[Kalium]

I think you may have missed the core of the notion. It's not about who "deserves" what at all. It's about providing value. Techies and other white collar types generally provide value by doing bespoke work. Demanding payment to copy non-custom bits because they have a certain color is not providing value in any readily apparent way.

What you've also missed is how sick and tired techies are of artists and musicians seeking to "deserve a good living" by controlling techies. To express contempt for our work while expecting unlimited cringing subservience.

Why is it that so-called "artists" are so quick to demand creative control over the work of others who work in different mediums? I have a few guesses.

[readymade]

Not at all. Rather, it's that your heuristic of "providing value" breaks down spectacularly in the face of even the most casual observations of consumer demand. Whether value is provided by copying bits is arguable, that artists add value to society is not even worth debating. Producing an album is bespoke labor as well, just work that, as such, typically goes uncompensated. And to the extent that these are merely symptoms of a market in flux, as opposed to the stratifications of a class system, it undermines that analysis to make the tired assertion that poverty wages are the price one pays for "following one's passion" (albeit very specific passions).

In any event, I suspect that you don't know many "so-called artists". May you have a long and prosperous career, and retire young before the market value for your passions is reduced to zero.

[Kalium]

Artists, as a group, unquestionably add value to a society. Whether or not a given individual artist adds sufficient value to society to justify them "deserving a good living" is a very different question. A question that is not to blithely glossed over with vague assertions about sizable classes of people.

An album in which an artist has key creative control is not bespoke labor. It's self-expression, a very different form of work. Software engineers generally perform bespoke, custom, specified labor for others who control what that labor looks like and produces. For this, said engineers are compensated for their time and labor. Said engineers do not generally expect to own the result, just as a portrait artist does not expect to own the commissioned piece.

May you have a long and prosperous career in which you fit your business model to the times in which you live. With luck, you'll even manage what the rest of us have - a way to profit from your passions.