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I can explain why the business behind music in particular is troublesome, but first let me just complain about the combination of "Pioneer" and "once DJing became a thing." DJing was a thing before Pioneer ever got involved. Technics turntables outsold guitars in the US at least once in the late 1990s.

With that out of the way, what are you selling, in music? You can sell recordings, but Spotify has made that pretty difficult, and even without Spotify, the margins are surprisingly bad because of all the middlemen. So mostly you're selling live performances, i.e., parties.

Some people go to the party for the music, some people go there to dance, and many people go to get high and/or get laid. The people who love music and the people who love dancing will come back often, and that's not a problem. But the people who show up to get high either don't do it very often, or they're a problem. The people who show up to meet somebody either then date that person for a while or are sex addicts. So again, they either don't do it very often, or they do, and that's a problem.

So there's the demand side of the equation. There's a small number of customers you can build an ongoing relationship with, and a larger number with whom you can't. Let's look at supply. Here it's the same story as it is with movies or TV: there are tons and tons of people who want to do it and are willing to take a financial loss in order to do so. So until you get to a level where you can charge a lot of money, you're stuck at a level where you can hardly charge at all. That phase can last for years, even decades.

If you want to instead consider promoters and event organizers the supply side, everything I said about the customers applies to them as well.

So there you have it. It's a brutally tough business for most people and a cakewalk for a lucky few.


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