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.

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.