The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

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.

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.

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.

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.