The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

Successful musicians have way more in common with actors than any other profession. It’s about connections, wealth, and nepotism over anything else.

Let’s say your child wants to be an actor. One way to make this happen is to be a successful actor yourself - require your children to be cast in the film in return for you starring. This is how famous acting families pushed their kids forwards, including Nicholas Cage (Coppola) and Jeff Bridges.

More relevant for HN is rich people. So you are tech rich and your kid wants to act. Fund the movie on the condition your child acts in it. That is the way since movies began.

That has been the case for a very, very long time. Classical music is basically one big orgy of wealthy people. Musicians born into families of musicians that were well off. Same goes for other artistic pursuits such as painters etc.

I found very little actual insight in this article. I think musicians have been struggling for decades and the parents have known for at least as long to tell their kids to get a degree regardless of their talents. Schools like Berklee are… questionable at best. Lots off nepo babies just taking a few years to fuck about, basically.

Now hit play on your phone connected to a speaker, GG musicians.

Not really comparable experience though.

I intuitively agree with this perspective, even if I'm unsure about the consequences, and would probably need to think more deeply about them.

Once, when criticising the toxic effects of advertising, I got a response to the effect of 'but how will streamers be able to support themselves?!'. Which I was really struck by, because it presumes that streamers should be able to support themselves by streaming. Should they? Is this actually a desirable outcome? Yes, the financial viability probably leads to more streaming, but what about the quality of the overall streaming? And what about the opportunity cost when someone gives up their job and puts their labours into the business of streaming?

There will always be some level of cultural output, since there will always be passionate people. But has making the arts an industry (through an ever expanding artifice of 'intellectual property', and the ever expanding criminalisation of its subversion) actually led to better arts? Would this be a better or worse world if people built bridges in their day job and played rock gigs at night, solely for the love of it?

I'm not trying to do a Socratic dialogue here, I genuinely don't know. But I suspect the answer is much more nuanced than 'more money = better art', and I am sceptical of certain legal or economic distortions based on that assumption (e.g. life + 70 copyright terms, surveillance advertising, surveillance DRM software, billion-dollar industries that subsist solely on 'IP', fines and prison terms for unauthorised sharing, or the reversing or bypassing of DRM, etc).

The vitality of music (and probably the rest of the arts), has always depended on a symbiosis between professional and amateur musicians. Some things still need professionals, such as fielding a top level symphony orchestra. And high caliber teaching.

Among other things, I play large-ensemble jazz. Over the years, I've played in a number of bands, and the level of quality and variety achieved by players with professional training is a noticeable step above amateur players. The material that my current band plays is unplayable without training. About half of the band members have music degrees (many teach music in the public schools) and the other half are dedicated amateurs with past training like myself.

Other styles, like folk music, are essentially sustained by amateurs.

Some things can only be done by amateurs, or professionals who also have a musical hobby, such as playing experimental, obscure, or historical music. Amateur musicians also support the professional scene by attending performances, taking lessons, buying instruments (resulting in economies of scale), etc.

Anyone who has something they've done out of love but can't figure out how to monetize knows the problem with this: you are limited in the amount of time you can put into doing it, both into the actual doing and the pre-doing practice and study. That means less of your best work gets done. Maybe you never actually reach the point where any of your best work gets done.

There's lots of value in amateur engineering. What if we deprofessionalized engineering via making it difficult for anyone to make a living doing it? Some people would no doubt still continue to do it, to scratch their itches and exercise their minds. But they would spend less time doing it, less time sudying how to do it, more time doing whatever it takes to pay the bills and claw out some semblance of security. We certainly wouldn't fall into technical poverty immediately, and maybe we wouldn't miss what we don't quite invent / develop, but both the people who actually love it enough to pay attention and the professionals would know the difference between what isn't getting done.

(And in fact, the US is standing on the precipice of a FAFO event with research here, having just made it more difficult to make a living focusing on it.)

What happens to a field that can only be engaged as a dilettante, never as a committed investor?

A lot.

Many musicians teach others. Without them how will we learn one of the most beautiful / coolest things to ever exist?

I’ve tried learning from an app and it’s not the same as spending an hour with my guitar teacher. It’s not even close. I wish he were paid more given how talented he is and how hard he works.

The question we should be asking, as consumers of music, is how many musical options do we want?

If musicians can't make a living, then both the quantity and quality of our musical options go down. Yes, hobbyists will always make music for themselves, but hobbyists won't necessarily record music for us or tour around the country for us to see in live venues. The issue is not that musicians inherently deserve to make a living; the issue is, what kind of musical market is available for consumers?

How many financially self-sustaining software developers should there be? AI code generation has caused the number to fall, but FOSS before that likely made it fall as well.

I can keep playing this game, as can others. Why do we need all that money invested in data collection and disseminating cat videos, political unrest, etc.

Streaming is only the next step of the ladder, the reality is that ever since recording was possible (then broadcasting, then the internet), music (and most of the arts for that matter) has increasing winner-take all effects, where a minuscule amount of artists reap huge gains, while the rest just scrape by.

Now, with AI, all signs seem to indicate that the industry will finally reset to what was the norm for hundreds of years : Artists would be supported on their craft by patrons and benefactors. Most didn't make it to be wealthy, but at least, they got to enjoy time in their craft.

With the advent of streaming services like Spotify, it’s definitely getting worse, but the market has always been difficult from a strictly performative/sales perspective. I never made any real money from my compositions, but I pulled a decent side income teaching piano back in university.

It reminds me of ex-Soviet chess players. The emigration of so many good grandmaster-level players diluted the market, and unless you were in the absolute upper echelons (like Kramnik, Karpov, or Kasparov), you pretty much had to supplement your income by teaching on the side.

It's even more of a scam because none of these companies were making such services with a way to actually profit in mind. It got customers spoiled on unrealistically cheap media; cheap media that was a result of skilled labor that only got more expensive over time. The bubble was going to burst one day.

In some regards, the ZIRP era ending was needed; companies can't just make money by relying on hype for years, even decades before the piper needs to be paid. But of course it couldn't have ended in a worst time.

It's not great. But the economics of selling recordings never worked out for artists; it's possible that most of what streaming does is to kill advances for artists, and royally fuck labels, the perennial antagonists in the stories we tell about the music industry.

Enjoy listening to Drake for the rest of your life.