The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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...

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.