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The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

(thewalrus.ca)
300 points pseudolus | 3 comments | 28 Jun 25 22:06 UTC | HN request time: 1.298s | source
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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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mlsu ◴[29 Jun 25 00:14 UTC] No.44409254[source]▶
Everyone should become an engineer. Then we can spend our whole lives working to build stuff. That way, we can prevent anyone from pursuing anything creative, beautiful, or transcendental.

Like, I see where you're going with this but music is one of those things that's actually the whole point of being alive. If all we ever do is do "useful" things ($$$) we lose our chance to actually live our lives.

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parpfish ◴[29 Jun 25 00:49 UTC] No.44409436[source]▶
i think you're reading something into my post that i didnt intend. i hate the "just learn to code"/"only STEM degrees are worthwhile" crowd.

we absolutely should be pursing things that are creative, beautiful, and transcendental. but.. should we expect the pursuit of the creative, beautiful, and transcendental to be a career? we should encourage everybody to do because it is inherently valuable instead of pursuing it because its a job.

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1. popalchemist ◴[29 Jun 25 02:02 UTC] No.44409782[source]▶
We should not encourage everybody to pursue the arts. But a society that disregards the importance of the arts (one symptom of which is that the pursuit of the arts as a career/way of life is inviable) then the society as a whole will -- 100% absolutely guaranteed -- suffer as a result. The arts are the means by which the unconscious comes to consciousness. Music is a means by which the sublime, and of course even various mundane psycho-spiritual-emotional states -- become accessible for the vast majority of people who can not access said states without aid.

In the absence of that, neurosis is certain to flourish.

So, it is not an economic matter but a matter of the psychodynamics of society. For the sake of the health of the whole, some members of the whole must be able to bring in certain vibes, patterns, states of mind, ideas, etc. And without the ability to pursue that and only that skillset, they won't be able to succeed at that. And it is required for the functioning of the whole.

It's a bit akin to the way the entire body depends on the cells that process ATP. If you eliminate all cells that serve that role, the entire body dies, even though they are a miniscule aspect of the entire operation. That is where the animating spirit comes from.

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2. mettamage ◴[29 Jun 25 10:25 UTC] No.44411878[source]▶
Well sure, but he asked "should we expect the pursuit of the creative, beautiful, and transcendental to be a career?"

My answer is no not necessarily. One can pursue it in their free time. Whether it should be a career or not is honestly an invisible hand question (aka capitalism). I'm normally not pro invisible hand such as in the case of healthcare, but when it comes to stuff like this, I totally am.

It might be beneficial to have dedicated people to do this, but a lot can be accomplished by free time.

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3. popalchemist ◴[03 Jul 25 00:12 UTC] No.44450226[source]▶
I direct you to The Society of the Spectacle, a postmodern marxist critique of capital and its infinite growth, which, due to man's limited resources (free time, life span, etc), inevitably encroaches upon man's ability to pursue such things.

If we do not explicitly carve out a space for the arts and other transcendental pursuits, capitalism eats them. And then the cancer grows.

So it is a moral imperative to make it possible for SOME of us (obviously, not everyone is called to such things) to pursue these things exclusively.