The T-Shirt Economy

At a club show, the band makes more on the shirt than on the performance. Not marginally more. Ticket money passes through a promoter, an agent, and the venue before any of it reaches the people who actually played; the shirt costs a few dollars of cotton, sells for thirty-five, and the only thing standing between the band and that spread is whatever the room charges them for the retail booth. That cut turns out to be contested enough to have produced an organized campaign to abolish it , with hundreds of venues signing on. Nobody organizes over the part of the business that doesn’t matter. I could throw a rock here in Nashville and hit a working musician who could have told me this without doing any math.

Performance keeps coming up as the refuge in the displaced-by-AI conversation. No one wants to watch a person type. Nobody buys a ticket to see code get written, sadly for me. Meanwhile, every creative art that predates recording technology — theater, music, dance, comedy, storytelling, religious ceremony — had performance baked into how it reached an audience. That’s not coincidence. Before recording, in-the-room was the only delivery mechanism. Recording severed performance from delivery a century ago, and AI is now doing the same severance, faster and more thoroughly, to the artifact-based arts: writing, illustration, code, photography, music recording. The performance arts went through their version of this a hundred years ago and survived, because being-in-the-room turned out to be its own irreducible thing. Human presence is truly scarce.

That’s the optimistic frame. It says that if the work AI threatens is artifact production, then arts depending on presence have a structural moat. Theater is fine. Live music is fine. Stand-up comedy is fine. The Nashville corner busker I hit with a rock is fine other than the scratch. The performer-in-front-of-people format is one of the few things AI genuinely can’t replace. Pull the human out of the performance and the spectacle survives but the reason to watch doesn’t, which is the same moat named from the grandstand instead of the stage. When I argued in Standing on Surfaces That Move that the thing worth defending is the judgment underneath rather than whichever surface you happen to be standing on right now, presence looked like the one surface that would hold.

The frame is mostly right but entirely incomplete.

The music is the billboard

You hear it said about The Rolling Stones, and about Metallica and Taylor Swift and Phish and Dead & Company: the real business is merchandise, and the music is just what gets people to the merch table. At stadium scale that’s folk wisdom more than accounting, since a Stones tour grosses on tickets in a way no merch table will ever match : their 2024 run took $235 million across eighteen stadium shows, about thirteen million a night at the ticket window. Scale down to where almost every working musician actually lives, though, and the folk wisdom turns into dicier arithmetic. The shirt has the margin. The record does not. A large share of the profession is structurally in the t-shirt business, and the music exists in service of the t-shirts rather than the other way around.

The Grateful Dead worked this out earlier and more deliberately than anyone. They let fans tape shows through the seventies and then formalized it in 1984 with a designated tapers section : a reserved block of seats for people recording, for free, a product the band could otherwise have sold them. The tapes created the affiliation, the affiliation drove ticket sales, the tickets drove the parking-lot merch table, and the music was the world’s most expensive billboard for the whole circle. Streaming clarified that pattern rather than inventing it. The music is the marketing. The product is identity. The transaction is I am the kind of person who likes this, made tangible by something you wear, hang, or display, which is the same trick the diamond ran from the other side of the counter. Who would’ve thought the iconic Grateful Dead logo is in the same family of messaging as a diamond ring.

Recording technology got there first, for a different reason. It democratized the reproduction of music until the recording itself stopped being worth selling. Napster and eventually commercial streaming get blamed for killing music sales, but they mostly finished what radio, cassettes, and CD ripping had been doing for fifty years; by the time Spotify arrived, music was already most of the way to free, and Spotify made the free thing official. The acts that came through intact were the ones who had understood for a long while that what they were selling wasn’t the art, it was the tribe organized around the art, around them.

AI is now doing to writing, illustration, and code what recording did to music. The artifact is becoming free, or close enough. Anyone with a twenty-dollar subscription can generate a plausible essay, a plausible illustration, a plausible piece of code in seconds.

So the value migrates to whatever is still scarce: identity, tribe, presence, taste, the specific life that produced the thing , the community that forms around the person who made it. Which makes “creator economy” an honest description of the post-artifact economy rather than the buzzword it sounds like. The creator is the product; the work is the free sample.

Substack, Patreon, MrBeast

Look at how the surviving creative economies actually work in 2026 and the pattern is everywhere.

Substack is not pay-per-essay. You’re buying a relationship with the writer, and the essays are the demonstration of why. The transaction is identity on both ends: I subscribe to that writer says something about you, I have those subscribers says something about them.

Patreon is the same shape stripped of the publishing veneer. You pay the person and you get whatever they make. The art form is almost beside the point, because what’s being transacted is access and affiliation. It’s also the oldest model on the menu. For most of history, art ran on patronage: the commission, Haydn wearing Esterházy livery, eighteenth-century books published by subscription with the subscribers’ names printed in the front matter, which is Patreon’s tier page typeset in 1750. The arrangement we think of as normal, artists selling finished artifacts to strangers at market, is the historical anomaly, a window recording technology propped open and AI is now closing. Patronage is just the mean, and the market is reverting to it.

MrBeast runs a shelf of consumer brands — Feastables chocolate, the Lunchly snack packs, the MrBeast Burger experiment, the merch. The videos are the customer acquisition channel for all of it. Measure the P&L and the video operation starts to look like the marketing department of a consumer-goods company.

Bandcamp is the music version. The album costs a few dollars. The bundle with the vinyl and the t-shirt and the handwritten thank-you note costs forty. Same record. Different transaction.

The camera is pointed at the actual business.

These are the working business models of creative work in 2026. The artifact alone doesn’t pay. The artifact in service of identity-affiliation does.

So performance protects you, sort of

The optimistic frame I started with — performance can’t be replaced by AI — is true. It just doesn’t translate cleanly into performers will be financially fine. The economics of touring have been brutal for decades: when the Music Industry Research Association surveyed American musicians , the median one cleared about twenty grand a year from music, stitched together from three or four different hustles, and most reported it didn’t cover their living expenses. What pays is the shirt, the meet-and-greet, the album in the merch bin, the Patreon, the Substack, the cultivated community that exists because of the live shows but doesn’t pay you for the live shows directly.

The refuge isn’t performance, exactly. It’s being a brand that performs. Performance is the most photogenic and historically dignified version of that, but the underlying mechanism is the one Substack writers and Patreon illustrators and YouTubers all run on: you become a person worth following, and the various things you put out there, including in the best of cases the art itself, are how people show that they’re following you.

The limit case already exists. ABBA has been selling out a purpose-built London arena seven shows a week since 2022 with a show called Voyage, and ABBA is not in the building: the “band” is four avatars rendered as the group looked in 1979. KISS, watching that work, sold their name, faces, and catalog to the company behind it, so that eight-foot digital versions can tour without them , first show targeted for 2027, with an ambition of several cities at once, Cirque-style. That looks like the moat failing. Look closer and it’s the thesis wearing makeup and platform boots: what got reproduced was the performer; what still can’t be reproduced is your night in the room with three thousand other people who own the shirt. Even Voyage keeps a ten-piece live band on stage. The pixels need witnesses.

Walter Benjamin saw the first half of this in 1935. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction argued that copying a thing endlessly destroys the aura of the original, the here-and-now authority that made an object worth standing in front of. What he didn’t say, and what I think the century after him actually did, is that the aura never evaporated. It moved. It came off the work and attached itself to the artist, and then the artist had to become a public-facing brand to collect on it at all. The romantic model — make the work, let the work speak, keep your personality out of it — doesn’t survive a regime where the work is free.

Klimt’s The Kiss has been reproduced onto more dorm posters and coffee mugs than almost anything this side of the Mona Lisa, and the copies did not kill the original’s aura. They advertise it. The queue at Vienna’s Belvedere Museum exists because of the mugs. A painting has what a recording never had, one scarce canvas for the aura to keep living on, and the museum has learned this essay’s whole lesson anyway: the gift shop is at the exit, the painting is the billboard. Music, text, and code have no original. Every copy is the work, so the aura had nowhere to sit except the person.

The honest caution

None of this is good news for creatives, myself included.

A lot of artists got into this work specifically to avoid having to be a brand. The whole appeal of the romantic model was that it let introverts, weirdos, and people who hate self-promotion do creative work for a living: make the thing, the thing represents you, nobody asks you to perform yourself on top of performing your work. Becoming a brand requires the temperament of a salesperson, which seems entirely opposed to what we think of as artists. It requires showing up consistently in a persona-shaped way. It requires being good at the meta-work of cultivating a tribe, on top of the actual work of making the thing the tribe is supposedly about. Many of the best artists I know are terrible at this and have no interest in learning.

I’m not writing that from outside it. I publish these essays free, on a schedule, and around them I’ve built the whole apparatus: a newsletter, a presence on Medium, a LinkedIn account I reactivated specifically to reach people who knew me from back in my tech book-writing days. The essays are the work and they are also, unmistakably, the demonstration. For thirty years I believed that a thing made well enough would find its own audience, which is a comfortable belief and mostly a wrong one, and it cost me more than I want to itemize here. If there’s one piece of advice I can confidently share, it’s this: if you build it, and do little more, they will not come. So the treadmill isn’t an abstraction I’m warning other people about from a safe distance. I got on it deliberately, late, having finally done the math. It still costs something. Some fraction of the attention that used to go into making the thing now goes into the layer that gets the thing seen, and I can feel the trade even on the days I think I’m making it correctly. On the other hand, I’ve learned that thinking about and documenting the making is its own sort of reward, so there’s that.

There’s also a winner-take-all problem. The artists for whom the brand economy works are concentrated at the top of the distribution. The Stones can profitably sell shirts. The local touring band cannot sell enough shirts to live. The MrBeast economy supports MrBeast and a handful of mid-tier creators; it doesn’t support the long tail in any sustainable way. The brand economy concentrates rewards at least as hard as the streaming economy did, maybe harder, because tribal affiliation scales with attention and attention is the most concentrated commodity humans produce. The platforms brokering it know exactly what they’re holding, which is the gate all over again in a friendlier coat.

Same shirt, same night, same room. The economy is happening over there.

And the concentration doesn’t only sort the winners. It reroutes the people who would otherwise have made the work.

The early App Store ran that experiment in miniature. In December of 2008, a ninety-nine-cent novelty app called iFart, which did precisely what its name promised, was clearing close to ten thousand dollars a day ; on Christmas Day it sold nearly forty thousand copies and netted its developer something near thirty thousand dollars in twenty-four hours. Developers who had been building database tools and document editors watched a novelty sound board earn a year’s salary in a week, and a meaningful number of them did the obvious thing. The platform didn’t only bury serious software under novelty on the discovery shelf. It hired the builders away from it. When the shortcut pays better than the forge, the shortcut doesn’t just win the shelf. It wins the labor.

Then there’s the question of what becomes of the art when the art is the marketing. Corruption sets in once the work has to serve a brand purpose first and an artistic purpose second. The work starts optimizing for the audience-acquisition layer. It gets more on-brand and less surprising. It stops being the thing that defies expectation and starts being the thing that fulfills it. That’s a real cost, and it’s the one I’m least sure how to talk about, because the people best positioned to notice it are the ones with the most incentive to deny it.

I’ve bought merchandise at a show exactly once that I can remember clearly. The Trashcan Sinatras, a beloved Scottish band I’ve followed for decades, at the Blue Bar in Nashville on Halloween night in 2017 . Halloween is a miserable night to sell a ticket in Nashville, so a room that should have been full held a crowd you could count without trying, a few dozen of us at most. I left with two shirts and a memory stick. They had recorded the show I had just watched, and they had a rig set up somewhere in the back to copy it onto sticks while the room emptied; hang around a few minutes and you could buy the evening before you reached your car. Nothing on that stick existed two hours earlier. Nothing on it would ever exist again. Their entire catalog was streamable on the walk to the parking lot, and not one second of it was what I was holding.

That’s the tapers section, inverted. The Dead handed the recording over for nothing and collected downstream, at the ticket window and the merch table, on the affiliation the tapes created. The Trashcan Sinatras skipped the downstream and sold the night itself, in the room, for cash, the way you do when a few dozen people on Halloween is not an audience you get to monetize twice. Both bands had worked out that the songs were never the scarce part. What’s scarce is having been there when those particular versions happened, and one of the two was quick enough to bottle it on the way out the door. I was buying evidence that I’d been in the room, and I knew that perfectly well while I was handing over the money.

Which brings me to the part that complicates the corruption argument I just made. I’d been to several of their shows by then, and that night I’d paid for the tier that gets you in early to meet the band. By this essay’s own logic that is the corruption, exactly: VIP access sold as a product, affiliation with a price printed on it. It did not feel like one. Frank Reader, John Douglas, and Paul Livingston turned out to be good company, the room was small enough that we genuinely talked rather than merely shaking hands, and somewhere in the set they referenced an anecdote from our earlier conversation, with my wife and me standing out there. They played two full sets and took verbal requests directly from the room , on the third-to-last night of a five-week haul across the country, to a Halloween crowd that hadn’t come. No arithmetic rewards that. I think they genuinely liked meeting the people who showed up, and I think the tier was how they paid for the van, and I think both of those were true at once. That’s inconvenient for the argument I’ve been building, which is why I’m sharing it.

The deal on the table

So the structural argument holds: presence is the thing that won’t reproduce, and value migrates toward it. What nobody hands you is the term sheet.

The fine print is that this is a worse deal than the one many artists thought they were signing. You don’t get to just make the work anymore. You have to make yourself into the marketing for the work, and the work into the marketing for the merch, and the merch into the marketing for the next thing. It’s a treadmill, and the people who win on it tend to be the ones who’d have made decent salespeople in another life. Mick Jagger left the London School of Economics to start the Stones; I’m not saying he’d have been salesman of the month at Carmax, but I wouldn’t bet against him.

Software people, to circle back to The Gate I Built , mostly cannot do this. There is no Linus Torvalds merchandise empire of any consequence. Open-source maintainers can’t sell shirts. We can do consulting, courses, books, conferences, all of them softer versions of identity monetization, none of them carrying the in-the-room tribal energy the performance arts have. So performers have a business model to lend back to the rest of us, even a slightly degraded one. Software has resilience to lend; performance has a survival strategy to lend.

So are we all headed toward being t-shirt salesmen? Probably some of us. Ask any working musician whether that’s a joke and watch the face they make. The t-shirt-salesman economy is the one the surviving creative arts have been quietly running for fifty years. AI just makes it the only one left.

The art used to be the product. Then it became the marketing. Now it’s the marketing for the marketing, and the actual transaction is happening one layer further out, where the t-shirt table is.

There is, possibly, a third path: something smaller, slower, and much harder to scale, art made for a specific person inside a community small enough that everyone in it has been on both sides of an exchange. That’s The Intimacy Economy, and it’s the configuration this essay’s arithmetic can’t see, because nothing in the t-shirt economy is pointed at it. Both of the AI-assisted projects I’m building right now are trying, in different ways, to live there.

Find your tribe, then. Make sure you know their shirt sizes.