Wealth & Money Quote by Bill Wyman

Bill Wyman is talking like a working musician who’s watched culture become seasonal. “Because of the fashion” isn’t a vague complaint about taste; it’s an indictment of an industry that treats music as trend-cycle content, where the past is either mined for quick nostalgia or buried under whatever the algorithm is pushing this week. In that ecosystem, history doesn’t disappear because nobody cares. It disappears because the infrastructure that once carried it - radio programmers, label reissues, critics with beats, record stores with clerks who proselytized - has been hollowed out.

The shrewd move is how he frames revival as “access.” He’s not romanticizing a golden age; he’s pointing to a gatekeeping problem. Young listeners could, in theory, find anything online. Wyman implies that availability isn’t the same as access: without advocates, liner notes, context, and living memory, the archive becomes a junk drawer. “People like me” isn’t ego so much as a description of a vanishing class: artists old enough to remember the lineage firsthand, credible enough to make it feel urgent.

Then comes the real sting: “you can’t earn any money doing it.” That line drags the conversation out of aesthetics and into labor. Preservation is work - curating, teaching, touring deep cuts, financing reissues - and the market rarely rewards it. Wyman’s subtext is bleak but practical: when cultural memory is unprofitable, it becomes volunteerism, and volunteerism doesn’t scale. In the end he’s warning that musical heritage won’t be “lost”; it will be outcompeted.