←back to thread

The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

(thewalrus.ca)
300 points pseudolus | 4 comments | 28 Jun 25 22:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.009s | source
Show context
parpfish ◴[28 Jun 25 22:58 UTC] No.44408859[source]▶
How many financially self-sustaining musicians should there be? Streaming has caused the number to fall, but recorded music before that likely made it fall as well.

Should we stop thinking about music as a job and start thinking about it as a hobbyist art form? Nobody is out there lamenting that you can’t make a living off of landscape painting. It’s a fun form of self expression that people will do regardless of the economics, so maybe the problem was ever thinking you could make a profession out of it?

replies(22): >>44408928 #>>44408966 #>>44409045 #>>44409157 #>>44409254 #>>44409270 #>>44409551 #>>44409842 #>>44409919 #>>44410084 #>>44410086 #>>44410122 #>>44410201 #>>44410210 #>>44410229 #>>44410260 #>>44410292 #>>44410623 #>>44410719 #>>44411539 #>>44412762 #>>44421135 #
1. Animats ◴[28 Jun 25 23:10 UTC] No.44408928[source]▶
> Should we stop thinking about music as a job and start thinking about it as a hobbyist art form?

At one point there were several million "MySpace Bands". That's music as a hobbyist art form. Some of them might even have been good.

replies(2): >>44409521 #>>44411182 #
2. parpfish ◴[29 Jun 25 01:05 UTC] No.44409521[source]▶
imo, it's better to have a million bands dicking around and having fun playing terrible shows for crowds of ten people than a hundred polished superstar groups playing sold out arenas.
replies(1): >>44410166 #
3. cmoski ◴[29 Jun 25 03:37 UTC] No.44410166[source]▶
Those are not the only two choices. There are so many great bands playing shows to hundreds or a few thousand people.

Maybe you don't value music or live music, but there are a lot of people out there that do. You not caring much for it doesn't change the fact or make it ok that they're getting stiffed by those with the upper hand in the relationship.

4. Semaphor ◴[29 Jun 25 08:08 UTC] No.44411182[source]▶
At least for metal, there are still tons of tiny musicians. Underground labels do cassette runs for the smallest of them, medium-tiny ones might get vinyls.

Bandcamp is chock full of bands, from home produced stuff, to bands spending saved money on a cheap studio. It's enough that even in the sub-niches I like, I can listen to 10-20 newly released albums every week.

I doubt more than a small single digit percentage of them make money that way, but they very often really enjoy what they are doing.