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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: 0s | source
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parpfish ◴[28 Jun 25 22:58 UTC] No.44408859[source]▶
How many financially self-sustaining musicians should there be? Streaming has caused the number to fall, but recorded music before that likely made it fall as well.

Should we stop thinking about music as a job and start thinking about it as a hobbyist art form? Nobody is out there lamenting that you can’t make a living off of landscape painting. It’s a fun form of self expression that people will do regardless of the economics, so maybe the problem was ever thinking you could make a profession out of it?

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jleyank ◴[29 Jun 25 03:51 UTC] No.44410229[source]▶
How many financially self-sustaining software developers should there be? AI code generation has caused the number to fall, but FOSS before that likely made it fall as well.

I can keep playing this game, as can others. Why do we need all that money invested in data collection and disseminating cat videos, political unrest, etc.

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1. orangecat ◴[29 Jun 25 18:51 UTC] No.44415381[source]▶
AI code generation has caused the number to fall

Not at all clear.

FOSS before that likely made it fall as well

Almost certainly false. Imagine a world where the concept of open source never happened, so if you want a website you have to pay thousands of dollars for web servers, compilers, databases, etc. Would the demand for software developers be higher or lower than in our world?

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2. jleyank ◴[30 Jun 25 15:03 UTC] No.44424222[source]▶
That world existed and we all lived through it. Hobbyists really hated paying for software, as did academics. Fair number of people being paid to write code as there was nothing commercial that didn’t require customization. Or, smaller sites did it with a few programmers rather than renting software. No web though, nor phones so it’s not a fair comparison to today. But there were really skilled hackers doing open software in the 60’s.