The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

> 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.

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.

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.

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.