems to be an overwhelming “yes”. In fact, that may be the defining contradiction of the modern music business. We are way past the commoditization of music, folks.
Music is everywhere. It plays in stores, restaurants, gyms, offices, films, television shows, video games, podcasts, social posts, waiting rooms and elevators. It wakes us up, helps us work, sells us products, regulates our moods and fills every uncomfortable silence. We consume more music in more places, for more hours of the day, than any previous generation could have imagined.
Yet the people making that music are increasingly treated as though they are incidental to the process.
The modern economy wants music constantly, but it does not necessarily want musicians. Musicians have needs, opinions, rent, health problems, equipment costs and an irritating expectation that their labor should lead to compensation. Music files have no such demands. They can be stored, copied, streamed, licensed, repackaged and placed into playlists without ever asking who benefits.
The business has learned to separate the value of music from the value of the person who created it. Music remains culturally essential, but musicians are told they are replaceable.
That separation is not accidental. It is the business model. This is what happens when your product is scalable but your workforce is not.
Streaming platforms need an endless supply of recordings. Social platforms need sounds that keep users watching. Advertisers need music to create emotion around products. Venues need performers to attract customers. Technology companies need creative work to train systems that will generate more creative work. Everyone needs music, but each part of the system is designed to minimize what it pays the musician.
The artist is essential right up until the invoice arrives.
This is how an industry can celebrate record revenue while musicians drive for delivery services between performances. It is how a platform can announce billions of dollars in payouts while thousands of artists debate whether they can afford to finish their next album. It is how a venue can depend on live music for atmosphere, identity and bar sales while offering the band less than the cost of transportation.
The value is visible everywhere except on the musician’s bank statement.
The language used to describe this system is often deliberately cheerful. Musicians have “opportunities.” They receive “exposure.” They have access to “powerful tools.” They are encouraged to “build community,” “own their audience” and “think like entrepreneurs.”
Translated into ordinary English, this often means: do more work, assume more risk, spend more of your own money and do not expect anyone else to guarantee a result. As someone who has done artist development and label A&R, the irony is not lost on me that the risk may not be worth the reward.
The musician is expected to be endlessly available and permanently optimistic. Record more songs. Make more videos. Post more often. Generate. Transform. Streamline. Answer more comments. Reveal more of your life. Feed the platforms enough material to remain visible, but never ask why visibility itself has become a product you must continually purchase.
The system does not merely underpay artists. It conditions them to consider underpayment normal.
Musicians are told that nobody owes them a career. This is true in the most literal sense and useless in every other sense. Nobody is guaranteed success, but an economy can still be judged by the conditions it creates for skilled people attempting to do serious work.
We would not describe a restaurant industry as healthy simply because people were eating more meals while most cooks could not afford groceries. We would not celebrate record construction revenue if the majority of builders were expected to provide their own materials and work for exposure. Music receives different treatment because society romanticizes artistic sacrifice and assumes that passion can substitute for compensation.
Passion is useful to the music business because passionate people will tolerate arrangements that rational people would reject.
A musician may spend years learning an instrument, decades developing a voice and thousands of dollars producing a recording. The finished track enters a marketplace where it competes with nearly every recording ever released, thousands of new tracks arriving each day and, increasingly, music that can be generated without a musician at all.
The artist is then told that the failure to break through is a branding problem.
This is one of the crueler features of the current system. Structural oversupply is presented as a personal deficiency. If the music disappears, the artist did not post enough. If the tour loses money, the artist did not build enough demand. If the audience does not grow, the artist failed to master the algorithm.
There is always a new strategy to learn, a new platform to join and a new consultant ready to explain why the last strategy failed.
Meanwhile, the basic economic arrangement remains unchanged. The musician supplies the work, the capital and the risk. The surrounding industries collect fees.
Artificial intelligence brings this contradiction into sharper focus. The promise is not merely that machines will help musicians create. The commercial temptation is that companies may eventually obtain music without having to deal with musicians at all.
No negotiations. No scheduling. No royalty disputes. No bad moods. No inconvenient questions about ownership, consent or payment.
From a certain corporate perspective, the ideal musician is not an empowered human creator using new tools. It is a software process that generates usable sound on command and has no legal standing. Machines are compliant (read: quiet) workers.
That is why the AI debate cannot be reduced to whether the technology is “good” or “bad.” The larger question is who gains bargaining power. If AI helps musicians work more efficiently while they retain ownership and control, it can be assistance. If it allows companies to imitate, replace or undercut musicians whose work helped build the technology, it becomes another mechanism for extracting value from artists while removing artists from the transaction.
The danger is not a future without music. There will be more music than ever.
The danger is a future in which music becomes nearly infinite while the number of people able to devote their lives to making it becomes smaller, wealthier and more culturally narrow. Those with family money, institutional support, inherited stability or massive existing audiences will continue. Everyone else will make music around the edges of another job until time, exhaustion or economics finally wins.
That would not eliminate creativity. Human beings will always make music.
It would eliminate access to a sustainable creative life.
The result would be a culture with unlimited sound and diminished experience behind it. Music might become technically polished, perfectly targeted and instantly generated, but increasingly detached from communities, struggle, place, memory and the slow accumulation of a human point of view.
The industry may not care. Content does not need a childhood. Background music does not need convictions. An algorithm does not need to survive long enough to make a second album.
Culture should care.
Musicians do more than create finished recordings. They create language for emotions people cannot articulate. They document places, generations and communities. They preserve traditions, invent new ones and give strangers something around which to gather.
If musicians disappear from public life, we do not simply lose products. We lose witnesses. Society loses a mirror to see itself.
A culture that consumes music constantly while making musical lives impossible is not supporting the arts. It is strip-mining them.
It takes decades of accumulated human creativity, converts that work into data, catalog assets and disposable content, then tells the next generation of musicians that they should be grateful for access to the platform.
The (virtual) shelves are full. The playlists never end. The soundtrack plays everywhere. But the people who create the music, sweat the details and hope for the best have been priced out of their own industry — maybe forever…
~ Michael Whalen (Digital Music News 8.15.26)
