I recently stumbled across a clip of Mark Cuban on TikTok, and what he said has been echoing in my mind ever since. He was asked about the worst industries to get into, and without hesitation he named three: media, clothing, and music. Of media, he went further still, calling it “the worst industry in the history of industries.”On the surface, it sounded blunt and a bit cynical, but the more I thought about it, the more it struck me as not only accurate but perhaps understated.
These three industries share an uncomfortable reality. They are oversaturated, undervalued, and increasingly disrupted by technology that is accelerating faster than the human capacity to keep up. With the rise of artificial intelligence, even the fragments of stability that once existed in the creative fields may vanish entirely. AI is not just an incremental change. It is an exponential one, and anything that can be digitized is going to feel the impact in ways we are only beginning to glimpse.
I know this because I built a career in music. For decades, I worked at the intersection of artists and audiences, curating performances that drew from jazz, classical, and world traditions. This was not a side hustle or a vanity project. It was my livelihood and my passion. I poured myself into presenting the kinds of music that mattered deeply to me, music that carried cultural weight and artistic integrity. But over the past several years, it has become nearly impossible to draw audiences. The market has shifted under our feet, and not in subtle ways.
When a world-class artist who has been playing for twenty years on the circuit cannot gather more than fifty people in a room to hear them, something is profoundly broken. This is not a question of marketing, venue, or even talent. It is structural. The economic foundation of live music, once precarious but at least viable, has all but collapsed. And if music has already suffered this fate, Cuban’s warning about media and fashion deserves to be taken seriously.
A Personal Lesson in Media’s Futility
My own experience with Cuban’s media company, then called HDNet and now AXS TV, gave me a painful education in how flawed the music-media model had become. I produced a concert with their help that brought together an all-star cast of some of the top rock stars in the world. On paper, it was a dream project: legendary musicians, high-definition production, and a network partnership that could have amplified the release.
But once the cameras stopped rolling, the project languished. Licensing the music proved to be an insurmountable barrier. For years, the recordings sat on the shelf, gathering dust instead of generating revenue or building momentum. By the time the legal hurdles were cleared and we finally released it, the bottom had completely fallen out of the music market.
Whatever buzz or excitement the event would have generated if it had been released immediately after filming had evaporated a decade later. The audience had moved on, the industry had shifted, and the cultural moment was lost. What should have been a landmark project became a cautionary tale about the structural dysfunction of music and media.
The Long Decline of Recorded Music
The problems in music did not begin yesterday. Recorded music as a business model essentially disintegrated decades ago. There was a time when buying an album was an event, when a record sleeve represented not just sound but a cultural statement. That world no longer exists. The arrival of Napster in the late 1990s opened Pandora’s box, and no one has been able to close it since.
Streaming completed the job. Today, music is background noise bundled into a subscription service. For ten dollars a month, you have the entire history of recorded sound at your fingertips. It is a marvel of access but a disaster for artists. The platforms hold the value. The musicians create the content and receive pennies in return.
I cannot remember the last time I purchased a track or album. I suspect I am not alone. Recorded music has become so thoroughly dematerialized that ownership feels like a relic of the past. For young people today, the idea of paying for a single song is almost incomprehensible. That cultural shift is irreversible, and it leaves artists stranded.
The Crisis in Live Music
For a while, live performance was supposed to be the salvation. Yes, the record industry had collapsed, but people would always crave the in-person experience, the electricity of a live set, the communion of being in the same room with the music. That was the theory.
The reality has been harsher. Live music has fragmented along with everything else. Attention is the rarest commodity, and competing for it is a losing game. When audiences can scroll endlessly on their phones, when they can watch entire concerts streamed in high definition from the comfort of their living rooms, the urgency of showing up in person diminishes. And this erosion has been brutal for musicians outside the tiny handful of superstar acts who can still fill stadiums.
Jazz, classical, world music—the traditions I care most about—are suffering in particular. These forms require deep listening and engagement, and that runs counter to the distracted tempo of our times. When even a veteran player with decades of credibility cannot attract more than a scattering of listeners, it is not because the art has lost its value. It is because the ecosystem no longer supports it.
Media’s Precarious State
If music is the canary in the coal mine, media is not far behind. The word itself is slippery. Newspapers, magazines, television, podcasts, digital platforms, book publishing—they all fall under the same umbrella, yet they are not equal in their resilience.
Journalism has been gutted by the collapse of advertising revenue and the dominance of tech platforms. Television is splintered into a thousand streaming services, each fighting for subscriber dollars in a race that few can win. Independent media outlets survive on crowdfunding and subscription models, but the margins are razor thin.
Book publishing, where I now devote much of my energy, is not immune to these pressures. Yet it retains certain advantages. People still buy books. They buy them not just for the content but for the object itself. A book is tangible, enduring, something you can hold and revisit. It has weight and permanence that a stream or a click cannot match. And while AI is now capable of generating text at astonishing speed, the role of publishers in curating, editing, and validating remains valuable. Readers do not want just words. They want trust, authority, and quality. That is what publishers provide, and for now it sustains the industry.
Fashion and the Disappearance of Scarcity
Fashion is perhaps the most vulnerable of Cuban’s three doomed industries. For centuries, fashion thrived on scarcity and exclusivity. Haute couture was aspirational because it was unattainable for most. Even mass-market fashion retained cycles of trend and novelty that gave consumers a reason to buy.
Fast fashion demolished that system by flooding the market with disposable clothing. The pace of production accelerated, and designs that once took months to develop were replicated in days. Now, with AI capable of generating runway-ready designs in seconds, the idea of scarcity collapses further. Anyone with a laptop can become a “designer.” The glamour of fashion risks dissolving into algorithmic churn.
The AI Earthquake
What binds these industries together is their vulnerability to automation. Creativity, once considered the last refuge of human distinctiveness, is no longer safe. AI can generate music, images, text, and designs that are convincing enough to compete with human output. The speed and scale are unmatched.
This does not mean that human creativity disappears. It means that the value attached to it becomes harder to capture. If a song or story can be generated instantly and cheaply, why would audiences pay for it? Scarcity has been the foundation of all creative economies. Without scarcity, monetization collapses.
Finding the Cracks Where Value Remains
The point is not that people will stop making music, writing books, or designing clothes. They will continue, perhaps more prolifically than ever. The point is that the business models that once supported these fields have eroded beyond recognition.
For me, that has meant a gradual shift away from music and toward publishing. Not because I love music any less, but because the infrastructure to sustain it has disintegrated. Publishing at least offers viable ways to monetize. Books still sell by the carload, even if fewer titles break through to mass audiences. There is still an economy there, fragile though it may be.
Cuban’s warning is a reminder to all of us that passion is not enough. The romance of the creative industries cannot disguise their economic instability. If you are entering these fields today, you must be prepared to confront not just competition but structural decline.
A Cultural Reckoning
This raises uncomfortable questions about the future of culture itself. What happens to the richness of our artistic traditions when the people who sustain them cannot make a living? What does it mean for society when jazz clubs close, when symphonies struggle, when small theaters go dark? These are not just business failures. They are cultural losses.
We live in a paradox. We consume more art, music, and media than ever before, but we are unwilling or unable to pay for it in ways that support creators. Technology has given us abundance, but abundance without value is indistinguishable from disposability.
The Path Forward
I am not naïve enough to believe there is a simple solution. But I do believe that survival depends on finding niches where trust, authenticity, and curation matter. In a world where AI can generate everything, what people will crave most is the genuine. Human connection, live experience, and the imprimatur of quality will carry weight even when algorithms can mimic style.
The industries Cuban identified may be among the hardest places to make money, but they are also among the most vital to human identity. Music, media, and fashion shape our sense of who we are. Their survival may depend not on scale or mass markets but on smaller, more devoted communities that value the work enough to sustain it.
For my part, I will continue to champion the artists and voices that matter, whether in music or in books. The challenge is immense, but the alternative is a cultural landscape stripped of depth, reduced to endlessly generated content that may amuse but does not endure.
Cuban was right. These industries are dangerous terrain. But abandoning them entirely would mean surrendering a part of ourselves. The task ahead is to build new models that honor creativity without exploiting it into oblivion.
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