The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

I played in a cover band with some well-paid engineers. We enjoyed music enough to consider going full time, but even with four-figure bookings were were barely taking home minimum wage. We looked into getting a manager to find us more high-paying gigs, but management fees and travel costs eat up the gains.

For a band, it's virtually impossible to find work outside the weekend. If a region had a few restaurants that were known for year round "live music Mondays", "live music lunches", etc, it would increase the number of hours that a musician could work during the week, and make full time performance viable for more musicians. Of course, people would also need to support these performances by patronizing the venues that host them.

But until a working musician can fill their weekday calendar with paying gigs without excessive travel/lodging costs, you'll continue to see talented musicians drop out and do something else.

Even if you play gigs 7 days a week on Broadway (Nashville), all year round, you'd make a pitiful salary - compared to the work put in.

And you'd be locked to only playing certain types of music (country, classic rock, singer songwriter), doing multiple gigs a day.

Truth be told, most musicians would be better off by picking a job, any job really, and treating music as a side hustle. And that really pains me, as I started out as a musician.

If you're going to make a living off music, it's going to be a never-ending marathon of hustles and uncertainty. Cover bands, church bands, wedding bands, session work, lessons, roadie work, instrument tech, and half (of not two thirds) of that work is based on sheer luck, depending on what people you cross paths with.