In September 2024, I wrote an article on online coaching.

Wasn’t particularly earth-shattering. Just a few real-life observations, the immediate occasion being fairly ordinary: a musicians’ mastermind I’d just joined closing prematurely because the founder didn’t find the revenue sustainable in the model.

I appreciated the honesty around it, and understood the problem.

But it confirmed a hunch I couldn’t help but observe and continue to since: a massive gap.

A gap between those who had spent years learning how to coach, educate and mentor with the required understanding of the responsibilities involved, and those implementing somewhat predictable business strategies to sell their knowledge and expertise. Strategies often based on what felt like the kind of thing a short certification course taught to encourage selling a version of the same thing to somebody else immediately.

My primary POV at the time, despite my disappointment, was that education or coaching being offered through an online medium doesn’t make it suspect by default.

I ended that article with a line I still stand by:

Online education is not “online education”. It is education that happens to be online.

Why this topic is pertinent for me

More than a decade ago, I was part of one of the first generations of working artists to be formally trained in artist coaching as part of a university education.

Founded by iconic German musician Udo Dahmen, the Popakademie Baden-Württemberg in Mannheim, Germany, was one of the first institutions to offer interdisciplinary arts degrees (though the nomenclature did get a bit lost in translation, especially for the time). Its programmes integrated artistic practice, performance, recording, business and pedagogy. Some of its graduates include the likes of Alice Merton and, more recently, Anika Nilles. Every annual cohort was about 25 students, chosen in some years from close to 1,000 applicants through what was, at the time, one of the toughest and most complex entrance examinations.

The writing on the wall for those who qualified was clear.

Changes in the arts industry had already begun. The old scaffolding around a music career was eroding. Performing and recording would not be enough. Artists would increasingly need to teach, mentor, co-create and help one another navigate careers that were becoming more precarious with each year.

Coaching was at the centre of it. Every student had not just lessons in their conventional music education, but a coach who would guide them through the less frequently addressed parts of the process. Additionally, they were coached to build teams with students who had chosen business as their major.

This was not presented as a clever stream of supplementary income. It belonged to the vocation we were entering. The words were not minced. If you didn’t understand coaching, or why elite performers have always had a relationship with it, you would need to reexamine your views.

By then, I was already a full-time musician and educator for over a decade. The Holistic Musician Academy grew much later, out of roughly three decades of lived experience. It grew out of EveryNowHere and the life of a working artist, not the other way around.

And music saved my life, literally and metaphorically. So helping other artists build sustainable careers without losing the reason they became artists is not a ‘niche’ I had selected because somebody told me it would ‘convert’. If anything, my clientele are possibly the toughest to sell to for reasons worthy of a different post.

Professional artistry remains one of the most highly trained and chronically underpaid vocations in the world. It takes a minute to compare the regular earnings of a doctor, lawyer and musician, even though the skill, years of training and dedication required can be entirely comparable. The UK Musicians’ Census found that 70 per cent of professional musicians held a degree or higher and 65 per cent had been earning musicians for more than a decade. Their average annual income from music was £20,700, with 43 per cent earning under £14,000 (Musicians’ Census).

For me, personally, offering professional, high-quality coaching at appropriate prices therefore had less to do with a profit strategy than contributing to a change in the entire positioning of an artist in society: professionally trained, culturally indispensable and still expected to live inside the ridiculous mythology of the starving artist.

Taking my education beyond privileged institutions mattered to me. Refusing to devalue it in the process mattered just as much. The ethical question I was faced with was whether the value, claims, method and price bear an honest relationship to one another.

This is why the degradation of coaching today (more details later in this article) feels painful. It is not only that unqualified people make the worst promises. It’s also that their language becomes so dominant that many of us run the risk of sounding the same from the outside.

A vocation becomes a ‘funnel’. Education becomes ‘content’. Attention becomes ‘access’. A calling becomes a ‘container’.

I am an educator. I am not an online persona. I am also a practising artist, which means I remain answerable to work outside anything I sell as a coach.

I am also acutely aware of how qualifications do not make somebody ethical or competent automatically. A certificate or even a university degree is not character, and longevity alone does not guarantee good practice. The question was not whether another coach followed my path, but the traceability of the relationship between what they sell, what they have studied, what they have practised, the people they have helped and the responsibilities they are willing to accept and not accept.

Since then, the conversation has moved well beyond a few sceptical posts about unqualified life coaches. Former clients, members and staff are comparing notes. Regulators are naming familiar sales tactics as warning signs. Courts are asking whether the word “coaching” is being used to avoid the responsibilities attached to education. Countries that became backdrops for the laptop-lifestyle economy are asking who is working there, who is paying tax and who is absorbing the consequences.

The backlash is justified. And parts of this ‘industry’ are an absolute mess.

But the backlash is also beginning to collapse several very different things into one another:

• Education and information
• Coaching and consulting
• Location independence and digital nomadism
• Accessibility and opportunism

The risk of discrediting the very things worth protecting along the way is worth noting.

When the product is teaching people to sell the product

I have sat on both sides of this relationship. I offer coaching, and I have hired coaches too. In fact, over the years, I have lost count of how many I tried to work with, including people whose practices left me confused and, on some days, devastated about the direction of my career. Some of these people ran extremely ‘successful’ businesses on paper.

It’s a distinction I want to bring people’s attention to. Because being good at coaching and being good at selling coaching are two very different skill sets. And one of the reasons the two are so easy to confuse is the very nature of the entire education system we are living in.

The machinery is familiar by now. A cheap entry product leads to a much larger offer. The sales call turns hesitation into pathology:

• ‘You are afraid of expansion’
• ‘You are trapped in scarcity mindset’
• ‘You are unwilling to invest in yourself’

Meanwhile, the exceptional success story becomes the testimonial. And when somebody does not get a result hoped for, the method keeps its halo while the client is told they did not implement, did not believe or were simply not coachable.

The worst part? It’s not entirely dismissable either. Because as admirable as the initiative of reaching out for help is, it’s just the first step. And results without the appropriate mindset and implementation are indeed unrealistic expectations. The flurry of college-graduated musicians who end up working at a cafe right after proves this theory. Which makes the entire murkiness of the system all the more confusing.

Then there is the circular market. A coach sells an expensive programme to aspiring coaches, who are taught to build expensive programmes for other aspiring coaches. Their clearest route to recovering what they spent is to sell the same opportunity onwards.

Coaches coaching coaches to coach coaches.

Training coaches is not inherently suspicious either. It is a tradition in fact. The South Asian Gharana system, for example, can be cited as an example where the ultimate goal of the teacher is to eventually make a teacher out of their student so the legacy is transferred. Coaches need education, supervision and professional development, just as other practitioners do.

The problem begins when the person with an actual need ends up as collateral damage amidst the noise. The artist, business owner, student or exhausted founder is replaced by another seller, and the skill being transferred is no longer the ability to help with the original problem, but the ability to market the opportunity to market the opportunity.

It’s a tale as old as time.

I would not casually call every circular or overpriced programme a pyramid scheme. That term has a legal meaning. But when recruitment, luxury imagery and income claims become the centre of the proposition, the resemblance is hard to dismiss as coincidence.

One recent American case shows how large that machinery can become. IM Mastery Academy operated in the neighbouring world of financial training and online business opportunity. The US Federal Trade Commission and the State of Nevada alleged that the company used false or baseless earnings claims to sell trading education and a multi-level-marketing venture in which participants marketed that education to others. The agencies said the operation had generated more than $1.2 billion since 2018. In May 2026, five of the main defendants agreed to surrender assets valued at nearly $90 million to resolve the charges.

The month before, the FTC had published a direct warning about business coaching scams: guaranteed income, large returns for little work, “proven systems”, pressure to act immediately and testimonials that cannot be trusted.

These are not arguments against coaching. They are reminders that the business model and the practice are not the same thing.

The ‘Free PDF’ Pandemic

There is understandable anger about people paying thousands for a programme and receiving a video library, a group call and a lightly edited PDF full of information they could have come up with themselves.

The PDF itself proves nothing. A digital recording costs very little to produce today. That does not make the work worthless. A book can hold thirty years of work and still arrive as an inexpensive file.

The problem is when the ‘free PDF strategy’ becomes the packaging to lure revenue without the actual substance living up to the claims being made about it. Slick branding, cinematic videos and an expensive members’ portal may package a PDF file as a viable product, but packaging is not pedagogy. If the price is justified by true value and access to somebody’s experience, those things need to be present. A €10,000 checkout page at the end of an email sequence cannot turn a generic PDF into bespoke education.

AI has now made that gap harder to ignore. Anybody can now generate a polished framework, worksheet, content calendar or twelve-page guide in minutes. Paste a client’s question into a chatbot and repeat the answer with more confidence than understanding.

Again, the tool is not necessarily the scandal, though many will (justifiably) debate that. Counterfeit authority is.

Information is becoming easier to produce. Experience is not. Neither is pattern recognition, responsibility, the ability to listen past the first version of a problem, or the awareness to stop when the work has moved outside your competence.

This is why I often find myself looking backwards when assessing somebody’s ‘expertise’. What were they doing before generative AI? Before the pandemic coaching boom? Before their expertise became a content strategy? A real practitioner tends to leave a trail: a body of work, students, colleagues, failures, recordings, writing and people who can describe what they actually did.

That history is not an infallible guarantee either. A new coach may be excellent, and somebody can repeat bad work for twenty years. But a polished website is not a substitute for a verifiable past.

Location independence vs digital nomadism

This part needs precision because mobility is not an abstraction to me.

I grew up speaking and mixing six languages across four countries while my parents travelled relentlessly. My musical education came through a strange and formative set of cultural collisions: Top of the Pops in London, Christian music taught to me by a nun in a South Indian village, South Asian classical training, rock music in cover bands in an Indian metropolis and university degrees in music and the arts along with additional certifications.

Long before “third culture kid” gave me a name for any of this, moving between worlds was simply my life.

Juggling cultures and multiple bases is not something I picked up as a random privilege after watching a webinar. It has been part and parcel of my life. As my audience became more global, as touring accumulated, and as caring for my elders became part of the equation, I had to find a way for the different parts of my work not to depend on my body remaining in one place.

My career was not an escape from a life I hated. I love my life and I love my vocation. I was trying to keep its moving parts from destroying one another.

Musicians have always been “digital nomads” before the digital, if we must use the term. We leave home to find stages, scenes, collaborators, studios and audiences. That movement is essential to build and grow a career. But nobody can tour forever. The Musicians’ Union lists touring, time away from home and irregular hours among the risk factors for burnout.

Most musicians also do not have one, single ‘job’. Our careers are assembled across performance, composition, production, teaching and whatever else allows the practice to continue. Research into musicians’ working lives has found that digital tools opened new possibilities for collaboration and securing work, a refreshing alternative to “over-gigging” which could actively undermine a sustainable career (Making Music Work).

Location independence allowed me to compartmentalise that life. A concert could remain physical. A lesson, workshop, mentoring conversation or planning session did not always have to be. 30 years of teaching and lived experience as a professional artist could be condensed into a self-paced course to help others. I could distribute what I knew beyond one postcode, balance performance with family responsibility, and yes, monetise my experience without asking every part of my career to become another tour or studio date.

For twenty years, I taught in a German city-council role with the kind of stability most musicians rarely see. I worked in conservatory and college contexts, with everyone from six-year-old beginners to master’s students. I was teaching in one of the most privileged parts of the world, inside a system many people could never enter because they did not live in the right country, speak the right language, know the right institution or have the money to get there.

Taking that education beyond the conservatory walls was a blessing.

Online music tuition has limitations. Latency is real. Sound gets compressed. Some things require bodies, instruments and air in the same room. But online delivery has also been used to reach students excluded by geography and transport costs. The point was never to force everything onto a screen. It was to recognise what no longer needed to remain trapped in one building.

That is location independence.

Digital nomadism on the other hand has a completely different background as a culture: an entire industry and identity sold through the promise of escape. Earn in a strong currency, move to a low-cost country, photograph the pool and use the difference in purchasing power as proof that the method works.

Moving somewhere less expensive is not automatically unethical. Artists using that as a necessary strategy has been a historical reality. Neither is having a client-roster from multiple countries. The dark side here is treating somebody else’s home, labour, infrastructure and lower wages as the unspoken profit margin in a personal freedom story, while remaining conveniently vague about real paperwork like visas, taxes and local responsibility.

When the people inside begin speaking

Another part of the backlash has come from former clients, members and staff comparing notes. Not all of them are whistleblowers in the legal sense, and some allegations remain contested. But the pattern deserves attention: success becomes a testimonial; failure is returned to the client as a lack of belief, implementation or “coachability”. A business that claims every success while disowning every failure has made itself almost impossible to question.

Part of what makes that possible is that ambiguity has become part of the sales model. An offer can be education, consulting, coaching, therapy, mentorship, community, access and transformation all at once on the sales page. When the client asks what was actually promised, it can become none of them in particular.

Scope matters. Coaching, teaching, consulting, mentoring and therapy can overlap, but they are not interchangeable. “Coaching” cannot be a catch-all on the sales page and then mean nothing specific when a client asks what they paid for. Anyone claiming to work with trauma, depression, addiction, eating disorders or abuse needs more than confident language and a “holistic” framework. Part of being a responsible coach is knowing where a competence ends and when another professional needs to be involved.

The scrutiny is no longer confined to social media. Authorities and courts in the US and Germany have begun testing both the conduct behind these organisations and the labels they use.[1][2]

Bali has become one of the clearest symbols of that reckoning in recent weeks. In the first half of 2026, immigration authorities there deported 342 foreign nationals. The cases involved overstays, permit misuse and other violations. But the wider backlash has also concerned foreign-run businesses, remote workers and social spaces that many Balinese people experience as detached from the island around them. Recent reporting describes anger over illegal work, rising costs and local people feeling excluded.

By August, Indonesia was reviewing work visas and possible tax rules for foreign digital nomads. Online does not mean nowhere. The money lands somewhere. So do the rent pressure, tax questions and labour consequences. As history has shown time and again, mobility without responsibility can become extraction very quickly.

Holistic is not an ‘all you can eat’ buffet.

What I would ask before hiring a coach now

First, I would work out whether coaching was even the right answer.

If I needed information, I might need a book, course or teacher. If I needed a specific strategy, I might need a consultant. If I was dealing with a mental-health struggle, I might need a properly qualified therapist or even doctor. Coaching earns its place when another person’s attention, questions and judgement can help me recognise and change something I have not been able to move alone.

Then I would ask:

• What did this person do before they began teaching other people to do it?
• Is there evidence of their work outside the coaching economy?
• If most of their clients are coaches, who is the work ultimately serving?
• What am I actually buying: information, live teaching, individual attention, consulting, group access or coaching?
• How much will be delivered by the person whose face sold it to me, and how much by recordings, junior staff or generic material?
• Are the price, cancellation terms and refund policy clear before the sales call?
• Can they describe the limits of their competence without turning the answer into another pitch?
• Am I being allowed to decide, or is my hesitation being used as evidence that I need the programme?

Above all, can they tell me that I do not need them?

Somebody whose answer to every problem is a larger package has already told you what their real practice is.

Real coaching does not guarantee a new life by Friday. It does not turn uncertainty into proof that you should pay more, and it does not make the coach the hero of the client’s story. The work underneath the label is slower and less glamorous:

• Paying attention
• Asking better questions
• Identifying patterns
• Holding boundaries
• Helping somebody become more capable, not dependent

The truth about ‘online coaching’ is that “online” tells us almost nothing. All it tells us is where the conversation happens. Not who is on the other side, what they know, how they learned it or whether their business depends on the client getting a result rather than simply becoming the next sale.

The people trying to hijack the work risk destroying our trust in education, mentorship and accessibility. I went online to keep a vocation I loved sustainable and to take an education that had once been confined to privileged rooms beyond their walls.

Surrendering that possibility as collateral damage to someone else’s get-rich-quick backdrop would be one of the most destructive paths to walk down.