If this is how it all shakes out, then I guess that's the end of mass-market music for me. GenAI has already made me extremely hesitant to pay any attention to new music that isn't from artists I already know and trust or from smaller artists I see live, so I guess I'm already mostly there as it is.

At least there's an enormous back catalog of excellent music to lean on.

Craftsmen have consistently vastly overestimated where the floor is for the quality customers will accept, from clothing to shoes to system security to how much RAM a piece of software uses.

Customers consistently prefer cheap.

There will always be a few niche cases where someone values something more, but not at the mass market.