Artists and craftspeople have a problem: How to do my art/craft while still having a comfortable home, food, healthcare, transportation, etc.? Historically one way was to produce commercial art.

Let's say you're a trumpet player. Really, you want to play baroque chamber music--which you do on weekends with your mad young crew of underground baroque chamber music hotheads--but to make rent you'll have to take a job as a studio musician recording commercial jingles and backing tracks for pop acts. It's not baroque chamber music, but you can get paid while you hone your chops (literally, or at least more literally than is usually meant). Life is good.

One day, all the studios decide they don't need a trumpet player because they bought a synthesizer and they can just have a pianist (whom they already employ anyway) do the trumpet tracks, so you're laid off. You even get a new job making more money writing trumpet tracks to be recorded on the synth (with trumpet tracks being so much cheaper now, producers are using them much more). You keep playing trumpet for baroque chamber music on the weekends -- even fall in love with and marry your cellist -- but you can't do it for work anymore.

Is this a happy ending? Well, the love story is nice, but a bit beside the point. The rest of it is, at best, bittersweet. Something real has been lost that can't be made whole with money.