Everything related to the middle class is collapsing, not to mention the piano

Executive summary: The decline in income and the shrinkage of assets have made the once prosperous "middle class" face an unprecedented crisis. Putting down your body, making money, and evolving into a "super individual" who can fight independently at the fastest speed is the only way to go through the cycle.

Just two days ago, the entry "Apple's official website rare big price reduction" rushed to the hot search.

Last year, everyone was saying that Apple had stepped down from the "altar"! Because the sales of 15 were said to have dropped by 30%, it was complained that it was expensive and had no bright spots.

Subsidies come and go, and everyone doesn't buy it, so that now they have joined the ranks of Spring Festival promotions like never before.

Coincidentally, since last year, entries about "piano crash" have also repeatedly rushed to the hot search.

According to the data, in the first three quarters of 2023, the revenue of Hailun Piano, the only two in China, decreased by 21.99% year-on-year, and Pearl River Piano decreased by 31.47%.

And the piano shops and music training institutions also fell by more than 30%.

Piano sellers and piano teachers collapsed overnight.

Where is the "middle class" of the past?

With the decline of middle-class income, middle-class-related consumption is shrinking, and middle-class-related assets are collapsing.

Why is the collapse of piano or piano training a sign of the decline in middle-class income?

Because in 2023, which is the year just past, there are many sellers in the piano field, or these education entrepreneurs engaged in piano training, who have begun to go out of business in batches.

A veteran in the piano field posted a message on the Internet saying that he didn't know what was going on last year, and practitioners and entrepreneurs in his own industry all thought that the epidemic had finally passed, and he must do a big job in 2023.

But the situation is not as optimistic as everyone thinks, but there is a cliff-like decline. This year, whether it is the users who buy pianos or take piano training courses, these customers have all disappeared.

All practitioners don't know where these people have gone, you can think rationally, if an industry, his users directly fall off a cliff, what kind of huge impact will it have on the industry?

Therefore, last year, the number of piano sellers basically fell by half, and those engaged in piano education and training were basically miserable.

There is also a market market on the Internet, saying that the piano that used to be 50,000 or 60,000 is now 5,000 or 6,000, and no one wants to deal with the price at a discount!

In the current market situation, 10,000 yuan can buy 4 Korean pianos and 2 Japanese pianos. As for those miscellaneous pianos, that's not to mention.

Through the comparison of this price and this market situation, you can also perceive the cold winter of this industry to some extent.

Whether it is a piano or a piano lesson, the main group of consumers is middle-income families, because in the past, only middle-class and above-income could afford piano lessons.

For example, in three to five years, how many lessons you have taken, you may need to spend at least 100,000 yuan or even more by buying a piano to training.

And we need to be clear about an objective fact, but also a cruel truth, every family's investment in children's art, especially piano education, is the lowest possibility of monetization.

Some people may think, "Hey, after training in the future, I have a talent and can become a pianist!"

But think about it, there are so many children in the country who buy pianos, so many children learn piano, and participate in various performances and competitions, but how many of them rely on the piano to make a living?

If you think about it all over the country, there are only two or three familiar names, right? You can count them with one hand stretched out.

Except for these few nationally renowned piano artists, who make a living from the piano, the other 99.99% of the people, can they make a living from the piano? It can only be used as a hobby for oneself, and it can be talked about for oneself, family and friends.

This kind of self-entertaining "investment" is extremely extravagant in the current environment.

Real estate, education, light luxury, school district housing... These middle-class people of the previous era, who tried to emulate the standards of the rich, are collapsing one by one.

In the future, there will be no pseudo-concept of "light luxury", only a comprehensive consumption classification. Either it is the absolute low price of the spelling model, or it is a rock-solid first-line luxury.

Because the bubble group of "middle class" has to come and go in the cycle of the times.

The decency of the rich and the rich are two different things

Is it the rich or the decency of the rich?

If you put on a famous brand, your children go to a prestigious school, and you take out a loan to live in a "rich area", you become rich?

You're just learning the decency of the rich.

And the strength behind the rich can have such decency, you haven't learned, or even, not seen at all.

Is he like you, working all over the world, tired of being a dog, or is he like you, paying off the car loan every month and having little left?

Once the risk comes, you say that it will collapse, and it will collapse several times, but people will be safe and sound.

What exactly did you learn?

People have the means of production! Going back and forth between cash flow and high-quality assets, the richness of resources in hand, and the flexibility of asset allocation are all throwing you off several galaxies.

In his book Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor, Zygmunt argues that today's poor are "non-consumers," not "unemployed," because they have failed to fulfill their most important social responsibility—to actively and efficiently purchase goods and services offered by the market.

More and more people in this world are moving from "poor but useful" to "poor and useless".

Do what's closest to the money

In the past few years, everyone is still piling up value on products, cultural attributes, spiritual attributes, and emotional attributes, as if they have achieved national prosperity, and they are all rushing to build a higher level of spiritual civilization.

In the past few years, the situation has changed abruptly, and it has returned to the pre-liberation period overnight. Even those who do culture, such as us, have without exception abandoned the flashy "long-termism" and began to do the closest thing to money and monetization.

The situation is stronger than the man.

The transmission of the economic crisis requires a process, in fact, there are strong signals before the mask, but only a small number of people are alert.

By the time ordinary people can generally feel it, in fact, the crisis has already taken shape.

At this time, you can clearly feel how hard it is to earn money, and you can see the real plight of your friends around you.

To put it bluntly, we are now in a cycle of repairing debts, and how cool it was to increase leverage in the past is how painful it is to pay it back now.

In the past, the middle class clinged to the "assets", whether it was houses, stocks, factories... The value will shrink dramatically.

What's the only thing that doesn't depreciate, or even appreciate, is yourself who is constantly evolving.

Using the cash you have in exchange for your ability to obtain cash flow in the future is the only safe survival strategy for ordinary people in this era.

This kind of ability is not something you imagine out of thin air, but it is accumulated and precipitated in your daily work, which is a soft power that others cannot surpass and replicate.

Therefore, you don't need to look at the project itself as too important, there are so many different projects on the market, you just need to think about how much hard power you add to yourself while you put in time and money for a certain project.

That's the mindset that keeps you in stride with a downcycle.

I have prepared a copy of "Individual Light Entrepreneurship 0-1 Path to Make Money", with this road map in hand, I can't promise you to get rich overnight, but at least I can ensure that you bypass all unnecessary detours.

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