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in a sense we have returned to 1800s for actual musicians, that is they can only really earn money now by playing for live audiences.
(EDIT) tldr - there will never be another Beatles again
yes, beautifully reasoned through. I wrote about this a bunch a few years back: https://www.stacker.news/items/798342 multiplied those concerned by AI.
But I think that's completely right: scarcity went in a U-shaped, from immediate consumable (the "1800s") to expensive distribution (mid-20th, large iconic ones) to infinite replication (today), which means musicians are back to their original tools.
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I don't claim to have any novel or particularly profound thoughts about this, but I have thought about it before.
If you go far enough back to before recorded media (say late 1800s) good music was pretty rare because it required lots of dedication and the high expense of buying instrument, BUT it wasn't very reproducible (ie a musician could only play in front of X number of people on a given day).
Fast forward to mid 1900s and the rise of cheap vinyl media and radio solved the distribution problem. This probably represented the peak of the music industry because it was still a rare skill AND supply was still constrained....so demand clustered around the few content producers available (Elvis, The Beatles, etc).
Now supply has become essentially infinite the skill to produce music is very very low and distribution is even cheaper than vinyl / radio, so market is destroyed....in a sense we have returned to 1800s for actual musicians, that is they can only really earn money now by playing for live audiences.
(EDIT) tldr - there will never be another Beatles again