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The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

(thewalrus.ca)
300 points pseudolus | 16 comments | 28 Jun 25 22:06 UTC | HN request time: 1.323s | source | bottom
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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?

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1. kleiba ◴[28 Jun 25 23:29 UTC] No.44409045[source]▶
> Nobody is out there lamenting that you can’t make a living off of landscape painting.

Completely different markets, though: how much time per day do you spend looking at landscape paintings vs. listening to music?

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2. Den_VR ◴[28 Jun 25 23:35 UTC] No.44409081[source]▶
I’d say I intentionally listen to music maybe an hour total per month, usually while my eyes are occupied.

Meanwhile, outside of museums most landscape art is also advertising. But I’ll spend two or three hours at an art museum when I get the chance.

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3. Waterluvian ◴[28 Jun 25 23:45 UTC] No.44409131[source]▶
Both are there constantly in the background of my day.

It’s not really The Sims. You don’t usually go stand in front of one of your paintings and emote a bunch. It’s just there breathing life into a space.

4. kleiba ◴[28 Jun 25 23:46 UTC] No.44409139[source]▶
I hear music all the time, when I commute, when I drive kids to various clubs, friends, and events, when they put music on at home, when I watch a TV show or a movie - all that music was produced by somebody.

I like art but I cannot remember the last time I went to an exhibition. Certainly not since my wife and I became parents.

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5. johnnyanmac ◴[29 Jun 25 00:25 UTC] No.44409310{3}[source]▶
"I like music but cannot remember the last time I went to a concert"

That seems like a weird angle to take it, no? I know it's just an example but there is more than one type of artist, just as there's more than one type of musician. As simple as it is, someone needed to design the YCombinator logo. Art is everywhere as well, even on a site like this that doesn't host much visual media.

(P.S. I do remember the last time I went to a concert. October).

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6. fragmede ◴[29 Jun 25 00:41 UTC] No.44409395{3}[source]▶
when was the last time you saw something beautiful though? Or just saw something and it made you think.
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7. BurningFrog ◴[29 Jun 25 01:28 UTC] No.44409639[source]▶
Landscape painters were replaced by cameras.

We do spend a lot of time looking at photos!

8. neom ◴[29 Jun 25 02:53 UTC] No.44409989{4}[source]▶
Yesterday a butterfly got stuck in my pool, I usually try to save them. This one was trying it's hardest to fly but the water on it's wings was just slightly too heavy or something, but it was flapping really hard and making the most amazing ripple in the pool, I froze and couldn't stop looking at the ripple it was making, the ripple frequency and modulation was was slow and totally perfect, even tho it was flapping incredibly hard...but I also thought it's stuck and going to die, but I was totally fixated on the frequency and amplitudes. I managed to break my gaze and got it out. That was the most beautiful thing that made me think recently, I'm still thinking about it.
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9. 11217mackem ◴[29 Jun 25 03:27 UTC] No.44410133[source]▶
Everyone knows that music is the objectively superior art form. Perhaps excluding film, which, putting aside scant creative geniuses, requires music and scoring.

Anyone who could live on this planet without music is a psycopath.

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10. aspenmayer ◴[29 Jun 25 04:20 UTC] No.44410335{5}[source]▶
Now you’ve got me thinking about the beauty in the mundane. The real butterfly effect is the friends we make along the way. You saved the butterfly one time, and in the telling, you’ve helped save my hope in humanity. To me, these moments are as genuinely human as any achievement. To be human is to behold, and to be captivated thus.
11. Den_VR ◴[29 Jun 25 07:50 UTC] No.44411095{3}[source]▶
People can be so go-go-go they don’t have time to think and reflect. Music is similar, it’s a source of constant distraction for the mind. It’s even more prominent in contemporary music. When listening to pieces more than a thousand years old and you’ll sometimes find works that build meaning into the silence as masterfully as artists compose paintings with negative space. But now it seems any gap must be filled with a beat. Y’all can stay wrapped up in your noise-noise-noise. But do excuse me for being comfortable in the silence of my own thoughts.
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12. ringeryless ◴[29 Jun 25 10:38 UTC] No.44411964{4}[source]▶
yes! i still have the songs i listened to last week echoing around in my head. i foind out i have some kind of memory based perfect pitch, as when i put thr recording on again it's in the same key i was playing it in my head in. i can literally hum every note of it, despite having heard it twice about a week ago, because it was poignant and stuck with me.

silence is golden and allows for reflection upon what we heard

13. kleiba ◴[29 Jun 25 10:57 UTC] No.44412064{4}[source]▶
Sorry, I cannot follow. But I don't find your first sentence to be weird.
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14. kleiba ◴[29 Jun 25 10:58 UTC] No.44412070{4}[source]▶
Why is that relevant? We're talking about the commercial prospect of making music vs. that of painting landscapes.
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15. johnnyanmac ◴[29 Jun 25 18:59 UTC] No.44415426{5}[source]▶
I was mostly just saying that your comparisons seem uneven. You were comparing one specific part of art (landscape painting) to the entire music industry. There more ways to art.
16. fragmede ◴[02 Jul 25 18:03 UTC] No.44446888{5}[source]▶
just because your eye aren't your ears, and you've been busy, doesn't mean that there isn't a market for visually appealing things.