The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

I left a career in music production five years ago and moved into programming (data science). there's no turning back.

I was very aware that I was lucky. You can be the best, you can have a great network, but (in my experience), luck is the main factor. and the "luck" window in the music space is more and more narrow currently.

I'm currently a data analyst, used to be a software engineer. Weirdly enough I feel that data analysis (programming, visualizing, consulting and presenting) feels a lot related to making music. I think I just see the art of being a data analyst.

I want to "move up" in my career, but I simply don't see the (performative) art of data science and data engineering. It feels too narrow. Music and data analysis feels broad. I could take a higher paycheck but it'd cost of a lot of fun.

It probably helps that I on top of that get to integrate LLMs and create LLM flows, basically n8n but then programming it using the APIs of an LLM. So I'm still actually programming as well.

It's fun being a generalist.

I totally agree, because I work with data analysis as well. Both feel similar because in the end you have to tell a story and (presumably) please the audience :)