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The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

(thewalrus.ca)
300 points pseudolus | 2 comments | 28 Jun 25 22:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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1. vunderba ◴[29 Jun 25 03:45 UTC] No.44410201[source]▶
With the advent of streaming services like Spotify, it’s definitely getting worse, but the market has always been difficult from a strictly performative/sales perspective. I never made any real money from my compositions, but I pulled a decent side income teaching piano back in university.

It reminds me of ex-Soviet chess players. The emigration of so many good grandmaster-level players diluted the market, and unless you were in the absolute upper echelons (like Kramnik, Karpov, or Kasparov), you pretty much had to supplement your income by teaching on the side.

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2. janstice ◴[29 Jun 25 05:14 UTC] No.44410530[source]▶
Oddly enough this also caused similar issues in classical orchestras - in the 90s a bunch of top flight Eastern European and Russian musicians raised the bar of orchestras in places like NZ, with the side effect of having fewer seats for younger musicians to move into.