October 2026
Spotify’s Loud & Clear says that more and more artists are making enough money to earn a living, and that the number is higher than ever before. And yet, the voices of artists and people from the music industry talking about the industry becoming a worse place for independent artists are also growing louder.
How can it be the best and the worst time to be an artist at the same time?
Borrowing the idea of enshittification from Cory Doctorow (and inspired by Mark Manson’s recent video), I am going to try to answer this question.
How did we get here? I believe the mechanism is as follows.
Commoditisation of music production and distribution enabled more individuals than ever to make music. That led to an explosion in the number of songs and artist profiles on DSPs, even before AI emerged. This, of course, did not go unnoticed by software and artist services companies, which initially lured artists into becoming their clients using venture capital funding, only to start charging them for everything (you can’t even choose a release date on DistroKid’s basic plan now).
It also quickly coincided with a disruption in music discovery, which transitioned from gatekeeper-controlled radio and physical distribution to social media-driven discovery. Besides being great at connecting audiences directly with creators, social media is also great at a couple of dark things. First, it favours visual and sonic gimmicks that trick us into engaging but not necessarily into admiring artists and their music. Second, the easier it is to make content, the harder it is to stand out. Or even to reach your own followers. You have to pay for ads to make sure people hear about your latest release. And third, it is good at selling false promises that anything is possible. Influencers and media outlets will praise success stories of nobodies becoming famous overnight as if survivorship bias never existed. But it is real. And the vast majority fail miserably. But nobody likes talking about that, and most people don’t want to hear it.
Labels also did not stand on the sidelines and gradually evolved into providers of two basic things: capital and marketing resources. As some people celebrated the opportunity to be entirely independent, others grew frustrated with labels no longer doing artist development.
Now imagine an artist who can make music relatively cheaply but has to pay for everything else: from a DistroKid subscription before anyone even listens to the music to paying Meta to reach their own followers.
The way artists make music can also be depressing. An artist’s life has always been a lonely journey, as it is for anyone who is creative, ambitious and rebellious. But now all this ambition and creativity is often locked inside the bedroom of a self-producing artist.
And now, even after all of that, new artists have to compete against old music being pushed by private equity and pension funds that have invested in this new asset class. Their model is not just to sit and wait, but to squeeze more profits out of their investments by pushing songs from their catalogues alongside new releases. And unlike emerging artists, they have capital and human resources.
The paradox is that it is still better than before. The macro picture is obvious: the gatekeepers are gone, making music is more accessible than ever, niche artists are rising, the live industry is prospering, and even physical sales are going up.
The problem is that people don’t live in the macro picture. They live at the micro level. And the commoditisation of everything and false promises are sucking the joy out of life as an artist. You can’t just make music as a hobby and enjoy the process anymore. Without physical barriers, it looks so appealing to put it on streaming platforms and make a push on social media. Everyone does it, and expectations rise above reality.
When FOMO wins, artists generally lose.