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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: 0s | 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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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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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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1. 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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2. Den_VR ◴[29 Jun 25 07:50 UTC] No.44411095[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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3. ringeryless ◴[29 Jun 25 10:38 UTC] No.44411964[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