The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

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?

> Should we stop thinking about music as a job and start thinking about it as a hobbyist art form?

At one point there were several million "MySpace Bands". That's music as a hobbyist art form. Some of them might even have been good.