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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: 0.543s | source
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BrenBarn ◴[29 Jun 25 06:43 UTC] No.44410806[source]▶
> I heard one answer more than any other: the government should introduce universal basic income. This would indeed afford artists the security to create art, but it’s also extremely fanciful.

Until we start viewing "fanciful" ideas as realistic, our problems will persist. This article is another in the long series of observations of seemingly distinct problems which are actually facets of a larger problem, namely that overall economic inequality is way too high. It's not just that musicians, or actors, or grocery store baggers, or taxi drivers, or whatever, can't make a living, it's that the set of things you can do to make a living is narrowing more and more. Broad-based solutions like basic income, wealth taxes, breaking up large market players, etc., will do far more for us than attempting piecemeal tweaks to this or that industry.

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TimByte ◴[29 Jun 25 09:19 UTC] No.44411522[source]▶
This isn't about any one industry failing, it's about a system designed to funnel value upwards while pretending the rest of us are just not hustling hard enough
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skybrian ◴[29 Jun 25 12:23 UTC] No.44412523[source]▶
I think “design” is the wrong word. Many systems are unjust by default, and that’s certainly true of hit-driven businesses like music. Justice doesn’t happen unless people make it happen, and often, most people don’t care.

For example, lotteries are inherently unjust, making random people wealthy for no reason, and hardly anyone cares. They just hope to win themselves.

Taylor Swift fans don’t care that she makes far more money than other talented musicians who languish in obscurity. They’re going to keep giving her more money. If you told them they shouldn’t because it perpetuates inequality, they wouldn’t get it.

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1. analog31 ◴[29 Jun 25 13:35 UTC] No.44413028[source]▶
Interestingly, music wasn't hit-driven in 1920. A person could earn a decent but not lavish middle class living as a musician, through things like performance, teaching, theaters, and so forth.

An example was that Miles Davis grew up in a middle class family -- his dad was a dentist -- who thought that becoming a musician was an OK career.

Sure, there were stars -- for instance in sheet music publishing -- but since then the working-class musician jobs have nearly vanished.

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2. mistrial9 ◴[29 Jun 25 14:20 UTC] No.44413386[source]▶
this is true in some urban settings agree. Rural people had barter and fell into patterns of farm labor. A wild guess is that the bar and the church were social magnets where cultural arts and entertainment could be done professionally to some extent. A very large base factor is "humans do culture, how to include monetary compensation for things that people do already" ?