A) Nobody goes into the music business from the ground up planning to support themselves selling albums, like a small business. Everybody has known for decades that doing so requires laying a ton of groundwork and for the first several years, at least, you’d be lucky to have low streaming compensation be a problem for you. Planning on any other path— persistent notoriety after going viral, being irresistibly appealing to large enough audiences to sell at least dozens of albums per week right off the bat, etc.— is like planning on winning the lottery. That’s literally the least representative market for commercial art. Even for audio!

B) There’s a universe of creative workers AI fucked over that have nothing to do with retail music sales. Concept artists, stock photographers, session musicians, copywriters, video game foley artists, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. Those were all reliable career paths until very recently. Disney chopped their concept art team to replace them with models Disney trained on their work… probably posturing to look pro-AI enough after their pathetic sora debacle. As an aside, they can go fuck themselves.