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I played in a cover band with some well-paid engineers. We enjoyed music enough to consider going full time, but even with four-figure bookings were were barely taking home minimum wage. We looked into getting a manager to find us more high-paying gigs, but management fees and travel costs eat up the gains.

For a band, it's virtually impossible to find work outside the weekend. If a region had a few restaurants that were known for year round "live music Mondays", "live music lunches", etc, it would increase the number of hours that a musician could work during the week, and make full time performance viable for more musicians. Of course, people would also need to support these performances by patronizing the venues that host them.

But until a working musician can fill their weekday calendar with paying gigs without excessive travel/lodging costs, you'll continue to see talented musicians drop out and do something else.

I've noticed post-covid there are a lot more weeknight gigs. I think it was accepted during the recovery period as everyone tried to make up for lost time, but so far it hasn't faded out. I hope it continues.

> 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.

> [...] a larger problem, namely that overall economic inequality is way too high.

What economic inequality would you deem small enough?

And why do you care about inequality, and not eg the absolute livings standards of the least well off? We can 'solve' inequality by just destroying everything the rich have, but that won't make anyone better off.

Btw, the absolute living standards of all members of society, including the least well off, have never been better. And that's true for almost any society you care to look at on our globe. (Removing eg those currently at war, that weren't at war earlier.)

There is so much research on the problems of inequality. "The Spirit Level" is one book. (e.g. https://equalitytrust.org.uk/the-spirit-level/)

The problems of inequality go well beyond living standards. E.g. consider political control in a very unequal society.

> What economic inequality would you deem small enough?

Economic inequality small enough to not be the root cause of the particular problem you are interested in.

Arts have another problem. Although I’m not even sure if it is a problem.

Lots and lots of people can create arts. In old era when people would just gather together and sing. Nobody would make a living off that. Very very few people were making a living by performing to nobility.

Modern recording industry with specialized instruments distorted this by allowing more talented people make a living. Yet it destroyed a lot of community singing by not-highly-talented people. On one hand more people could make a living, on the other hand much much less people were creating arts.

Nowadays it feels like we’re returning back to the natural flow. More people are creating arts since modern instruments are widely accessible. But fewer people can make a living.

Overall, I’d say more people creating arts is preferable outcome. And best art is created for the sake of it as a hobby.

Except that socialism has failed already.

Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally.

> Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally.

It's pretty easy to justify morally. I mean at least as easy as any other welfare.

The net payments for UBI plus (income) taxes don't have to look to different from what many countries already do today. It's just the accounting that looks a bit different.

Would you care to provide some facts to support your affirmations?

Socialism didn't fail because of a UBI, which it never attempted; it failed because it couldn't calculate prices accurately, because it was bad at finding and processing information, political economy, and deeper computational complexity reasons.

UBIs don't have these problems (or, rather, they'd have some of them in different ways, but in ways that are closer to market capitalism than socialism).

I made the socialism-remark because of the post before blaming everything on economic inequality. While that can lead to problems, I don't think it's necessarily a problem in itself or a sign of injustice.

You're correct in that UBI is something different than socialism.

Ironically, I suspect a UBI not only can coexist with inequality but might substantially increase it (not a bad thing in my book). The vast majority of Americans already have incomes above a UBI level, especially when current government benefits are accounted for. But post UBI, a substantial minority would exit entirely from market labor, while another substantial minority would be more willing to take career and entrepreneurial risks that are on average income increasing. There are also some very favorable aspects of it for marginal tax rates, which would encourage workers to earn more income.

Socialism is community ownership of resources. UBI is not socialism. It is income redistribution.

Your morals are very strange if they don't include care for others.

UBI is not about "care". That's just the typical left-wing compassion framing.

I don't want to abolish all taxes, I'm not a libertarian. But giving away the money you took from somebody else needs a justification (for example to pay for the roads). And I find "income redistribution" for the sake of it not an acceptable goal.

UBI is obviously a far less intensive project than Socialism would be.

If you want to provide truly livable UBI, it’d be even bigger than socialism. The working people would have to be taxed through the nose. And necessary professions like trash car drivers should be paid a crapton.

Food stamps tried it too, they're plenty successful.

The top 1% of people controlling more wealth and resources than the bottom 50% is mortally justifiable?

It’s funny whenever there is a comment like “hey, maybe we shouldn’t let individual people get so rich they can basically become thier own country.” Always get called socialists/communists. You can be capitalist while also having some care and protection for the little people.

'A' being morally unjustifiable (by some metric), doesn't mean that 'B' is morally justifiable.

If there was a button that I could press that would double the wealth of the 99% of people and quadruple the wealth of the top 1%, I would keep pressing it, even though it technically makes inequality worse and worse every time.

It would be morally reprehensible not to press that button.

Depends if socialism means the US highway system, Medicare, or The Great Leap Forward

I'm european, so socialism means actually socialism (no/no/yes).

Only problem is that it requires totalitarian world government to do it. There is that thing called competition. Societies where people aren't pushed to work by fear of hunger, homelessness, and social exclusion, will very quickly lose out and fall apart. Perhaps this is why universal basic income doesn't exist. I mean, Soviet Union was very close to having it: there was no unemployment and if you were fine living on the base salary you could do nothing on your job and as long as you didn't come there drunk or disseminated anti-Soviet jokes, you'd be fine. See where it ended up.

Wouldn't that argument predict that the united states and most of Europe should collapse any second now? Countries where failure to find work leads to an actual threat of hunger are mostly very poor and corrupt developing nations.

The lede of this article, about Rollie Pemberton, is about a "360" deal where the label gets a cut of all revenue related to the act (Pemberton's "Cadence Weapon"). Unusually, in Pemberton's case, it appears that most of his revenue came in from prizes and grants, not from recording sales or touring. The structure of his deal thus made Upper Class Records an outsized return. The deal seems pretty exploitative.

The problem with this as a framing device is that it doesn't describe very many working musical acts. 360 deals are probably generally gross? But Pemberton's situation is weird. In most cases, labels are in fact going to lose money from midlist acts.

The more you look at these kinds of businesses the more striking the pattern is. It's true of most media, it's true of startups, it's true for pharmaceuticals. The winners pay for the losers; in fact, the winners are usually the only thing that matter, the high-order bit of returns.

What's challenging about this is that you can't squeeze blood from a stone. The package offered to a midlist act might in fact be a loss leader; incentive to improve dealflow and optionality for the label, to get a better shot at the tiny number of acts whose returns will keep the label afloat. There may not be much more to offer to acts that aren't going to generate revenue.

David Lowery (a mathematician and the founder/lead vocalist of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker) had an article about this years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850935

It's worth a read (though things have probably changed in a number of ways since then). It's an interesting counterpoint to the automatic cite to Albini's piece that comes up in these discussions. Not that you should have sympathy for labels, just it's useful to have a clearer idea of what the deal was. The classic label deal with a mid-sized advance that never recouped (and which the labels never came back looking for when it didn't) was basically the driver for "middle-class" rock lifestyles; it's dead now.

What has been developing for awhile is that musicians are coming from richer backgrounds on average. They can dally around trying their hand as a working musician and can fail and not be destitute. The age of a working class or lower class musician is waining.

Science used to work this way too, didn't it? You'd be rich, or you'd have a wealthy benefactor.

To go back in time before university endowments for intellectual work you'd find yourself in a monestary, with endowments from the nobility for intellectual work (copying texts and making those great illuminated manuscripts). As far as I know the model you're describing did apply to ancient Greece.

Successful musicians have way more in common with actors than any other profession. It’s about connections, wealth, and nepotism over anything else.

Let’s say your child wants to be an actor. One way to make this happen is to be a successful actor yourself - require your children to be cast in the film in return for you starring. This is how famous acting families pushed their kids forwards, including Nicholas Cage (Coppola) and Jeff Bridges.

More relevant for HN is rich people. So you are tech rich and your kid wants to act. Fund the movie on the condition your child acts in it. That is the way since movies began.

> Fund the movie on the condition your child acts in it.

The customer of such a movie isn’t the audience but the wealthy patron sponsoring the movie. I suspect this self-promotion motivation is a large reason why so many movies are so bad.

As a film maker who studied film, the reason why so many movies are so bad are manyfold:

  - making movies is hard. A lot of things that require years to master need to go right. A *ton* of tech is involved. 
  
  - making movies is expensive. Money alone won't make you a good movie, but many productions are so on the edge that aome choice they had to make for monetary reason will cause the bad. 
  
  - making movies is complex, that means making a masterful one requires multiple botched attempts and experiences by all people involved. These botched attempts are also what you see.  
  

Yes and the fact that you grew up with e.g. actor parents means you know a lot about acting and the world it takes place in and the language used within it already, just like the kid of a farmer will know more than the average person about farm animals, tractors and crop.

On top of that come the contacts and being rich. But the contacts are not a thing other people couldn't make as well, especially if they are good. One of the somewhat hidden benefits of higher education are the contacts you will make. Maybe you're not rich and your parents are roofers while you want to become an actor, but if you're good and well connected you might benefit from other peoples connections. This is how I started to make my living in a foreign country with two parents without any shared background: There were people who had those contacts and I benefitted of them simply by being the one they chose because I am accurate, reliable, on time, knowledgeable, patient and good at what I do.

But

That has been the case for a very, very long time. Classical music is basically one big orgy of wealthy people. Musicians born into families of musicians that were well off. Same goes for other artistic pursuits such as painters etc.

I found very little actual insight in this article. I think musicians have been struggling for decades and the parents have known for at least as long to tell their kids to get a degree regardless of their talents. Schools like Berklee are… questionable at best. Lots off nepo babies just taking a few years to fuck about, basically.

Conservatory music culture is peculiar. Yes, lots of upper class parents want their children to take part in it, but it is not a good career economically speaking. (Unless you want to be a double-showoff and study medicine alongside classical piano, like one guy in my hometown did.) Especially classical musicians take a step down economical class-wise if they succeed. And this has been the case for most entertainer professions for a long time.

I've played with Berklee-trained musicians. It's a mixed bag. They won't turn you into a great musician against your will. This is true of any education. And you have to already be **** good when you apply in order to make full use of the opportunities that they offer.

Oddly enough Berklee is considered to be a jazz school, but the players from there who I consider to be real stand-outs (performing at an international level, or well on their way to doing so) have chosen to earn their livings outside of mainstream jazz.

Mainstream jazz really doesn't make money. Also, Berklee is also really strong in the broader field of "Commercial Music" which includes things like film scoring and pop-oriented genres.

What is mainstream jazz

What you get in a jazz club.

The "live from Emmet's place" series that you can find on youtube has some of the best jazz players today playing mainstream jazz.

Kenny G, of course. I saw him rummaging through the dumpster in Kirkland just a few days ago.

The odds are long but some musicians make it work. Several of the Imagine Dragons band members attended Berklee, and then grinded for years playing cover songs and touring small clubs until they got a recording deal. Would they have succeeded at the same level without that Berklee education? Hard to say.

> grinded for years playing cover songs

The Beatles and Van Halen did the same.

dude grand piano maybe cost a house back then

when you think about it

This feel like it's related to the problem of no more mid-budget movies. Now that physical media (CD/VHS/DVD) isn't a thing, there is no long tail of fans to sustain mid-market efforts. Movies that cost a few tens of millions usually didn't make their budget back in the theater -- it was VHS and DVD sales that made up the difference. But now that doesn't happen, so those movies either don't get made, or they're made by the streamers.

Same thing with music. Streaming pays so little compared to physical media now that artists never make up the difference.

> or they're made by the streamers.

Not sure what the problem is, the streams will pay the budget of the movie, just like the old movie studios did. So where is the difference? Do they pay much less and no royalties?

It's really hard to become a cult classic when it's only on Netflix. But also yes, until recently (and even now), it pays a lot less to the people involved in the movie. There weren't really any residuals, the streamers make a one time payment.

I assumed the article would be about orchestral musicians (for whom there is a high, and increasing skill threshold) or session musicians (whose work is increasingly being replaced by computer synthesis). Instead, we get a very long narrative about a rapper who is still struggling to "make it" as a recording artist. In the era of sound recordings (which began well over a century ago) there is little incentive for the consumer to choose one with middling appeal over the most popular options. This makes the task of becoming a star, but on a small scale, a difficult one. Instead, a prospective "middle-class musician" must find a niche of some kind, perhaps by focusing on the local market. For example, a busker could potentially make more (than his cited $250k in recording revenue) over a period of 9 years with sufficient dedication.

~15-20 years ago, the popular wisdom was that we were entering the age of the long tail, where the open distribution opportunities of the internet combined with discovery technology would mean that it'd be easier for many artists to "make it" to a point where they had 10k fans. What happened?

We decimated recordings as a revenue stream (and literal decimation might be wildly generous, given that stream payouts frequently never add up to a single sale for many artists). We let people peddle the lie that artists can just find some other revenue source like merchandising or another job or anything else rather than paying for the thing people ostensibly value.

Minor league success was never an easy proposition but we had a chance to give it better margins. And we let Spotify and others eat those, and let too many people tell comforting lies to consumers along the way.

And without a major cultural shift, we will do the same thing for everyone eventually.

Who is this "we" you speak of? There is no society. There is only individuals making decisions on how to spend their money, time, and comfort.

If hundreds of millions of people decide to use Spotify and Youtube to obtain their music, and if that means most artists are shafted in the process, no secret organization enacted some conspiracy to achieve that. Instead, technology enabled a new form of consumption, and producers faced a new level of competition.

The "secret organization" is us, via the tyranny of small decisions. That doesn't mean it's a good thing.

There are no good or bad things. Only things that happen or don't happen. Anyone is welcome to fight the nature of reality.

Most musicians who can make it now are only middle class, with a handful of superstars and a huge legion of poor artists.

I’ve played many gigs for $20-100, which is once a month or week and tough work relative to typing some code from home. I played for 25 mins in front of 1000 people and spent 8+ hours total all-in to make 200 bucks. Way harder money than coding.

Really, think back through history. Musicians were needed for dance, parties, all occasions. Now hit play on your phone connected to a speaker, GG musicians.

Now hit play on your phone connected to a speaker, GG musicians.

Not really comparable experience though.

Comparable, though very much not equal. Unless you came specifically to listen to music (e.g. many concerts), the music plays a technical role: dance music, movie soundtrack, restaurant / bar background music. For that, a good recording is adequate or even superior.

To some extent it is much better.

More reliable, no divas, no drunk musicians, always on time, the repertoire is literally unlimited.

I left a career in music production five years ago and moved into programming (data science). there's no turning back.

I was very aware that I was lucky. You can be the best, you can have a great network, but (in my experience), luck is the main factor. and the "luck" window in the music space is more and more narrow currently.

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?

The vitality of music (and probably the rest of the arts), has always depended on a symbiosis between professional and amateur musicians. Some things still need professionals, such as fielding a top level symphony orchestra. And high caliber teaching.

Among other things, I play large-ensemble jazz. Over the years, I've played in a number of bands, and the level of quality and variety achieved by players with professional training is a noticeable step above amateur players. The material that my current band plays is unplayable without training. About half of the band members have music degrees (many teach music in the public schools) and the other half are dedicated amateurs with past training like myself.

Other styles, like folk music, are essentially sustained by amateurs.

Some things can only be done by amateurs, or professionals who also have a musical hobby, such as playing experimental, obscure, or historical music. Amateur musicians also support the professional scene by attending performances, taking lessons, buying instruments (resulting in economies of scale), etc.

I intuitively agree with this perspective, even if I'm unsure about the consequences, and would probably need to think more deeply about them.

Once, when criticising the toxic effects of advertising, I got a response to the effect of 'but how will streamers be able to support themselves?!'. Which I was really struck by, because it presumes that streamers should be able to support themselves by streaming. Should they? Is this actually a desirable outcome? Yes, the financial viability probably leads to more streaming, but what about the quality of the overall streaming? And what about the opportunity cost when someone gives up their job and puts their labours into the business of streaming?

There will always be some level of cultural output, since there will always be passionate people. But has making the arts an industry (through an ever expanding artifice of 'intellectual property', and the ever expanding criminalisation of its subversion) actually led to better arts? Would this be a better or worse world if people built bridges in their day job and played rock gigs at night, solely for the love of it?

I'm not trying to do a Socratic dialogue here, I genuinely don't know. But I suspect the answer is much more nuanced than 'more money = better art', and I am sceptical of certain legal or economic distortions based on that assumption (e.g. life + 70 copyright terms, surveillance advertising, surveillance DRM software, billion-dollar industries that subsist solely on 'IP', fines and prison terms for unauthorised sharing, or the reversing or bypassing of DRM, etc).

The question we should be asking, as consumers of music, is how many musical options do we want?

If musicians can't make a living, then both the quantity and quality of our musical options go down. Yes, hobbyists will always make music for themselves, but hobbyists won't necessarily record music for us or tour around the country for us to see in live venues. The issue is not that musicians inherently deserve to make a living; the issue is, what kind of musical market is available for consumers?

Plenty of hobbyists record their music. A lot of the music I listen to is from youtubers with a handful of views.

> Plenty of hobbyists record their music.

That's not contrary to what I said, which was "hobbyists won't necessarily [emphasis added] record music for us". And of course you didn't respond to my point about touring.

In any case, the music and recordings of hobbyists are likely to be inferior to the music and recordings of professionals, because in general, professionals are better than hobbyists at almost everything, music being only one example.

> A lot of the music I listen to is from youtubers with a handful of views.

If that's the future you want, then I guess you're in luck.

Can you recommend a YouTuber with a hand full of views that you think is a good musician?

There are tons of rappers and EDM DJs on Soundcloud (not YouTube) that have legitimately good music. They might not be good 5 years from now or even 1 year from now, but they are good now if you put the work into finding them. Seems like atleast in the DJ scene someone might be on top of the world fairly quickly even if they disappear soon after.

For SoundCloud rappers I really like Smoke Chedda Tha A$$ Getta.

I'm not sure if they're more popular on other media platforms, but I've really enjoyed quite a few songs by the Japanese band Ribettowns and their YouTube account has less than 1K subscribers

Streaming is only the next step of the ladder, the reality is that ever since recording was possible (then broadcasting, then the internet), music (and most of the arts for that matter) has increasing winner-take all effects, where a minuscule amount of artists reap huge gains, while the rest just scrape by.

Now, with AI, all signs seem to indicate that the industry will finally reset to what was the norm for hundreds of years : Artists would be supported on their craft by patrons and benefactors. Most didn't make it to be wealthy, but at least, they got to enjoy time in their craft.

A lot.

Many musicians teach others. Without them how will we learn one of the most beautiful / coolest things to ever exist?

I’ve tried learning from an app and it’s not the same as spending an hour with my guitar teacher. It’s not even close. I wish he were paid more given how talented he is and how hard he works.

> I wish he were paid more given how talented he is and how hard he works.

He's your guitar teacher. It would be difficult for you to state a wish that was more completely under your own control.

I’m talking about the gigs where he gets paid in beer and the streaming where he makes pennies. But sure boss I’ll throw him some extra cash when he’s back from tour.

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.

Answer is enough to sustainably run needs of modern society. And that number is probably significantly lower than we now have.

And for me with musicians the number is zero.

Well in this case someone seems to employ and pay these software developers.

We can only speculate about the future having more AI-code or the repercussions thereof (as many do).

It’s already happened to DJing. Used to require very expensive gear, crates full of expensive records, and a ton of talent.

Now someone with a $400 controller, pirated music, and some free time can do it. Loads of people willing to play at venues for free just for the fun of it have crushed the viability of doing it as an actual job.

With the advent of streaming services like Spotify, it’s definitely getting worse, but the market has always been difficult from a strictly performative/sales perspective. I never made any real money from my compositions, but I pulled a decent side income teaching piano back in university.

It reminds me of ex-Soviet chess players. The emigration of so many good grandmaster-level players diluted the market, and unless you were in the absolute upper echelons (like Kramnik, Karpov, or Kasparov), you pretty much had to supplement your income by teaching on the side.

Oddly enough this also caused similar issues in classical orchestras - in the 90s a bunch of top flight Eastern European and Russian musicians raised the bar of orchestras in places like NZ, with the side effect of having fewer seats for younger musicians to move into.

> Should we stop thinking about music as a job and start thinking about it as a hobbyist art form?

At one point there were several million "MySpace Bands". That's music as a hobbyist art form. Some of them might even have been good.

imo, it's better to have a million bands dicking around and having fun playing terrible shows for crowds of ten people than a hundred polished superstar groups playing sold out arenas.

Those are not the only two choices. There are so many great bands playing shows to hundreds or a few thousand people.

Maybe you don't value music or live music, but there are a lot of people out there that do. You not caring much for it doesn't change the fact or make it ok that they're getting stiffed by those with the upper hand in the relationship.

5. There should be 5 people in whole of Canada to make money from their music. Or 15. Kazzillion razmadillion. How are you supposed to calculate that?

Well you don’t need to. The answer is ”as many as the market will support”, as it is with any other product. However, your rhetorical question misses the point completely. The question is not should a person just make thing x as a hobby, but that this global multi-billion dollar industry shares very little of it’s revenue to the people who make thump thump and bum bum that get’s asses on the floor and people to move. All of the examples in this article are clearly quite successful acts that people are willing to pay to listen to and are quite integral part of the economy as a whole (not to mention softer values such as cultural enrichment of all human life), but are struggling to make the ends meet. Why.

Because some else literally takes the money people pay to listen to them. If I want to listen rapper Yakkedi Yap’s new single Xingabow and give him money, I would be better off to sending them money in an envelope than listening them from any streaming app (maybe Bandcamp is an exception), or even going to their concert or buying their merch. Because someone literally steals the money.

At least if you buy a landscape painting from a gallery the gallery takes just 20-40% and artist gets the rest minus materials and taxes. They don’t take 60%, then minus every possible cost from the artist, then take what is left and give it to Drake.

I suppose we can say the same thing about all jobs when AI gets good enough to take them over.

We will start thinking about jobs when the tech feudal lords find out there's no more growth, because consumers to their products are being replaced by AI.

Some are already worried: https://fortune.com/europe/2025/06/09/bnpl-loans-klarna-ceo-...

"How many jobs there should be for X" is not a question that can be answered by people whose main intent in the last few years has been to put others out of a job while claiming they're making the world a better place. Aka, us in tech.

> We will start thinking about jobs when the tech feudal lords find out there's no more growth, because consumers to their products are being replaced by AI.

The future feudal lords will just sell to each other and ignore the jobless, moneyless masses. We don’t like to hear this, but normal people will likely become less and less economically relevant, to the point where their total economic activity will one day be a rounding error next to the economic activity of the top 0.0N%.

I worked with a founder who dealt with only a small number of very rich customers. He would say “We only sell to the rich because they have the money.” The future looks like a more extreme version of this.

That doesn't work for all industries though. iPhones and other mass luxury/ "masstige" goods are essentially high-end commodities. Apple can't stay rich just selling to richies, they need poor sods to line up to buy millions upon millions of Apple devices. And that can't happen if aforementioned sods have no income. Same with most electronics, with most travel, with autos, with apparel, most restaurants, videogames, furnishings and appliances, etc. Income inequality can only go so far without dire economic consequences. If the non-wealthy become a mere rounding error in terms of aggregate purchasing power, then we simply won't be able to buy enough to keep these lifestyle manufacturers flush.

Rich people selling stuff to other rich people is just moving wealth around, it does not generate wealth.

I sell you stuff worth 5 billion, you give me 5 billion. Nothing happened. Maybe you even consume the product so there is less wealth.

Only labor can generate value. Work is what transforms a thing into another thing that has more value than before. Machines and AI do not create value.

You might wonder what would happen if they had an general AI, maybe actual autonomous robots? Would those create value? Well, at first whoever got the first AGI would get incredibly rich but if everyone had access to that tech, the prices for everything that can produced with it would plummet down until they are the cost of running the AI.

Rich people get richer by employing poor people. So they can extract the value they produce. If they don't employ anyone, they are not making any profit. (Well for actual free markets, you can of course make profit being a monopolist and stuff or just do crime.)

So yes, rich people are screwed. That is why they buy bunkers in New Zealand. That is why we see the rise of fascism, because they will have to tighten the screws to keep the ship running a little while longer.

Why keep any ships running other than their own? kill off 90% of the humans, starting with the poor, using robots, after robots can make new robots and fix themselves and do all the other jobs?

If we're looking at extremes, I don't think the ultra rich are in as bad a position as you want them to be.

Exactly, they are running for the haven of government to retain power.

>I worked with a founder who dealt with only a small number of very rich customers. He would say “We only sell to the rich because they have the money.”

So you worked with someone who you claim to be a direct -knowing even- participant in this trend. You presumably benefited from this work too. No?

It's impressive how many people bemoan the dangers they see in a thing, while continuing to contribute to its growth, again and again and again, as long as the personal benefit keeps working their way.

He's a real Adolf Eichmann, that one

What is it with so many people saying art should be a hobby? except for the really great.

But how are you going to get good if you don't get any practice and feedback?

I remember someone lamenting people videoing comedians in small venues and posting the fails, that follow you forever. How are you going to get good at stand up if you can't fail and learn?

Not everyone can be Steven King and get an advance worth 3 years salary for their first book.

Well, you know, it is kinda like how companies are replacing all the juniors with AI. It's cheap, for now. But then comes the question of what do you do in 5-10 years when you need some seniors with actual experience?

Everyone should become an engineer. Then we can spend our whole lives working to build stuff. That way, we can prevent anyone from pursuing anything creative, beautiful, or transcendental.

Like, I see where you're going with this but music is one of those things that's actually the whole point of being alive. If all we ever do is do "useful" things ($$$) we lose our chance to actually live our lives.

i think you're reading something into my post that i didnt intend. i hate the "just learn to code"/"only STEM degrees are worthwhile" crowd.

we absolutely should be pursing things that are creative, beautiful, and transcendental. but.. should we expect the pursuit of the creative, beautiful, and transcendental to be a career? we should encourage everybody to do because it is inherently valuable instead of pursuing it because its a job.

We should not encourage everybody to pursue the arts. But a society that disregards the importance of the arts (one symptom of which is that the pursuit of the arts as a career/way of life is inviable) then the society as a whole will -- 100% absolutely guaranteed -- suffer as a result. The arts are the means by which the unconscious comes to consciousness. Music is a means by which the sublime, and of course even various mundane psycho-spiritual-emotional states -- become accessible for the vast majority of people who can not access said states without aid.

In the absence of that, neurosis is certain to flourish.

So, it is not an economic matter but a matter of the psychodynamics of society. For the sake of the health of the whole, some members of the whole must be able to bring in certain vibes, patterns, states of mind, ideas, etc. And without the ability to pursue that and only that skillset, they won't be able to succeed at that. And it is required for the functioning of the whole.

It's a bit akin to the way the entire body depends on the cells that process ATP. If you eliminate all cells that serve that role, the entire body dies, even though they are a miniscule aspect of the entire operation. That is where the animating spirit comes from.

The US constitution says congress will pay for useful arts and sciences. It says this before paying for national defense fwiw. If career soldiers and scientists can exist with federal dollars, so should useful artists. Now to define useful art...

"Useful art" is an old term that means what people call "engineering" nowadays.

The "useful arts" mentioned in the US constitution refers to the works of artisans and craftsmen, such as textile manufacturers, instrument* makers, and people working in construction.

*Realizing this might be confusing in context. I meant e.g. navigational instruments

> Nobody is out there lamenting that you can’t make a living off of landscape painting.

Completely different markets, though: how much time per day do you spend looking at landscape paintings vs. listening to music?

Both are there constantly in the background of my day.

It’s not really The Sims. You don’t usually go stand in front of one of your paintings and emote a bunch. It’s just there breathing life into a space.

Landscape painters were replaced by cameras.

We do spend a lot of time looking at photos!

I’d say I intentionally listen to music maybe an hour total per month, usually while my eyes are occupied.

Meanwhile, outside of museums most landscape art is also advertising. But I’ll spend two or three hours at an art museum when I get the chance.

I hear music all the time, when I commute, when I drive kids to various clubs, friends, and events, when they put music on at home, when I watch a TV show or a movie - all that music was produced by somebody.

I like art but I cannot remember the last time I went to an exhibition. Certainly not since my wife and I became parents.

"I like music but cannot remember the last time I went to a concert"

That seems like a weird angle to take it, no? I know it's just an example but there is more than one type of artist, just as there's more than one type of musician. As simple as it is, someone needed to design the YCombinator logo. Art is everywhere as well, even on a site like this that doesn't host much visual media.

(P.S. I do remember the last time I went to a concert. October).

when was the last time you saw something beautiful though? Or just saw something and it made you think.

Yesterday a butterfly got stuck in my pool, I usually try to save them. This one was trying it's hardest to fly but the water on it's wings was just slightly too heavy or something, but it was flapping really hard and making the most amazing ripple in the pool, I froze and couldn't stop looking at the ripple it was making, the ripple frequency and modulation was was slow and totally perfect, even tho it was flapping incredibly hard...but I also thought it's stuck and going to die, but I was totally fixated on the frequency and amplitudes. I managed to break my gaze and got it out. That was the most beautiful thing that made me think recently, I'm still thinking about it.

Now you’ve got me thinking about the beauty in the mundane. The real butterfly effect is the friends we make along the way. You saved the butterfly one time, and in the telling, you’ve helped save my hope in humanity. To me, these moments are as genuinely human as any achievement. To be human is to behold, and to be captivated thus.

Everyone knows that music is the objectively superior art form. Perhaps excluding film, which, putting aside scant creative geniuses, requires music and scoring.

Anyone who could live on this planet without music is a psycopath.

> How many financially self-sustaining musicians should there be?

That depends, how much do you value culture (and, my extension: cultural power)? If it's a take-it-or-leave-it kind of thing, then whatever the market will bear.

In a world where some large fraction of the working-age population is employed in factories (most of those in automotive), maybe not so many should be musicians. In a world where we've shipped all those other blue collar jobs to Asia, every industry sub-sector that becomes unviable is a disaster. So asking "how many x should there be" sort of marks you as clueless or even callous. The answer is as many as there can possibly be, plus a few extra.

>Nobody is out there lamenting that you can’t make a living off of landscape painting

Plenty are. But your experience in landscape painting transfers to other professional crafts, so the loss is mitigated. What does a skilled musician have to tranfer to if the industry falls apart? Teaching music?

I also really don't like reinforcing the idea that "the arts aren't meant to be a career". One of the biggest turnabouts in the 20th century is that you don't need to already be set for life in order to spend your days training your passions. The arts are (or were) no longer this "high class" means to distinguish yourself from the working class.

Meanwhile so much of society is built upon and weathered against destruction over such artisans. Are you really going to have a healthy society if all kids see growing up are pencil pushers, hard physical labor, managing retail, or hyper-specializing after 20+ years of schooling? What's all that work building up to? To serve billionaires?

okay, well what if i had picked a different example:

nobody is out there lamenting that we're not supporting a 'middle class' of baseball players.

the top 0.001% get to the big leagues and make bank. the top 0.01% scrape by in the minors. nobody else makes a dime. yet... plenty of people are still passionate about the game and play it for free. the guys playing in an adult rec leauge aren't thinking "there's a career in this I can put together a good highlight reel this season". they're playing because they find it fun and fulfilling.

so maybe musicians should view music like professional sports? do it because you love it. start a band with your friends. play gigs at your local bar every friday. but don't kid yourself that it's a career.

>nobody is out there lamenting that we're not supporting a 'middle class' of baseball players.

I will cheekily argue that the "transferable skill" of failed athletes is charisma. It's pretty clear that being able to talk about sports is a cheat code for upwards mobility (no matter the industry) and the mentality it builds is of high social value (you'll never find trouble finding a local court or field to make a pickup game with. An artists Meetup, a bit harder to arrange). Certainly more than 99% of artists.

But to properly answer your point, I don't have the full answer of how to balance "necessary careers" with "dream careers". If you want to maintain a satisfied populace (aka, prevent a violent coup by people who feel they have nothing to lose), they need to feel their dreams are reachable. Emphasis on "feel".

You don't even need to make money off your dreams per se. But you need time for it, and basics safeties taken care of. the current atmosphere offers neither.

Why do you think nobody is lamenting that you can't make a living off of landscape painting? Lot's of people want to be professional artists. Some percentage of them actually are able to make a living off of it.

I think most artists would tell you that if people couldn't make a living as visual artists, the quality of new art in the world would decrease tremendously. Painting is a craft - it takes a lot of training to develop the skills. It also takes a ton of work to develop one's own style. Then there's the whole business part of marketing the work.

Very few great artists would have been able to reach their level of quality just doing it as a hobby.

I do wonder about actual numbers, though.

* Is the amount of music listened to in a day down? * Is the rate of music creation down? * Given some metric of diversity is music diversity down? * Given some metric of quality is music quality down? * Are there fewer artists per capita / in total? * Has the Gini coefficient really shifted?

I assume that for almost all of these, the answer is actually no. Presumably, technology has made making more higher quality music easier and cheaper than ever, and people are listening to more than ever.

The 80s song Sultans of Swing is about this. Don't think it's new.

I'm a software engineer by trade, but have played bluesy / rock guitar since I heard Jimi Hendrix as a teenager. I try to run a band, to fuel my mid-life crisis but I've come to the conclusion that it's essentially a hobby, not a device for making money.

The death of the middle class everything. I have no idea how median wage statistics are possible. There is not a single neighborhood in my city where median income in that neighborhood can afford rent or a mortgage in that neighborhood. It’s all non-wage sources of wealth and no traditional middle class lifestyle is possible

Yeah it's like who can afford a specific house.

80s entry level coder

90s team lead

00s manager

10s cto

20s cto with help from parents

Wage stagnation and inflation and asset inflation.

Writers have been experimenting with paywalls (substacks etc) - musicians aren't? Indies keep complaining about streaming and platforms killing their livelihood but I wonder if this is just because the target for "justice" seems clearer (eg. Spotify cut, etc)

Seems to me that music has an additional challenge which is most revenue channels requires middlemen: streaming infrastructure, merch factories, venues owners, technicians, etc which artist can't/won't replace.

At some point musicians - as product creators - need to have a clear biz model for their enterprise and passion to try it. Not just passion to create, passion to sell.

Enjoy listening to Drake for the rest of your life.

Streaming is the biggest scam to have perpetuated the entertainment industry. The way the money is divided among the content creators is absurd and the prices are both too high and too low at the same time.

It's not great. But the economics of selling recordings never worked out for artists; it's possible that most of what streaming does is to kill advances for artists, and royally fuck labels, the perennial antagonists in the stories we tell about the music industry.

Music doesn't the buyer money, at the same time millions are qualified to make it and to boot millions enjoy making it. There is little barrier to entry and there is more than enough of it. Even if another song is never made. It's in the sweet spot for being a low paid shithole.

I'd look at NFTs for similar market dynamics. Some big winners but mostly people not making a dime.

Recording worked only as merch to sell at live shows.

recording also works to give a 'real job' to those who insist on making music for a living.

Only a few have ever made a job of performing. The midevil bard was often a second son of a nobel supported as a way to ensure they kill the older brother for the throne. Everyone else music was a hobby they did after farming was done.

It's even more of a scam because none of these companies were making such services with a way to actually profit in mind. It got customers spoiled on unrealistically cheap media; cheap media that was a result of skilled labor that only got more expensive over time. The bubble was going to burst one day.

In some regards, the ZIRP era ending was needed; companies can't just make money by relying on hype for years, even decades before the piper needs to be paid. But of course it couldn't have ended in a worst time.

> In some regards, the ZIRP era ending was needed; companies can't just make money by relying on hype for years, even decades before the piper needs to be paid. But of course it couldn't have ended in a worst time.

Maybe that is why lots of people are struggling more now while the economy numbers say things are better than ever.

For now. I believe the gdp started to slightly contract last quarter. The government never wants to admit times are bad, but eventually even their massaging of the data can't hide the true situation.

GDP contracted because of a build up of inventory. It was a technicality, the GDP actually grew.

I suppose we'll see if they run through all that inventory. Or worse, don't run through it.

Has life ever been easy for musicians? Has it ever been easy to make money from making/playing music in the history of mankind?

What's the deal with always wanting to turn art into a day job, anyway? These things are almost antithetical, as exemplifies by thousands of YouTube channel that turned into soulless content-producers in an effort to keep a schedule.

Damn, people somehow made art in 10000BC, when everyone was a hunter-gatherer by necessity.

What if you want to maximize your talent? I'm sure you're good at something; isn't it satisfying to get better at it? At some point you'll maximize the improvement you can make in your free time; if you get there before you reach the ceiling of your ability or your drive, then what else are you going to (want to) do?

This comment makes the same point, better than I did:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44410292

The main rehearsal space in San Francisco closed more than two decades ago.

I venture that live music has suffered because of it.

Interestingly, and that may be a personal opinion - I have bought more music from more obscure musicians in the last few years, mostly thanks to Bandcamp.

Before that, I mostly gravitated to 'blockbuster musicians', old classics, 1970s psychedelic rock. Today I buy some unknown musician's album every few days (and I pay what I'd pay for a 'proper' album, even if it is pay what you want).

Part of that is simply availability. The old record stores of old were often just "what's popular" with a side dish of "what the owner likes". Today? I found some Touareg rock band the other day. In the 1990s, that was virtually impossible even for music lovers.

Part of it is that today, I pay for what I like. Radio sucks, the classics are oversaturated, and often enough new releases are just qualitatively worse - both in composition as well as remasters which tend to sacrifice nuance for loudness. But indy bands? I don't expect perfection, but often enough find it.

Now, I understand I am a rare breed. In a Spotify world, the one buying FLACs is exotic. I do understand that the mid-range musician is not going to become a millionaire - but who ever did?

The example in the article sounds a lot like the artist has been bent over a barrel by the record company - a pattern even "successful" musicians have experienced. Maybe instead of chasing fame, the solution is to do your own marketing.

The musical middle class wasn’t thinned out by the audience, but by labels and streaming models. If you’re not topping the charts, you vanish between promotion costs and algorithmic obscurity - unless you go directly to the listener.

all this was obvious the moment napster became popular. and for more than a decade anyone who explained what was happening was ridiculed, especially in tech circles.

spotify in particular cemented a payment structure that disadvantages any “serious” music versus endless repeat pop songs, while also being completely corrupted by conflict of interest from record labels with an ownership stake. now they manufacture their own muzak and steer your playlist to it, draining the last bits of revenue possibility away from these “middle class musicians.”

youtube streamed music for free for years, paying no artists, and it was one of its core growth engines. completely asymmetrical outcome.

the whole thing denigrated musicians, and music itself. hordes of early online young tech professionals making great money at their office jobs poo pooing the concerns of an entire industry which previously enabled some of the most sophisticated artistic endeavors our culture ever attempted.

just dumb. a complete victory of lowbrow values.

baffling someone is writing this article in 2025. at every fork in the road, the path was taken that would give less revenue to the musicians. and ~no one in tech felt it was a problem.

talking about it like there is a revelation or an emerging phenomenon here mystifies, while rubbing salt in the wound.

"onetheless, the state has a role to play. The government has long forced commercial and campus radio stations to play at least 35 percent CanCon—that is, music that meets two of the four criteria of MAPL (music, artist, performance, lyrics): that the music was composed by a Canadian, performed by a Canadian, and recorded in Canada, with lyrics written by a Canadian. But imposing such requirements on internationally owned streamers has proven challenging."

When the state dictates artistic content, that is socialism.

When people use terms like "neofeudalism", this is the sort of thing we're talking about. It's capitalism working as intended. There are an increasing number of jobs that are only available to the children of the wealthy. There are several reasons for this:

1. Any of the creative professions have way more applicants than positions so nepotism dominates. It's almost shocking how many nepo babies there are in Hollywood. It infects every level. It could be that some rich person will fund your indie movie as long as you give a major role to their child. It can be family connections to studio decision-makers,. It can be currying favor with Hollywood heavyweights. Whatever. Either way, getting in as a nobody is increasingly difficult;

2. Education. First, you have legacies. Roughly a third of Harvard's undergrad class are legacies ie the children of wealthy donors. That's the real DEI. But also it's the cost. The wealthy can absorb the cost of an elite education.

This is a real issue with medical school. Someone can often graduate with $300-600k in student loan debt. By the time they finish residency they may owe $500k-1M. The wealthy can absorb this. There are a few medical schools now that offer free tuition thanks to some large endowments. Many medical schools try and have people from more diverse economic backgrounds but it's difficult. Not having to worry about money means you caa afford to spend a year doing unpaid research to pad your resume. The free tuition schools seem to have skewed more to students from wealthier backgrounds because they're simply better connected and better able to game getting into such schools;

3. Housing costs specifically and the cost of living generally. 30 years ago if you were trying to make it as a musician in LA you could rent an apartment for $300-400/month. You could live cheaply. You could chase that dream. Now? The average apartment seems to be near or over $2000/month.;

4. The disappearance of third spaces. Higher housing costs mean the higher cost of businesses. If a bar or a coffee shop needs now absorb rent of $200,000/year where once it was $10-20k, that affects what busineses are viable and for those that are, it's an input to the cost of everything. Well, those were performance spaces for up and coming acts. You see this in the UK, for example, where the number of pubs just keeps going down as they sold and converted into apartments. Community spaces just cannot survive with the high cost of property; and

5. The freedom to fail. I saw a clip of Allison Williams recently who acknowledge this. For those that don't know, she was one of the main cast of HBO's Girls. She's the daughter of Brian Williams, a long-time news anchor. Fun fact: the entire main cast of this show were all nepo babies. It cannot be overstated what relieving the fear of becoming homeless can do to your opportunities.

Now some, particularly here, have long pointed to tech as their key to social mobility. That's been true for a long time but I suspect many here are in for a rude shock. We're already seeing it with the layoffs and how many people apply for any given job. AI will make this worse.

And who do you think will get positions in this shirnking pool of opportunities? It'll be the same children of wealthy people. It'll be connections, access to funding and other factors that give you opportunities.

...in Canada.

It's weird to call it dead because I'm not sure it was ever truly alive.

Few people should make a living with music, or indeed any other form of art. Art is a hobby.

Literally everyone is an artist, even if their art consists of bad doodles and singing in the shower. Sure, some people are more talented than that, but expecting to make a living with art? Nah...

Most of music is craft not art. People should be able to make a living from their craft