The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

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?

Anyone who has something they've done out of love but can't figure out how to monetize knows the problem with this: you are limited in the amount of time you can put into doing it, both into the actual doing and the pre-doing practice and study. That means less of your best work gets done. Maybe you never actually reach the point where any of your best work gets done.

There's lots of value in amateur engineering. What if we deprofessionalized engineering via making it difficult for anyone to make a living doing it? Some people would no doubt still continue to do it, to scratch their itches and exercise their minds. But they would spend less time doing it, less time sudying how to do it, more time doing whatever it takes to pay the bills and claw out some semblance of security. We certainly wouldn't fall into technical poverty immediately, and maybe we wouldn't miss what we don't quite invent / develop, but both the people who actually love it enough to pay attention and the professionals would know the difference between what isn't getting done.

(And in fact, the US is standing on the precipice of a FAFO event with research here, having just made it more difficult to make a living focusing on it.)

What happens to a field that can only be engaged as a dilettante, never as a committed investor?

This has happened to many past professions, and will continue to happen. Can one really make a career out of woodworking craftsmanship? Making custom furniture? Maybe a small number of people in the world can, but the rest just do woodworking as a hobby because it doesn’t pay the bills.

Software development will go this way, too, as we are all starting to learn.

The problem is people are ok with corporate, mass-produced slop—whether it be music, furniture, or (soon) software. Fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for human craftsman-produced product.