You wouldn’t want to be called a sell-out by selling a product. Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school.

Alda contrasts an older artistic/countercultural ethic—where overt commercialism risked the stigma of “selling out”—with a contemporary climate that treats marketing and monetization as mainstream, even academically credentialed. The line plays on the shift from moral judgment to professionalization: what once implied betrayal of values is now framed as a legitimate skill set. Implicitly, he critiques how commerce can normalize itself to the point that ethical or aesthetic reservations are dismissed as naïve. The humor (“you can major in it”) sharpens the observation that cultural prestige has migrated toward business logic, and that reputational costs for commercial endorsement have diminished.