[asdff]

Consider these two hypothetical situations of a bar. In one, there is a jazz band. They play all night and get paid some money. If you go to New Orleans, there are dozens of bars like this, all with their own jazz band at the same time. Those are people who wouldn't have work in music otherwise without such opportunities being available.

Meanwhile consider another bar, there is jazz music, some Duke Ellington song, but it is coming from spotify. Does Duke get paid here? No, he's dead. Do his grandkids? No, Sony owns the rights. Suddenly there are no musicians getting paid at all for jazz music to be played in this case, just ultra wealthy Sony getting slightly wealthier. That seems worse to me than the above.

The idea that this wouldn't scale now that we have billions of people versus when it did scale fine when we had millions doesn't make too much sense to me. It's not like we all make an order of magnitude less money than our ancestors did generations ago, in fact, despite the population today being at the highest levels its been, we seem to all have more money and access to more resources and better technology. Maybe if somehow we lived in an alternate universe where no recorded music was invented, being a musician might be as common of a job as being a bartender today, and one where some people make a ton of money from tips perhaps. Maybe there would be levels to it, like you'd get a great and well paid in house musician if the restaurant was one to hire a well paid sommelier in addition to bartenders. Somehow though it seems like more people would be playing instruments at a given time in this alternative reality at the very least.