At the risk of invoking the “No True Scotsman Fallacy,” I think we can all agree that today’s music sucks. No, we’re not some old fogies shaking our fists at the world. It’s a fact. Most of the crap produced today is horrific noise.

Luckily, someone in the know made a YouTube video about it. And it closely relates to everything we write about here in the Rude.

Let me introduce you to Rick Beato.

He didn't set out to become a monetary economist.

He just wanted to make records and talk about music. But in his now-viral video, Why Only Rich Kids Make It in Music Today, he ends up filing a field report from an industry the Federal Reserve quietly destroyed.

A million streams barely buy groceries. Touring is a breakeven gamble at best. The working musician — the session player, the mid-tier touring act, the songwriter who paid the rent — is functionally extinct.

We were told it was "disruption." A new era. The miracle of the internet.

It wasn't. It was the Fed’s zero interest rate policy.

We Didn’t Start the Fire Sale

You already know the Cantillon Effect. It's the mechanism behind every rigged game the Fed runs: new money doesn't land evenly. It flows first to those closest to the spigot, such as banks, hedge funds, and tech platforms. And only from them, after they’ve already inflated asset prices beyond most people's reach, does the money trickle down to everyone else.

After the 2008 crisis, the Federal Reserve maintained near-zero interest rates. This influx of virtually cost-free capital flowed into financial assets, especially tech.

The streaming model was the favorite child of a zero-rate regime that paid investors to bet on monopoly economics and subsidize losses for years until every alternative was dead.

Spotify burned cash for over a decade. It didn't matter. Cheap money has no patience for profit, only for scale. When you can fund platform losses indefinitely, you can train an entire generation of listeners to expect unlimited music for $10 a month. Once that habit sets in, there's no going back. The economics of the artist are permanently repriced downward.

Born to Run… Out of Money

According to Beato, streaming pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per play. To earn a minimum wage of around $15,000 per year, an artist needs roughly 4 million streams annually.

Four million streams. For poverty wages.

Before streaming, a musician could make a diversified, sustainable income from record royalties, session work, and touring. These were working professionals who weren't famous but weren't broke, either.

This new financial system methodically destroyed that middle (sound familiar?) by subsidizing platforms until they achieved the pricing power to set per-stream rates at fractions of a cent. Locked out of every alternative distribution channel, musicians had no choice but to accept it.

Platform monopsony is the economic term. "The only game in town" is its plain English translation.

The Sound of Finance

Here's the other side of the same coin. While streaming collapsed musician income, easy money turned music catalogs into financial assets.

In a zero rate world, you’ve got to chase yield. Predictable music publishing rights began to look like bonds to private equity funds. Bruce Springsteen sold his masters for $500 million. Bob Dylan sold his for over $300 million. Hipgnosis Songs Fund was buying catalogs as if it were running a REIT roll-up.

The music didn't get more valuable. The cost of capital got cheaper. PE funds and major labels hoovered up the ownership of recorded music because, when rates are zero, any asset with a yield becomes attractive, even if it only generates pennies per stream.

So here's the full picture: the Cantillon Effect ran through the music industry in both directions at once. On the income side, it crushed payouts to working artists. On the asset side, it inflated the value of catalogs owned by the already-wealthy. The same mechanism that made the rich richer in housing and equities made the rich richer in music, while making it practically impossible to build a music career from scratch.

Like a Rolling Loan

This is Beato's devastating core point. Music has always been a gamble. But it used to be a gamble accessible to working-class kids, because the costs were manageable and an income floor, however low, existed.

Now, costs for recording, instruments, and touring have skyrocketed, thanks to the Fed’s price inflation. At the same time, digital platforms have decimated artists' earning potential.

What's left? You're either a superstar with 100 million streams generating actual money, or you're a hobbyist with a day job. The working musician's rung is gone.

When the income floor disappears, and the costs stay high, who can afford the apprenticeship? Who can afford to spend years playing small clubs, honing a craft?

Kids whose parents won the asset-inflation lottery, that’s who.

The Fed didn't just redistribute wealth upward. It redistributed cultural access. It made the ability to pursue a music career a function of inheritance rather than talent.

Sweet Child O’ Minefield

This isn’t unique to music. It's the same story running in parallel across the economy:

• Housing: cheap credit inflated prices until the only path to ownership runs through the Bank of Mom and Dad.
• College education: government loans set off tuition inflation. Now, a degree is a debt sentence.
• Small business: cheap capital funds private equity roll-ups that crushed independents.

Easy money flows first to the scale-seekers, who use it to capture distribution. But the people who build houses, teach students, and record songs saw their pricing power collapse while their cost of living kept rising.

The players call it disruption, and it is. But underneath that disruption, the Cantillon Effect is doing what it does. It rewards money printer proximity and hurts everyone else.

Wrap It Up

The Fed not only broke the economy, but also wrecked its soundtrack.

When you make money free for financiers, the price of everything else gets bid out of reach, whether it’s for housing, education, health care, and yes, a shot at a music career.

The platforms that now control music distribution aren’t tech miracles. They’re the direct product of a monetary regime that subsidized monopoly until monopoly was the only thing left.

Rick Beato noticed it from inside the industry. Your job is to notice it from inside the financial system and position accordingly.

The Cantillon winners own the catalogs, platforms, real estate, equity, and bonds.