The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

If you want to talk about the root of problems, it comes down to preferences. Income inequality in musicians? People prefer some musicians and songs over others. UBI and taxation isn't going to meaningfully change the income inequality between the median and top earners in entertainment fields due to social dynamics. Guess what the primary driver of the housing shortage is? Preference for larger homes and "better" locations. There are enough housing units nationally, but their distribution and charateristics don't match the preferences. You might be thinking about NIMBY, but guess what that is? The preferences of the people already there. Solutions like UBI or just building more skip a logical step of evaluating the true underlying causes and presume them instead. To solve a problem we must first understand it.

Any reference that you can point to on the housing shortage being due to preference?

It seems like job location, compensation, average cost of living, and commute would play a fairly large role.

"It seems like job location, compensation, average cost of living, and commute would play a fairly large role."

Are you saying these don't involve preferences?

And a web search will bring up tons of housing preference sources coming various aspects.

https://learn.upright.us/real-estate-investing-blog/a-housin...

Sure, you could argue that some people prefer to not live a destitute life, and that influences the high price of housing. But that is reductive, ignoring a host of other factors, which again, you might be able to boil down to preference (wealthy capitalists prefer to make more money) but again, it's reductive and offers a somewhat shallow perspective and not much to act on.

You would at least be able to act on the true cause rather than chase short term changes that may not even work or won't scale. If it's indicative of a distribution problem, then we should be investigating distribution solutions. If you can't see this connection, then I posit that you might have the shallow perspective.

The inequality of musicians is not about what they earn once they make a living making music. Professional instrumentalists, for example, tend to be paid fairly equally (though not necessarily well).

It's about who gets to become a musician, because practicing the skill takes a lot of resources, and it seems the middle class can no longer afford that.

The idea that the middle class musician ever existed at all is a false premise. Lamenting the loss of something that never existed is pretty ridiculous. "Ahh, remember the good old days when one could make a middle class living as an amateur ski jumper". How can we get back to that? Of course, UBI / communism.

>> It's about who gets to become a musician, because practicing the skill takes a lot of resources, and it seems the middle class can no longer afford that.

Most of the middle class has lots of time to practice (just do that instead of watching TikTok). Practice can help you become a better musician, but cannot make you great - innate talent is needed for that. Being great is also no guarantee of success - luck and / or other forms of skill are needed (marketing capability, etc).

This is also only on the performance side of things. The real limiting factor in music for the most part is writing songs that people want to hear. If you can do that you will be successful almost immediately because supply and demand is so out of balance here and distribution is trivial.

This is nonsense. The music business relies on a core of largely unknown session players and arrangers. The successful ones earn a comfortable living. The top players are easily millionaires, because there aren't many people who can learn and perform parts by ear with the right vibe for a headliner stadium or Broadway show in under a week. (Or a weekend, in some cases.)

There are people you've never heard of earning six or seven figures a year from music for ads.

And so on.

The catch is these people are very, very good at what they do. They're not bedroom wannabes.

As for pop - that has always had a complex relationship with management and funding. Everyone assumes you join a band and get famous. But many bands/artists were treated more like investment vehicles or startups, with record companies and sometimes private individuals providing seed funding for careers.

It's a much riskier career than software, where you can be pretty mediocre and make a good living.

But impossible and nonexistent are both spectacularly wrong and absolutely detached from how the industry works.

Exactly. Those are preferences.

You can get a decent, 3 bed, 2 bath house for 100k. Just move to some place like Tucumcari, NM. Why not? Oh...right...the same reasons no one else moves to places like that...

Not false in any way. The life of the middle-income touring performer used to exist and is gone now..

The article isn't focused on the plight of the session Broadway player or Orchestral musician (nor artists writing music for ads or movies or acting as a session musician for a headliner act). It isn't clear that this is getting better or worse but is completely orthogonal to the discussion.

Mainstream recording artists (pop, country, R&B, rock, etc.) represent the vast majority of industry revenues. My argument is that middle class musicians have effectively never existed in this space. Just like middle class professional basketball players effectively don't exist. You either win big or do something else.

Can you name any?

It seems very disingenuous to suggest needing to live somewhere one can make a living is only a “preference.”

In Britain it’s noticeable that as unemployment benefit and social housing has been stripped back the proportion of people from working class backgrounds with careers in the arts has declined. The most visible example of this is probably actors; pretty much all the current generation of British actors went to public school and were able to support themselves via family wealth as they became established. This wasn’t the case for the generation coming through in the 70s and 80s. The underlying cause is that if you can’t subsist as you learn your craft you can’t learn your craft, I don’t think this is mysterious.

This doesn’t just apply to the arts, if all junior dev roles are stripped away by llm’s where do the talented developers of tomorrow come from? Those who can learn the craft on their own time, those with independent wealth.

At a societal level there is a huge amount of potential talent being left on the table, and imo redistributive policies are the obvious fix. In think this is really important both from a mortal point of view and an economically pragmatic one.

Preferences don’t explain why we aren’t building housing where people want to live. Mid rise buildings don’t need to be particularly expensive per square foot. ~11 million for a 50 unit building is 220k / apartment not 100k cheap but way better than what you see near most cites people want to live in. 2 to 3x housing density requires extra transportation infrastructure but it also means being able to support such infrastructure.

Instead walk around most expensive city’s and you see single family dwellings /row houses in sight of high rises / skyscrapers. That’s not economic efficiency that’s people who can afford high housing prices likening the system the way it is.

Because there aren’t jobs there?

This seems extremely overly reductive. It's not just "time to practice".

It's also about having access to equipment that is available, clean, and in proper working order.

And it's about having access to educators who can teach you what you are doing right or wrong. And those educators having the time to be able to actually do so.

And it's about having the ability to attend performances or competitions so that you can learn to actually perform and to receive impartial critique to improve. That doesn't just mean having the option of attending these events but also being able to afford the fees associated with the events as well as being able to afford transportation (whether that's getting there yourself or having family being able to take time off from work to transport you there and back).

You don't need every one of these to be able to succeed but each one of these legs you take away is one less leg the next generation of lower and middle class musicians have to stand on.

I've known quite a few people who made quite good livings playing 5-nights a week at hotel lounges in BFE. You're not going to recognize any, because they aren't famous, they just made their living going around playing music and weren't super famous. Even the relatively "famous" ones I have worked with (say, marc benno or paul pearcy or jay boy adams) aren't known by folks outside of very small circles.

IME, the consolidation of radio, changes in taste around live music, and the dissolution of paying for recorded music all worked to get rid of that group of folks.

But that doesn't mean that I haven't played with a lot of folks who are now in their 70s and 80s who made a good living playing music for folks.

The focus here again seems to be on the plight of the Orchestral musician / related. While this might represent a large portion of mind share in some groups it is tiny from an economic perspective when compared to mainstream recording acts. The primary instruments driving this revenue are as follows: 1) voice 2) drums 3) bass 4) guitar 5) keyboard. None of these things are expensive or hard to maintain. You don't even need to be particularly good at any of these things other than voice.

This is an obvious trolling attempt, but I'll bite. Very simple statistical sample for those interested:

- Go on the wikipedia page for the notable alumni of Berklee College of Music[1]; - Sort by graduation years; - Notice the "early life" snippet on the bio of most musicians from the 1970-2000. - Compare those with the bio from artists from and before such interval. Bonus points for taking in consideration how many musicians past year 2000 come from a family with an already existing musical background.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Berklee_College_of_Mus...

This has nothing to do with subsisting while learning your craft. This is about a supply and demand difference and the inequality in entertainment roles. If you have too many actors, then the nobodies get paid next to nothing while the famous people get the lion's share. And many of those nobodies never make even close to earning a living because the supply side is saturated and the demand side doesn't want to pay for that art. You have to have buyers.

This doesn't work in practice. Marketing for instance rewards spending far more than skill. Sure social media/viral marketing can theoretically be free, but that just kicks the can down the road. My friend's band is (in my opinion) terrific, but despite constantly playing shows and posting everywhere haven't gotten "instan" success". They haven't gotten the recommendation algorithms or playlists skewed in their favor by signing with a major publisher but that comes with its own problems

You need to find a way to convince the owners of that inefficient housing to sell it to a developer so that they can demolish it to build the efficient housing. That will add significantly to the unit economics of the efficient housing.

Well, I do mean in the context of the article. I'm not suggesting no one ever played in an orchestra. I'm saying that are vanishingly few middle class touring and recording rock, hip hop, pop and country artists and this has largely always been the case. In this domain you either hit it out of the park or go on to do something else.

I don't really know what the table of Berklee grads is pointing toward. Are you suggesting that this says it is now harder to become a middle class recording / touring artist today than it was in the past? If so, how?

Thanks for the names that you provided. I'd say these are examples of people that had some success and then pivoted to become session / touring musicians for other (very famous) bands (though one is a Grammy award winner in their own right). I suppose it is possible that there will be fewer people like that in the future. I guess we will see.

Perhaps the artist in the article could similarly pivot. At least, that seems to be the main way to stay in the industry if you are unable (for whatever reason) to attain commercial success.

Looks like about 3/4 of musicians are part time. The average salary of $57k for the full time workers is about $1k over the minimum to be considered middle class. And the unemployment rate is about 18%.

There's no doubt that there are some middle class and higher earners. It seems that most are part time, don't make much and face higher unemployment than many other sectors. Sector growth is alaso very slow. There's a reason that most people's parents don't push them to pursue music careers unless it's as a teacher or if they're exceptional. Same thing for sports - you can make decent money as a college coach or gym teacher, but the proportion of people who play sports that go on to do anything professionally with it is extraordinary small. It's all supply and demand.

Well, do tell. What is your friends band's name?

The definition of "make a living" is highly subject to preferences. The vacant houses are in areas where other people live. If those other people can't make a living, then shouldn't we improve the economy in that area rather than ship those people off to more congested areas or leave the homes vacant?

A question for the downvoters. How many of your middle class neighbours are recording / touring artists playing original pop, rock, hip hop or country music? Did you have a lot more such neighbours 20 years ago?

Class in this context is referring to the actors' backgrounds, i.e. parental incomes, rather than their own income. There is an issue if you have to be born to a rich family in order to take on a career like acting, and right now, at least based on the evidence, that appears to be true: you need a sufficient safety net to be able to survive for a long time on basically no income while you practice and work low-paying gigs until you finally break through. For some people that just isn't possible.

A social safety net means that more people have the ability to try out risky careers - not necessarily that more of them will succeed, but that the pool of applicants will be larger and include a wider proportion of the population.

In most cases it's illegal to build that efficient housing.

Legal issues are more of a hindrance.

At the start you might be adding a few million in land costs and building taller, but that quickly deflates the housing market. Pushing people to sell before their homes become ever less valuable. Further cities outlive people, reluctant homeowners eventually die.

City infrastructure similarly has real costs, but an infrastructure tax on every net new unit isn’t going to see anywhere close to current prices.

Thin Lines, Golden Days is a fantastic album: https://open.spotify.com/album/7KZ2Rp2bp5X3MU3rmu7nwf?si=O1d...

I agree. Entertainment has long been called a "hits based" industry.

That's also true for programmers, machinists, all kinds of engineers, pilots, etc.

A cheap guitar + youtube to start is a lot cheaper than anything involving eg. CNC machining, where most people can't even think about starting the process, way before the "get good" phase. Just obtaining a mac + an iphone is hard to impossible in many places on earth, especially for younger people.

Should we also subsidize lottery tickets?

I gave the opening track a listen. It sounds fairly undifferentiated to me. I hope they find success. I am just one data point.

I want to hear something that is simultaneously good and also I have never heard before. Not an easy ask of course.

Does society benefit from there being lots of lottery winners from a variety of backgrounds? I think there is a big difference between having a thriving arts landscape and having a thriving landscape of people who won the lottery.

Why would your proposal result in a 'thriving arts landscape'?

20 years ago I knew a bunch of people in their teens and early twenties. Now I know a bunch of people in their 40s and I couldn't tell you what the teens around me are doing. Are you sure you're not just picking up on the fact that you're 20 years older now?

The real question then is why the "professionals" in these fields are able to command such massive incomes, and why people are prepared to pay multiple hundreds to watch their favourite singer but won't drop into a free gig at an open mic night. Why some footballers can can earn millions per week, and the lower tiers of the sport are paid so little. Why top actors can earn more from one film than even most doctors or lawyers will earn in their lifetime, while other decent actors spend their entire careers working as an extra, etc...

Clearly everyone can see that the system is "unfair" in almost every industry, so the question is why does everybody perpetuate this system. It seems to be that by and large, people are prepared to pay more to get more of whatever they consider "the best" and they care much less about everything else in that space.

But shift the focus away from people and to products - why are so many people willing to pay over $1000 for the latest iPhone, when they already have the previous year's phone, and a $100 phone probably does 90% of what they need.

Again, it's because people want the best they can afford, and so the market increases the price to the point that maximises the product of price and people prepared to pay that price. Sadly, for the aspiring musician that hasn't been scouted yet, the price is low and even then not many people are prepared to pay it. This is why we have record labels who scout for talent, front them some money up front, handle publicity and building an audience, hoping that one of their 100+ artists might make enough that they can pay for the rest and still make a profit.

Lotteries are already a tax on people bad at math

Same with the Midlist Author

My point is 20 years ago I had zero middle class neighbours that fell into this category and that number is the same today. I suspect those numbers represent most people's experiences as well.

The article is suggesting that there is a delta between the past and the present. My argument is there is no delta. There were always nearly zero people in this category.

It comes back to the Stephen Jay Gould quote:

> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

If you widen the pool of applicants, you've got a better chance of finding the best actors, musicians, writers, etc. And you also get a wider variety of stories to tell. Monocultures are dangerous, be that in the workplace, in politics, in academia, or in the arts. Ensuring that more people get a chance to enter these fields keeps them healthy and active, and prevents them from devolving into navel gazing.

It's the same way that if you want to see innovation in tech, you need to keep on funding startups and small companies. If instead you just constantly subsidise Google and friends, you'll never get that next great thing, you'll just get more of the same.

  It's the same way that if you want to see innovation in tech, you need to keep on funding startups

Right, and there's a market mechanism for funding risky startups.

If there's such a benefit to finding additional folks with extreme acting talent/potential, why is a non-market solution required?

No this is just in general. Voice is cheap but it's easy to destroy. So many artists get close to or just past breaking out into success and torch their voice in the process, killing their careers. Likewise percussionists risk their hearing if they don't know better.

And in general, musicians are rarely made by just practicing in one's room. Even your big successful musicians spend their middle and high schools in band classes where they learn a substantial portion of their technical skills. They may not be playing the same instruments that they become successful on but school concert, jazz, and marching bands are really the breeding grounds for musicians who eventually go out and pursue their passions in other genres. Likewise that's generally where they meet their band-mates or colleagues who spur them on to greater things.

It's not just market mechanisms that ensure risky startups get funded. It's also decisions in government about how to tax those sorts of companies and investments, what sort of writeoffs they have available to them, what safety nets are available for people investing, etc. It's not as simple as just having the government take its hands away and let private enterprise get on with things — the government needs to actively reward the behaviour it wants to see.

There is of course a market mechanism deciding which actors achieve success — the employment market. It doesn't make sense to get rid of that. But government interventions are what fuels innovation — otherwise the market will simply stagnate as the largest entities in it capture it and prevent any growth or change from happening.

>> Voice is cheap

A good voice seems very rare. Perhaps as rare as 1/10000 or so. Practicing voice is cheap of course.

Lot's of kids take band class. I'd say the primary ingredients are some combination of innate talent and luck.

Enlighten me.

Yep. Practicing is cheap. Also "a good voice" isn't really a thing. Everyone can have a good voice, it just requires training. Some people just get lucky and start much closer to their end goal than others.

This is especially obvious if you follow any content creators who after getting somewhat successful decide to try to learn to sing and watch how they improve year over year.

Lot's of kids take band class but band class is expensive.

I'm in my late 20s so it's been a little while but in middle school band fees and instrument rentals (if you couldn't afford your own) were like 100-300USD per year. And in high school the cost of participating in the marching band was like 600-800USD (bus rentals, trailer rentals, uniforms, event fees, etc) for a single semester and then concert band was another ~200-300USD for the other semester and the jazz band was a similar ~300ish USD.

And if you can't afford those fees you either just sit in the back of the class doing nothing until you can find a way to make that money or you and/or your parents had to work concessions at the different sports teams games for essentially the entire year to cover the cost. Of course there's only a limited number of slots for that and a single person isn't going to cover that cost in a year, only like half of it. So now to be able to participate in band you depend on your parents being able to afford the energy and time to work in a kitchen or concessions stand for 5-10 hours a week.

And if all the spots are full for concessions and it doesn't look like you'll be able to pay? You get moved out of the band class and assigned to another "elective" course with a lower cost to participate in. All the other ones still of course cost ~150-400USD for the year with the exception of the "learn how to use microsoft office" class and gym. So the poor kids just got sent to those classes and took the them over and over again every year instead of participating in one of the arts classes.

So yes lots of kids take band class. But band class is expensive and it only gets more expensive as costs go up and funding goes down.

Yep. It's definitely not impossible but increased barriers decrease chances of success and increase even just attempts.

That of course applies across the board, not just to musicians but to any skilled field.

More than you'd think.

My honest opinion, as a person who has gigged a lot for money, who has played a whole lot with folks who are now in their 70s and 80s, and who has retired from programming into a life where I can afford to just make music with folks is this:

a lot of folks on this thread have very little understanding of how the music industry has ever operated and almost no understanding of the material and historical situation of musicians working in the 20th C.

There is a whole technological progression proceeding backwards from streaming to the Clear Channel consolidation, to the rise of cheap DJ equipment going back at least as far as the the rise of mass sheet music production, and that procession has changed the music industry at every step.

While it's not some universally transcendent material praxis, there was indeed a time between the 1940s and the late 1990s when the market was much wider and more distributed in ways that made it possible for a pretty wide and diverse set of folks who aren't A-list national acts to develop functional careers as musicians.

If you're not aware of that situation, perhaps you don't have enough of a basis in the history of that industry to be commenting with the kind of certainty you're displaying.

I believe that poster is using "preference" in the economic sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_(economics)

"In economics, and in other social sciences, preference refers to an order by which an agent, while in search of an 'optimal choice', ranks alternatives based on their respective utility." "Individual preferences are determined by taste, need, ..., as opposed to price, availability or personal income."

They make nice music. I enjoyed it. But it is hard to get famous making this style of rock music these days. Even 20 years ago when this style was more popular it was still tough to stand out from the crowd. It wasn't enough to be good, you needed something really special. While the music is nice I don't hear anything that blows my mind.

James Keelaghan, Stephen Fearing, Skinny Puppy...hundreds more.

Also, the comment you replied to said that those names he mentioned were the relatively famous ones. The ones who are less famous than that will not have the success you mentioned. They will simply be people who had mid-level success in an industry that could support them.