The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

https://thewalrus.ca/the-death-of-the-middle-class-musician/

by pseudolus • 1 year ago

300 698 1 year ago

thewalrus.ca

WorkerBee28474• 1 year ago

...in Canada.

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

parpfish4• 1 year ago

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?

Animats• 1 year ago

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.

parpfish4• 1 year ago

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.

Semaphor• 1 year ago

At least for metal, there are still tons of tiny musicians. Underground labels do cassette runs for the smallest of them, medium-tiny ones might get vinyls.

Bandcamp is chock full of bands, from home produced stuff, to bands spending saved money on a cheap studio. It's enough that even in the sub-niches I like, I can listen to 10-20 newly released albums every week.

I doubt more than a small single digit percentage of them make money that way, but they very often really enjoy what they are doing.

billy99k• 1 year ago

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

whstl2• 1 year ago

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.

kleiba4• 1 year ago

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?

Den_VR2• 1 year ago

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.

Waterluvian• 1 year ago

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.

BurningFrog• 1 year ago

Landscape painters were replaced by cameras.

We do spend a lot of time looking at photos!

lapcat4• 1 year ago

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?

DennisP3• 1 year ago

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

mlsu• 1 year ago

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.

parpfish4• 1 year ago

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.

ancillary• 1 year ago

"whole point of being alive" is maybe exaggerating for something that most people are demonstrably uninterested in paying more than a very small fraction of their income to consume?

johnnyanmac8• 1 year ago

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?

parpfish4• 1 year ago

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.

apical_dendrite• 1 year ago

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.

IG_Semmelweiss• 1 year ago

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.

spamizbad• 1 year ago

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.

troad• 1 year ago

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).

bix62• 1 year ago

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.

thaumasiotes• 1 year ago

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.

Gigachad• 1 year ago

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.

vunderba3• 1 year ago

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.

janstice• 1 year ago

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.

analog313• 1 year ago

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.

jleyank3• 1 year ago

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.

_9ptr5• 1 year ago

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).

Ekaros2• 1 year ago

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.

orangecat5• 1 year ago

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?

GarnetFloride• 1 year ago

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?

mettamage6• 1 year ago

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

When you do a hobby you can get practice and feedback in. It depends on their situation.

Someone is a kid? A lot

Someone is single? 4 hours per evening and 6 hours per weekend day. That's still a lot.

Someone has kids? Don't know but doesn't seem like a lot

wwweston3• 1 year ago

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?

ryandrake6• 1 year ago

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.

mettamage6• 1 year ago

I think now that AI is here, tech CEOs will do their best to make it happen. That is, if AI won't be a force multiplier in the end but simply replacing tech people.

anomaly_• 1 year ago

There's lots of value in amateur engineering

clearly that isn't the case. the fetishism of amateur/hobby practice here is ridiculous. if people found value in these activities, they would pay for them. UBI advocates basically want someone to fund them drinking beer while they tinker in their garage.

delis-thumbs-7e• 1 year ago

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.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 1 year ago

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.

TimByte6• 1 year ago

But I think the key difference is scale and ubiquity... music isn't niche like landscape painting

micromacrofoot5• 1 year ago

I would love to make a living off of landscape painting actually

tossandthrow3• 1 year ago

I don't think Thisnis the right question.

The right question is likely how much time we should dedicate to subsistence - roof, clothes, food.

And that number ought to go down.

From that you can derive that we should have a freaking lot of people who can devote their time to music.

Dumblydorr• 1 year ago

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.

bamboozled3• 1 year ago

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

Not really comparable experience though.

nine_k2• 1 year ago

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.

galkk• 1 year ago

To some extent it is much better.

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

LtWorf3• 1 year ago

On the other hand busking in a street (which I regard as open source music, donations accepted) makes way more money than releasing an open source project and having tens of thousands use it daily.

magicalhippo2• 1 year ago

I played for 25 mins in front of 1000 people and spent 8+ hours total all-in to make 200 bucks.

Perhaps a bit cynical, but my thinking has long been that if I see a band that's playing in a venue that takes like 100-200 people or so[1], they're doing it out of passion. And that immediately makes it more interesting for me to go.

I've had lots of great experiences that way, including for bands that's normally way outside my comfort zone. And as the price of admission is fairly low, if it somehow is a miss it's not a big deal.

Now, as I know they're making little or no money on the gig itself, I usually end up buying some merch.

[1]: I'm in Norway, we don't have a ton of large venues.

BeFlatXIII• 1 year ago

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.

John Philip Sousa had the right opinion on recorded music.

blindriver2• 1 year ago

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.

tptacek3• 1 year ago

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.

bluGill7• 1 year ago

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.

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

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.

johnnyanmac8• 1 year ago

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.

owebmaster• 1 year ago

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.

bethekidyouwant3• 1 year ago

It’s cheap because I can carry a terabyte in my pocket not because of anything else. If somehow we went back to selling 700 MB CDs of uncompressed music I would still fill my pocket with a terabyte of every song to not pay $30 a CD.

prvc• 1 year ago

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.

wwweston3• 1 year ago

~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.

chickenzzzzu3• 1 year ago

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.

freddie_mercury• 1 year ago

I think "what happened" was that Anderson's long tail theory was

a) just a theory not a proven thing and

b) based on flawed assumptions that were quickly disproven. See the 2008 paper "Should You Invest in the Long Tail?" finding that consumers don't like niche products and the bottom 80% sold $0, contrary to the theory's prediction.

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=32337

Had nothing to do with merchandising or whatever. The Long Tail was never correct.

tptacek3• 1 year ago

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.

nabla9• 1 year ago

In most cases, labels are in fact going to lose money from midlist acts.

This is almost certainly the case. The music business is the economics of superstars. see: Rosen, Sherwin. “The Economics of Superstars.” The American Economic Review 71, no. 5 (1981): 845–58.

Small personal difference translate into enormous differences in earnings. The income curve has only small area for middle incomes. Either you are below middle, or you quickly get into upper middle class or higher incomes. It's not a market failure but a predictable dynamics of this particular field.

Artists low pay is driven by two things:

First, an oversupply of talent willing to work below a living wage keeps incomes low.

Second, promotion and marketing are the primary drivers of an artist's financial outome, leading to uneven deals where labels handle the heavy lifting and deserve larger piece of the cake. Once an artist's career reaches a certain scale, their earnings can grow to outweigh their direct creative input.

woolion• 1 year ago

This is a very sensible analysis of the problems. On the one hand, people tend to ignore how many bands fail, and how much money and effort is spent on the process. On the other hand, labels have a deathgrip on the industry, using payola and other practices that they can afford thanks to their financial (and accounting) abilities.

One thing that could help is transparency, but in a way the lack of transparency is a good part of what keeps the system going. Most people would not agree if they knew how little they would keep if they were successful; "what do you mean I have to pay for the losers?". They would just want to pay for what was necessary for their success, ignoring every expense that didn't work as a "stupid label decision". The thing is that nobody has a true recipe for success, you can just get reasonable estimates on your bets, but each bet will always be a biased coin flip.

Projectiboga• 1 year ago

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.

absurdo• 1 year ago

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.

tonyhart7• 1 year ago

dude grand piano maybe cost a house back then

when you think about it

analog313• 1 year ago

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.

nradov2• 1 year 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.

vintermann• 1 year ago

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.

monero-xmr2• 1 year ago

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.

bitmasher9• 1 year ago

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.

atoav3• 1 year ago

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

slyall• 1 year ago

I suspect it is more likely that rich people will fund their actor-aspirant children more convention ways:

When they are younger they could pay for acting classes, acting camps and help them get into local productions.

Out of school they pay for livings costs, education and any additional classes. Living in New York or LA and being able to concentrate on getting parts of training rather than having to make money would be a huge boast.

Maybe at the next stage getting their kid an agent or manager who has contacts and experience to get their kid the roles.

Perhaps you mean throwing a few thousand dollars at student-level films to ensure their kid gets an important part. I guess maybe some will write 6 (7?) figure cheques to get their kid a part, but that probably doesn't happen often.

patcon• 1 year ago

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

whatshisface2• 1 year ago

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.

Hard_Space• 1 year ago

In the UK, the 'golden age' of the dole gave an otherwise-unsupported fringe of lower-class and middle-class talent time to mature.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/01/writers-recall...

TrackerFF3• 1 year ago

Pretty much anything in the "creatives" industry.

Want to work for the most prestigious fashion brands? You start with unpaid (or very low pay) internships in some of the most expensive cities in the world. Same goes for record labels. Art. Literature publishing.

And these days, some of the above will filter out applicants that don't have big enough social media accounts.

thr0waway001• 1 year ago

What has been developing for awhile is that musicians are coming from richer backgrounds on average.

Same sh it is happening with basketball. More nepo babies that got to go through expensive camp than ballers from the streets rising up the ranks homie. And no person embodies dis shit more than Bronny James.

Sad cause sports was supposed to be the ultimate meritocracy yo!

boredemployee2• 1 year ago

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.

melvinroest2• 1 year ago

I'm currently a data analyst, used to be a software engineer. Weirdly enough I feel that data analysis (programming, visualizing, consulting and presenting) feels a lot related to making music. I think I just see the art of being a data analyst.

I want to "move up" in my career, but I simply don't see the (performative) art of data science and data engineering. It feels too narrow. Music and data analysis feels broad. I could take a higher paycheck but it'd cost of a lot of fun.

It probably helps that I on top of that get to integrate LLMs and create LLM flows, basically n8n but then programming it using the APIs of an LLM. So I'm still actually programming as well.

It's fun being a generalist.

boredemployee2• 1 year ago

I totally agree, because I work with data analysis as well. Both feel similar because in the end you have to tell a story and (presumably) please the audience :)

627467• 1 year ago

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.

11217mackem2• 1 year ago

Enjoy listening to Drake for the rest of your life.

asdf6969• 1 year ago

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

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

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.

dirtyhippiefree• 1 year ago

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

I venture that live music has suffered because of it.

jdkee• 1 year ago

"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.

elevation• 1 year ago

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.

lmm• 1 year ago

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.

mettamage6• 1 year ago

I've come to the perhaps grim conclusion that the world doesn't value music enough. It seems to me that most artists are making music because they love to do it themselves. It's essentially a form of play. Wanting a career out of it implies sacrifice in the way we currently have our world setup.

The current world we live in doesn't care enough about creativity. I find it a bleak thought, but here I am. Feel free to try to talk me out of it, because it does feel kind of depressing. Or feel free to validate it. I want to see the world for what it is, not what I like it to be.

dalmo3• 1 year ago

What would a world that cares about creativity look like?

magicalhippo2• 1 year ago

I've come to the perhaps grim conclusion that the world doesn't value music enough.

What do you mean by not valuing music? Should we allocate more of our paycheck to music? Or should we talk more about how great music is?

It seems to me that most artists are making music because they love to do it themselves.

I mean, art is ultimately an expression of emotions. If you don't love creating the art you create, unless you have another deep emotional reason to create it, it's going to affect the result quite significantly.

The current world we live in doesn't care enough about creativity.

This is just human nature though I think. Most people want the fuzzy feeling of something familiar. And then you have those who go to large events for the shared experience of going, rather than what's actually performed.

Personally I love going to smaller venues (<300 people) where the cost of admission is such that I feel I can take the risk of something unknown and outside my comfort zone. But I also realize I'm weird that way.

peab2• 1 year ago

The music industry is a multi-billion dollar market and growing, so it's not really fair to say that the world doesn't value it.

The problem is that it's a bit of a winner takes all market. It's comparable to professional sports.

Everyone loves soccer, but 99.9% of people won't get paid to play it. That doesn't mean it isn't valued - some of the highest paid people in the world are soccer players!

gedy• 1 year ago

They sort of do (or as much as they ever have), but I think that the modern world gives access to national and global stars via prerecorded entertainment and the little guys can't make a living like they used to.

That's a drag in many ways because local circuits and regional music are where a lot of new styles and bands came from, and the wealth is more concentrated now into fewer people.

spacemadness2• 1 year ago

People do care whether they realize it or not. They will always care. They have to if they consume any creative media at all. Our government and economic system on the other hand might not care to offer any encouragement other than “good luck, you’ll need it. I hope you’re good at marketing.” The article states there are more people making music than ever. I agree. I became overwhelmed by the sheer amount of output coming out by bedroom musicians. The list of bands playing near me weekly is huge. Whether it’s more quality on top of quantity is another discussion.

dale_glass• 1 year ago

What people don't care about is seeking novelty.

Think of it: a lot of people listen to music as a background of some kind. That means they don't want to keep going "Ugh, this one sucks, next, next, next..."

But, there's thousands of absolutely excellent songs that are time tested. You can play top 100 from the 80s and not be annoyed most of the time.

But ever time somebody plays Prince or Duran Duran is a time they're not playing the song you just released.

trainerxr50• 1 year ago

This is just not true.

There has never been as many ways to make money off being creative as individual as right now.

This board just loves to romanticize the past to an absurd degree and then conclude free money fixes everything.

It is basically every non-software discussion on here. The present sucks, the past was better, free money.

TrackerFF3• 1 year ago

Even if you play gigs 7 days a week on Broadway (Nashville), all year round, you'd make a pitiful salary - compared to the work put in.

And you'd be locked to only playing certain types of music (country, classic rock, singer songwriter), doing multiple gigs a day.

Truth be told, most musicians would be better off by picking a job, any job really, and treating music as a side hustle. And that really pains me, as I started out as a musician.

If you're going to make a living off music, it's going to be a never-ending marathon of hustles and uncertainty. Cover bands, church bands, wedding bands, session work, lessons, roadie work, instrument tech, and half (of not two thirds) of that work is based on sheer luck, depending on what people you cross paths with.

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

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

weregiraffe• 1 year ago

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.

eszed• 1 year ago

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

ringeryless8• 1 year ago

quite right. i happen to be an amazing musical genius with the keys to the future of the art, and i will not share my hobby work with you or the world because you just pulled the rug out from under my lifes mission by reducing everything to shopping mall McDonald's aesthetics. enjoy your oldies and cover bands.

ringeryless8• 1 year ago

"as exemplifies by thousands of YouTube channel that turned into soulless content-producers in an effort to keep a schedule."

This means that a former musical artist became a Youtube content producer in order to earn a living. This does not illustrate the negative effects of paying musicians to make music.

cynicalsecurity• 1 year ago

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

DocTomoe• 1 year ago

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.

taylorius• 1 year ago

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.

TimByte6• 1 year ago

There's something freeing about embracing it as a passion instead of chasing dollars

jmyeet• 1 year ago

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.

orangecat5• 1 year ago

Housing costs specifically

This is a huge problem, and it's due almost entirely to bad government policies rather than "capitalism working as intended".

kingstnap• 1 year ago

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.

jedberg2• 1 year ago

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.

dist-epoch• 1 year ago

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?

jedberg2• 1 year ago

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.

micromacrofoot5• 1 year ago

yes, there's just less money going around with streaming - think about it, rentals sustained hundreds of physical buildings with multiple employees

TimByte6• 1 year ago

Either you're part of the algorithmic elite or you're scraping by

whiddershins• 1 year ago

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.

ringeryless8• 1 year ago

OT, i love your username. if i walk 3 times anticlockwise around the local church, will i end up in fairyland?

bradley132• 1 year ago

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...

croes• 1 year ago

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

ringeryless8• 1 year ago

is all art equal? is there no structure or history to art? is copying someone elses ideas the same as bringing new ideas to life? i contend that music is a discourse space where great minds show great structural concepts, and where minds with nothing to say merely regurgitate others ideas ad nauseum

BrenBarn5• 1 year ago

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.

_9ptr5• 1 year ago

Except that socialism has failed already.

Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally.

bryanrasmussen• 1 year ago

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

bigyabai• 1 year ago

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

yoyohello13• 1 year ago

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.

blueboo3• 1 year ago

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

ElFitz• 1 year ago

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

scarmig3• 1 year ago

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).

noelwelsh4• 1 year ago

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.

eru56• 1 year ago

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.

djmips• 1 year ago

People that have inherited capital have income without merit. Is that immoral? Randomly being born in a rich nation to an advantaged life. Is that immoral too?

ascorbic3• 1 year ago

UBI is not a socialist policy. It's supported by many across the political spectrum. It seems particularly popular with many libertarians

tehjoker3• 1 year ago

capitalism has failed, the economy is turning into pure financial speculation. our products are made in socialist china which delivered the largest proportion of people rising from poverty

mantas11• 1 year ago

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.

watwut2• 1 year ago

Afaik, it is opposite. You coulf live off being musician, because people liked music. Bars and such paid live music, weddings, funerals, middle class birthsdays too.

That stopped when we started to play from record.

decimalenough4• 1 year ago

Yet it destroyed a lot of community singing by not-highly-talented people.

There is almost certainly a choir near you that would love to have more singers, especially if they're male. (Membership skews female and geriatric.)

anovikov2• 1 year ago

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.

whatshisface2• 1 year ago

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.

atoav3• 1 year ago

That is what you would think. Yet scandinavian countries which many US observers would (wrongly) call "socialist" countries fare quite well, while the US is currently falling apart in a fractal fashion where even the big issues have smaller issues attached to them.

It is maybe time for people like you to realize that the current crisis in the US is a direct result of this zero-sum worldview, where you think you can only win if someone else loses. Some turned that around and infer someone else losing will make them win, which is where a lot of the worse-than-soviet cruelty in US society comes from. Where producing win-win outcomes should be prefered, part of the US seems to be craving for lose-lose.

It is hard for the fish to perceive the nature of the water they have been swimming in their whole lives, but trust me: from an European standpoint the frequency soviet-style stories emerging from the US is rising.

People don’t call ambulances because they’re afraid of the cost, they die in the back of rideshares or sit bleeding out waiting for someone to Google the cheapest ER.

People drink poisoned water in one of the richest countries in the world, not as a one-time scandal but as a structural outcome, in Flint, in Jackson, in places the cameras moved on from.

Housing is a market, not a right, and so entire cities now feature tent villages under highways while luxury units sit empty, protected not by need but by capital.

In parts of Louisiana, California and Iowa, the air you breathe and the water you touch can kill you, but only if you’re poor enough or Black or unlucky enough to live near a chemical plant, a battery smelter, a lake no one bothers to save. In these sacrifice zones, life expectancy drops like it’s wartime. In urban centres people film others burning alive on the subway (NYC) and call it content.

There are cemeteries of Black Americans being paved over for parking garages, with courts hesitating to intervene. These aren’t edge cases—they’re the shape of the thing. This is not the freedom that was promised. This is the bureaucracy of cruelty operating not as failure, but as design. And the worst part is: many still think this is the price of success.

foxglacier2• 1 year ago

No because the whole first world has protections against starvation and homelessness, while social exclusion is usually for social behaviors rather than not working. However, what does drive people to be productive in those countries is the unbounded upward mobility offered by doing productive work. People strive to be richer than each other in a virtuous cycle that has the side effect of benefiting everyone. People, especially men, love and often need to be better than their peers to attract better partners, and that's a powerful driving force for many. For others, it's just feeling successful or gaining the power to by what you want. You can't do that if you're not rewarded for higher performance than your competitors (socialism).

Homelessness in the west is mostly not because people can't afford a house but because they'd rather spend their money on other things (drugs) or don't want a house at any price, or can't avoid losing their house because of their behavior.

eru56• 1 year ago

[...] 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.)

jstummbillig• 1 year ago

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.

noelwelsh4• 1 year ago

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. political control in a very unequal society gets concentrated in a few people.

WarOnPrivacy4• 1 year ago

What economic inequality would you deem small enough?

I'd like the one small enough that I won't die from my (treatable) first major medical event due to being unable to fund 100% of treatment costs.

I'd also like one small enough that me and the kids didn't spend most of the 2010s in hunger-level poverty.

That'd be a start.

pazimzadeh4• 1 year ago

the healthcare situation sucks. provide universal healthcare and you might have a point

weatherlite3• 1 year ago

And why do you care about inequality, and not eg the absolute livings standards of the least well off?

The two are connected. You can either transfer more wealth to the poorer people without taxing the rich (lets say by helicopter money), or transfer it from the rich to the poor. In both cases the rich become less rich in relative terms. It should also make intuitive sense - if the rich (lets say top 5%) hold 95% of wealth it means there is less for everyone else - less wealth that is because the resources like land, apartments and good education are finite and not abundant.

voidhorse9• 1 year ago

The reason inequality is a problem is very simple.

As inequality increases at scale it means that an increasingly concentrated group has more and more capital. What do they do with that capital? They buy assets, they are basically forced to do so by design.

What happens when they buy assets? They capitalize those assets. An apartment unit now becomes a home others can rent but not purchase.

Rinse and repeat until eventually wealth is so concentrated that the ability for any other individuals to access assets is basically zero. This means those individuals cannot build capital or ultimately wealth and it also means that, even if more resource become readily available, more people cannot afford them. They have to do 2x today what they did yesterday to an achieve the same amount of stability even if their "standard of living" has increased because of a wider swath of goods and services.

Honestly at this point I think that anyone who doesn't see inequality as a major driver of contemporary problems is simply not paying attention to the USA or must not live there. Countries in which it is less of a problem basically only mitigate it by having a state that can provide essentials to effectively prevent the capitaled class from taking them away from people (eg healthcare, as you mention).

Economics is all about the balance of who has access to what resources. We cannot just generate resources and capital out of thin air. One person getting more necessarily means another gets less. Period.

Devasta• 1 year ago

To be clear, confiscating everything Musk, Theil, Zuckerberg and Bezos have absolutely would make my life better off. Think about the amount of political meddling by Musk in the past year alone, things he could never do if he weren't so rich.

andrepd2• 1 year ago

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?

Answer to both those questions, simplifying massively: the most prosperous period of capitalism in the past 200 years was also that where there was the smallest levels of inequality.

The point of view that you must only look at the overall floor is terribly short-sighted (and even then, the lower and middle classes have become WORSE off in the past 40 years!). The massive increases in wealth have been going overwhelmingly to the pockets of the very rich; this is bad in itself, irrespective of the overall GDP growth or whatever.

Read Pikkety's books and you will understand.

FooBarBizBazz• 1 year ago

The economy is not a static thing in which the same goods and services are offered independent of the wealth distribution. The same work is not done.

When wealth is concentrated, prices cease to aggregate information and preferences from across the whole society. Instead they represent whatever stupid whim some clique of investors has developed. As a result you get massive malinvestments in speculative bullshit while basic things decay. It's the Politburo but dumber.

This determines the physical environment you live in, the services offered on your street, and the stuff you do at your job.

micromacrofoot5• 1 year ago

absolute living standards are very unequal

metabagel5• 1 year ago

We can 'solve' inequality by just destroying everything the rich have

This is "all or nothing" fallacy thinking.

iechoz6H• 1 year ago

But we've had a way of addressing that since the year dot, it's called progressive taxation but no, that appears beyond the pale nowadays.

huijzer• 1 year ago

it's that the set of things you can do to make a living is narrowing more and more.

Or, instead of handing out more and more money from the state, try to introduce dynamism again. Try to reduce the amount of times that YouTube takes videos or accounts down for example.

dmje• 1 year ago

100% this. I don’t know how long we have to go on pushing at the “wealth will trickle down” door to discover it’s utter bullshit and always has been. The answer isn’t private companies, because they’re continuing to take the piss and make a small number of people incredibly wealthy at the expense of the majority.

It’s never a popular thing to say on HN but the country the typifies inequality most starkly is the US - and it’s also the one with the biggest set of problems: huge issues with drug use, obesity, widespread unhappiness, simmering resentment, a divided nation. The countries that are getting this right (and by right I mean GDP, happiness, heath, pretty much any meaningful index of “a good life”) are the ones that fund public services, healthcare, education, etc through higher taxes.

~ braces for downvotes ~

somedude8952• 1 year ago

And yet everyone wants to move to the US. Weird, isn't it?

renegade-otter• 1 year ago

UBI was first piloted by Richard Nixon. These ideas are not fanciful. America has moved so hard to the right that anything slightly left of center seems radical and communist.

127• 1 year ago

...in America. There are countries that actually fight the oligarchs and tax them until the wealth inequality becomes lesser.

Of course there's no silver bullet and high progressive taxes for the mega-wealthy do have other negative effects. Like people being less motivated to strive. Less capital to invest and less competitive companies born.

But billionaires paying less taxes than the guy sweeping floors at the local mall is absurd. Once you reach a certain threshold of wealth, your taxes actually start going down.

ponector5• 1 year ago

There is actually no sense to put high taxes on ultra wealthy people. They have all means to avoid payment of income/profit taxes at all, no matter of the current tax rate.

That's why poor people pay the highest percentage of their income: they have no choice, no ways to do tax evasion.

hibikir2• 1 year ago

In fact, note how some European countries tax wealth from pretty low amounts: Sometimes under a million euros worth.Often around 2% of wealth after you get to 2 or 3 million, in practice making self-funded early retirement almost unheard of. Those wealth taxes raise more money from professionals that save instead of spend than from anyone rich enough to seem like an oligarch.

ponector5• 1 year ago

actors, or grocery store baggers, or taxi drivers, or whatever, can't make a living

Until they are dying on the streets, they are actually make a living.

If they cannot make a decent living with their low income - UBI wouldn't help. UBI is a safety net, a minimal salary payment. You are never going to have a decent life on minimal salary.

VerminOctopus1• 1 year ago

Capitalism seems to be an optimizer for this type of “efficiency”. How far can we squeeze people for their labour before they are dying in the streets or rioting?

weatherlite3• 1 year ago

I totally agree. There's the inequality side of things were many working people are still in a precarious position. Then there's also the burnout / job conditions side of things where people can't persist in their roles without slowly losing their mental health. Think about nurses, police officers, teachers etc. It can be solvable by making their work weeks shorter and/or by increasing the numbers of staff per student and many other things we can do - that are deemed too expensive now but can become realistic if we distribute the wealth in a more equal way.

TimByte6• 1 year ago

This isn't about any one industry failing, it's about a system designed to funnel value upwards while pretending the rest of us are just not hustling hard enough

monero-xmr2• 1 year ago

I would argue the system is designed for efficiency. Economic solutions to this problem are about introducing legally-mandated inefficiencies, like limiting competition or artificially increasing labor costs

skybrian4• 1 year ago

I think “design” is the wrong word. Many systems are unjust by default, and that’s certainly true of hit-driven businesses like music. Justice doesn’t happen unless people make it happen, and often, most people don’t care.

For example, lotteries are inherently unjust, making random people wealthy for no reason, and hardly anyone cares. They just hope to win themselves.

Taylor Swift fans don’t care that she makes far more money than other talented musicians who languish in obscurity. They’re going to keep giving her more money. If you told them they shouldn’t because it perpetuates inequality, they wouldn’t get it.

xhkkffbf• 1 year ago

It’s easier than ever to make music, and harder than ever to make a living from it

The subhed spells it out. It's a supply and demand world. If it's easy to do things, the supply increases. It's that simple.

That's not to say that the larger system isn't doing what you claim. Just that music is just too easy to make to be valuable.

sandworm101• 1 year ago

I'd describe it more as a system designed to enable capital to better purchase assets built by persons without. Taylor Swift sold her early work to someone with capital, who then owned her as the labels owned the artists in the article.

The answer might be then to disallow capital from buying artists so easily. One option, which Canada does partially have on the books, is a concept of non-divestible "artist rights". If fully implemented, Taylor Swift would be incapable of selling away her works fully, always retaining a degree of control. This would no doubt reduce the value of art but would keep control in the hands of artists. So when the artist feels dissatisfied, they can always walk away no matter what contact they have signed earlier in their career.

NerdCubed did a video recently about similar experiences when publishing a book.

tim3333• 1 year ago

Universal basic income is a bit impractical just now - give everyone free money and who will do the jobs that need doing? - but shortly will be very practical when robots/AI will do the jobs that need doing.

graemep3• 1 year ago

No, people always want more money.

Why do so many rich people who could afford to retire work hard to make more? Why does hardly anyone on a high hourly rate work the minimum hours they need for an adequate income?

There have been numerous trials of UBI and I have yet to heard of one that showed people worked significantly less when given it.

hackable_sand• 1 year ago

Cultural investment in education is my take. People should be enabled to study for career mobility in highly regulated environments.

Getting this and that cert. is costly, but even things like hands-om experience in new domains is inaccessible if you don't have the cash flow.

HPsquared• 1 year ago

UBI would introduce massive inequality between those who work and those who don't. Much tension would arise.

decimalenough4• 1 year ago

How would this differ from the tension we have today between the employed and the unemployed? The latter are already heavily stigmatized (dole bludgers, welfare queens, etc).

trueismywork• 1 year ago

How would it increase inequality?

mentalpiracy• 1 year ago

a definitive assertion offered without elaboration

graemep3• 1 year ago

It would do the opposite.

It would set a minimum income that everyone would know they had.

Whatever work people did would add to that. It would encourage the unemployed to start businesses, or do casual work as they would keep all the money (rather than having their benefits cut).

decimalenough4• 1 year ago

You're conflating three very different types of jobs here.

Minimum wage hourly jobs like grocery baggers need to be able to survive off a 40-hour week, and it's a societal problem if they can't.

Taxi drivers are essentially sole proprietors who set their own hours and accept higher risk for a higher payoff. Demand and supply will calibrate themselves unless the government distorts the market (eg. taxi medallions).

Musicians and actors are and have always been in a brutal power law market where all the wealth accrues to the 0.1% at the top of the heap. This drives exploitation since people will do anything to get to the top, but at the end of the day society does not need them the way it needs taxi drivers or grocery baggers and there is no economic rationale for subsidizing them.

somedude8952• 1 year ago

at the end of the day society does not need them the way it needs taxi drivers or grocery baggers

This is absolutely true. In my country psychologists are complaining about "low" wages and tough conditions, and yet people go study psychology in droves because they "find it interesting." There's only so much demand for any one thing and if you decide because you enjoy something you want to make that your career well tough shit, there's thousands like yourself and nobody wants more of what you supply. So you can keep it as a hobby, but to make a living you have to provide something that people want and need, otherwise you're just a leech on society. It's funny that the ones complaining about these issues are usually the people who care about the social aspect of things, yet there's absolutely nothing social about demanding money without contributing anything that others actually need.

grumpy_coder2• 1 year ago

The grocery bagger on a zero hour contract needs to be able to survive when not given 40 hours. Also the 5% unemployed people in a 'full employment' economy need to be able to survive when sacrificed to control inflation.

giantg210• 1 year ago

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.

fraggleysun• 1 year ago

Any reference that you can point to on the housing shortage being due to preference?

It seems like job location, compensation, average cost of living, and commute would play a fairly large role.

simonask5• 1 year ago

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.

wyre2• 1 year ago

It seems very disingenuous to suggest needing to live somewhere one can make a living is only a “preference.”

tomgp• 1 year ago

In Britain it’s noticeable that as unemployment benefit and social housing has been stripped back the proportion of people from working class backgrounds with careers in the arts has declined. The most visible example of this is probably actors; pretty much all the current generation of British actors went to public school and were able to support themselves via family wealth as they became established. This wasn’t the case for the generation coming through in the 70s and 80s. The underlying cause is that if you can’t subsist as you learn your craft you can’t learn your craft, I don’t think this is mysterious.

This doesn’t just apply to the arts, if all junior dev roles are stripped away by llm’s where do the talented developers of tomorrow come from? Those who can learn the craft on their own time, those with independent wealth.

At a societal level there is a huge amount of potential talent being left on the table, and imo redistributive policies are the obvious fix. In think this is really important both from a mortal point of view and an economically pragmatic one.

reactordev• 1 year ago

And yet they just voted to do the opposite. It’s not universal income that’s the solution, it’s breaking apart the monopolistic legislation that allows certain companies strangleholds on the markets. M&A shouldn’t be allowed if 65% of the majority of the market is owned by those two companies. Individuals with wealth should be capped and any excess should be used for low-income development programs.

We built a world for higher level thinking but ever since 2010, we’ve been failing to meet that standard.

gosub1006• 1 year ago

one idea I've been toying with is to give municipalities ability to be hostile to corporations. for instance, levy a hefty tax on the wealth that is extracted from the community and paid to shareholders.

Of course I'm sure there are a million laws against this at the state or federal level, but citizens could still band together to make them comply or else run them out of town. ie. the police could agree to stop responding to McDonalds, or courts could allow trial by jury for eviction cases, and simply have the jurors find them not guilty (for the case of corporate landlords). These would be elements of last resort. The first resort would be to require corporate owners to pay a lot more to do business. A second line would be to rescind a lot of the "tax cuts" given to companies to build there. Just say sorry, this is an emergency and we cannot afford to give you the cuts anymore.

It would be dangerous, no doubt, and ripe for abuse. But it's a tool that could be used at the local level to provide relief. Ultimately, I think certain sectors should be forbidden for corporations to operate, such as restaurants and landlording. These are entry-level small business opportunities for normal people to get involved in, and they do not deserve to be pushed out by wealthy corporations.

osigurdson22• 1 year ago

Usually when people in western countries think about UBI, they are assuming that money from people richer than themselves will trickle down to them. What they don't realize is, globally, money will trickle out of their pockets to the rest of the world. Basically they are looking for a constrained hypothetical situation in which free money flows to them.

amelius3• 1 year ago

The root of the problem is that the rules of the economy are unfair.

By analogy, try playing a game of monopoly but enter the game after a few rounds have already been played. Exorbitant housing prices are an example.

Another problem is that while it is fine if hardworking people make more money, these people can use that money __against__ people who made different life choices, in various ways, consciously and unconsciously.

We have to acknowledge that the system is broken, and it is starting to show.

MichaelZuo4• 1 year ago

This doesn’t make sense… people have always been able to use their time, effort, and resources against someone else?

Since the beginning of society I imagine.

skeeter2020• 1 year ago

I do a lot of things as an amateur but at pretty high level: athletics, music, art and more. I also pay a huge portion of my income as a software developer in direct and indirect taxation. Convince me I should fund people to focus full-time on things where they can't make a living, the same things I love to do but realize can't be your sole pursuit.

You've conflated people busting ass who can't keep up with those following their passion in the arts voluntarily. Those don't feel anything like the same thing to me. I don't think I'm alone in a perspective that if you keep taking more from me I'll stop contributing all together, and we'll all fail. The ultra-rich and others with means to avoid picking up the tab have already done so.

tossandthrow3• 1 year ago

Assuming you live in the US, it is relatively easy to convince you - but it heavily relieve on you opening your eyes.

Start traveling, talking to other cultures, and stop being dismissive and defensive.

metabagel5• 1 year ago

Convince me I should fund people

Are you in the top 1%? If so, you can afford it. If not, then I don't think your taxes should go up - I think Bezos' taxes should go up, and there should be a wealth tax for high net worth individuals.

candiddevmike• 1 year ago

Convince me I should fund people to focus full-time on things where they can't make a living, the same things I love to do but realize can't be your sole pursuit.

You already are, it's just going to the ultra wealthy and pension fund kids, while you slave your life away making that stock go up because you believe there should be no other choice.

KittenInABox2• 1 year ago

If all the people who passionately pursue art decided to pursue only profitable full-time jobs, you bet that your software developer job would pay shit like an art and you'd be way worse off than if you just paid a few hundred bucks (at most, let's be real, unless you have serious assets in which why would we pity you) annually to allow to a civilized society that actually allows for cultural innovations.

ahoy• 1 year ago

Because you have to live in a society with those other people. Because that's going to be YOU in the future. Because it's going to be your kids, your cousins, your neighbors.

pavlov2• 1 year ago

I love art and I also love making art, but I have to work so I don’t get to spend as much time on it as I’d like.

Yet that doesn’t mean I want to see other people making less art. On the contrary: I wish other people could create more great stuff that makes me happy, and I’m also happy if my tax euros (and my private consumption) help pay for that.

What I’m trying to say is that this idea of “I don’t get to do it, so nobody else should either” seems completely foreign to creativity. It’s not a zero-sum game.

harmmonica2• 1 year ago

I feel like this is one of the fundamental issues with US taxation today and this overall issue of wealth inequality. People like you, high-income and likely not a lot of shelters for that income based on what you're saying, pay a lot of taxes percentage-wise and so the thought of paying another 1-2 percentage points is, for lack of a better word, sickening. I tend to think you're right about that because it feels really unfair when you're paying 40-50% tax, a lot of people pay zero, and then people who are much wealthier than you are paying 20%.

It's when you start making fabulous amounts of money, and can park it in all sorts of shelters, whether that's straightforward things like real estate or, as HN commenters point out every time this comes up, by not ever even earning income or investment gains and so you can drive your tax towards zero (by doing things like taking out loans against your assets for money to live on).

I'm not sure what the answer is, but a North Star, in my mind, would be that as you have more you pay more, a truly progressive scheme, because every additional dollar you earn (through income or investment gains, realized or unrealized), as you get richer, actually is less critical to your livelihood. Who am I to say that? I'm not talking about some nebulous concept. I'm saying that if you make $1 million dollars per year, in total, a dollar extra matters less to you than it does to someone making $100,000 so I'm purely speaking on a relative basis (cue someone saying "how do you know it matters less? That person could live in a HCOL location, or have 12 kids or..." Hopefully we can avoid that because it misses the point; those things are choices people make. How much you're taxed is not a choice for the most part though can be to some extent (move from a high-tax state to a low one, etc.).

pineaux2• 1 year ago

Because if all these people are forced to do what you do, because nothing else pays their bills, your income will go down.

Also, all the people who cant do what you do, should they just curl up and do fentanyl? What do you propose they should do?

jayd162• 1 year ago

Your argument begs the question. If we made it so it could be a sole pursuit then you'd be free to choose.

Besides, why do you want to live in a world with less artists and full of people who hate their jobs?

mitthrowaway22• 1 year ago

OK, I'll do my best: Economies of scale.

Consider two toy economies: One in which purchasing power is fairly evenly distributed among the population, and one in which it's concentrated via a power-law distribution into the top 1%, and 0.1%, etc.

In the first case, the quantities of mass-market products demanded will be much larger, because more people can afford to purchase them. This means demand for things like cameras, cell phones, breakfast cereals, movies, video games software, etc, go up. However most of these are also things where economies of scale makes production more efficient as order quantities increase. Factories can invest in jigs, automation, and high-throughput lines to make enough quantity for everyone. The jobs that produce these goods also become better-paid, and easier to secure investment for, because order quantities are higher and less volatile. And doubly so for intangible goods like software, ebooks, music, and video games: production can scale to infinite demand, so there can never be a production shortage, but people who work in these industries can be better rewarded for their efforts because a bigger audience can afford to pay more.

So order quantities grow, and so do incomes, but inflation is relatively low because of the increasing efficiency of production. This means real GDP per capita increases greatly, and the population as a whole becomes materially more wealthy. Even though wealth is being distributed away from top earners, there are huge material rewards available to anyone able to supply goods and services to the masses, because the masses are able to pay for those goods and services.

In the wealth-concentration economy, those mass-production industries have to fight for scraps, because the top 1% has as much purchasing power as the bottom 99%, and the top 0.1% has more purchasing power than the 1% below them. More purchasing power is directed towards luxury goods: golf courses, supercars, yachts, country club estates, Rolex watches, art, private jets, and real estate. Production quantities are low and inefficient, and in the case of land, production is effectively impossible. Prices go up for these assets, but there is little productive benefit to the economy. The excess wealth of the 0.1% is put towards buying political influence, buying news media, and so on, which becomes another negative for society as a whole. Meanwhile an entrepreneur might identify a pressing need among the bottom 25% of the populace, where very simple things (eg. vitamins or eyeglasses) could create an incredible increase in social welfare, but they will not be able to secure investment nor be rewarded for such efforts because there is no profit in it; the poor cannot afford to pay.

worik• 1 year ago

Convince me I should fund people to focus full-time on things where they can't make a living

I cannot do that.

But given that we need the labour of about 10% (give or take) of people for society to function, we need to change our economic arrangements

I think we should fund the basic meat hook realities for the common person. Accommodation, food, health care, shoes...

That is a UBI - Universal Basic Income

It will simplify so many aspects of modern life, increase our taxes, and open up many opportunities

The current system has failed to deliver anything like economic justice and needs rethinking

This will mean that people are able to "focus full-time on things where they can't make a living", rather than hustle for crusts. That is a side effect, not the purpose

hnpolicestate• 1 year ago

"Convince me I should fund people to focus full-time on things where they can't make a living" - because you wrote the programs that made their job (like everyone else's job) obsolete/automated?

rrrrrrrrrrrryan• 1 year ago

According to empirical laffer curve studies, median earners in America start taking their foot off the gas pedal when you tax more than 33% of their wages, but you can tax 73% of billionaires' income before they begin to dial back their contributions to the economy.

We taxed our top earners 90% in living memory, which was naively high and absolutely caused distortions, but their current crazy low tax rates are a ridiculous policy failure. We could absolutely fund a small basic income by fixing this alone.

mystified50162• 1 year ago

First because generally in order to be a good person you have to care what happens to other people.

Second because the second order effects of reverting American society to Victorian slums would be incredibly bad for the economy and your tax burden.

Because somehow a plurality of Americans seem to have been convinced by the guy stealing all their money that it's someone else's fault and you should stone them to death instead.

Because letting large portions of the population starve to death slowly is just a bad thing in general?

Because it would be good for everyone including you.

Because you'd wish that someone else wasn't a smug asshole with an "I got mine" attitude and gave you help when you need it.

pstuart• 1 year ago

UBI seems inevitable with the progress of AI and automation -- but transitioning to it will need a catalyst to break through the wall of resistance to make that happen. Covid was such a catalyst, and at least in the US it was so poorly managed on the distribution of funds it did not help shift the mindset to support UBI.

That's a pity, because it could have done so brilliantly. The catch is that we need a government that is not corrupt and incompetent to administer that process and that's exactly what was in charge at the time.

So while it can't happen now it would be worth exploring what that tipping point might be and how to make sure it serves the people its supposed to.

tptacek3• 1 year ago

Acknowledging inequality won't change the economics of a midlist artist, because you can't compel people to buy music they don't want to buy.

motorest11• 1 year ago

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.

I actually read the article before going into the comment section, and your comment was surprising and baffling by how detached from the content of the post it was.

There are plenty of exploitation arguments made in it, but if you read the article is income inequality one of them? Well, no.

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.

I think that this conclusion is far-fetched if your starting point is the actual article. The music business is notorious for being virtually impossible to make a living, even if you are an international act. There were plenty of examples from decades ago up until now of musicians from popular international bands with packed international tours not being able to afford to quit their day job to make ends meet. If your income comes from selling tickets to the public, sometimes directly, and you still cannot generate a livable income, the problem is not income inequality. The problem is that there is not enough demand for what you're selling to make it a viable business.

I mean, if your primary source of income is playing shows and not enough people want to spend money to attend them, why do you think the fact that some people earn way more than you is even relevant?

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.

Here is a though experiment: does your assertion hold valid if you replace "store baggers" and "taxi drivers" with "contortionists" or "jugglers"? Because while "store baggers" and "taxi drivers" aren't exactly activities associated with upper middle class income levels, they are activities that most people are coerced to have because they have no alternative to make a living. Musicians are another story altogether, and associated with people pursuing their dreams. In fact, there is that age old cliche about third generation wealth being artists and academics because their exceptional wealth allowed them to pursue their dreams.

msgodel• 1 year ago

We already have a pretty burdensome welfare system, it might be that we've gone too far towards UBI to make middle class musicians practical.

cma• 1 year ago

Not only that there's already one in place (earned income tax credit) and Alaska has one for oil revenue. We can just increase the EICT.

astrange3• 1 year ago

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.

Basic income has been tested very thoroughly many different times and all results show it basically doesn't do anything good or bad. So it won't create any new musicians. The main effect is it's simpler to administrate than other kinds of welfare, which is a good thing because it saves money.

Wealth taxes are inflationary (because they force you to sell assets) and so would probably cause fewer musicians. Especially if you assume musicians are nepo babies, in which case you actually need rich/upper-middle-class people to create them.

Anyway, the solution here is to copy other countries where it works. They don't do any of these made-up future policy ideas. Japan/Korea produces a lot of culture because it has a low cost of living, a mature industry that trains a lot of people, and most importantly (but negatively) wages are low so there's nothing more productive for the musicians to be doing. Doubly so for women, who might as well become Z-grade idols when they can't get a career job at all.

In the West IIRC a surprising amount of songwriting talent comes from Sweden, but don't know much about that.

osigurdson22• 1 year ago

Perhaps instead of UBI we should be doing UBE (Universal Basic Expense). Most governments run deficits today so maybe we start with ending those. Here is how it could work:

At the end of ever taxation year, the government calculates its deficit for the year. Divide this by all income earners at their marginal tax rate. Then, at tax time, the tax payer can choose to either pay this or allow it to accumulate at the same rate that the government charges itself. Maybe once we can cover deficits we can start thinking about UBI.

corimaith2• 1 year ago

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.

The cost of living is correlated to the high cost of housing, competitive job market and high cost of labor in basic services such as infrastructure development. How exactly does "reducing inequality" address all of this? Taxing a bunch of billionaires isn't going to magically increase the number of well-paid jobs, and the guys quoting $5,000 for your AC installation aren't anywhere near the 1% either. Even with stuff like crime and homelessness, just look at Bloomberg's tenure of NYC or Hong Kong when the businesses have a say, they do manage cleaning up cities quite well! If anything, it's the billionares providing the cheap goods you do like to consume so much like Amazon or new Iphones each year.

The funny thing is that back in March we already had this conversation with the whole tariff and manufacturing debacle, no matter how stupid Trump's execution was in reality, this board or really progressives are essentially shooting themselves in the foot in adamantally claiming that "manufacturing will never return" and wanting to continue the status quo of cheap exports but expensive domestic labour. Yeah well, that's what exactly leads to the situation you're in today. You might point to nominally higher salaries, but truth be told, do you feel particularly more civilized in the Bay Area than in Shenzhen or Tokyo?

WarOnPrivacy4• 1 year ago

In Jan, my son ordered a mystery box from ... I dunno who. It just showed up. Evidently it was someone connected with King Gizzard because it was recently released KG vinyl, inc a test pressing. Also a sealed cassette of another band that we don't recognize. Also stickers.

Connect with fans, treat them well and stay creative - and they'll buy your stuff. Often a lot of it.

SlowTao• 1 year ago

Yeah King Gizzard have basically done the complete opposite of what is considered good advice on making it in the music business and made it work.

Rapid release schedule (except the last year or so), inconsistent genre choices, questionable aesthetic choices, not much marketing, and just some generally goofy stuff and it just works. I think part of it is folks just tired of the packaged crap and see it for what it is. Pure authentic stuff.

dsign2• 1 year ago

Well, AI is here and I give it a high chance than in a few years all the music streaming platforms will go the way of the mastodon. Even recorded music in general may take a hit. I'm already skipping tracks in YT-music that I suspect they are AI-generated. When I find that the majority of the tracks are AI-generated, I'll start looking up individual producers and getting back to maintaining my own music collection in a harddrive and an MP3 player. Maybe I'll even buy a ticket and go to a concert, something I've only done once so far in my four decades and counting.

You may say that people just care about the music and not the musician, and that thus an AI-generated track is as good as any. Perhaps. But when I was a kid, all my pals developed their musical taste by word-of-mouth and I-want-to-be-cool-like-you-and-listen-to-Rammstein. Can't imagine all edgy teenagers will fall in love with an AI model.

MomsAVoxell2• 1 year ago

Disclaimer: I work in the pro audio industry and have decades of experience with this industry from the perspective of a developer of instruments, tools, and so on, specifically for creatives.

You see, I firmly believe that music, itself, is a form of currency.

So exchanging that currency for another is the problem.

However, I can say with a great deal of certainty - having observed musicians for decades - musicians make money when they make live music.

Not all music can be played live.

But live musicians are the future of music.

It’s one thing to be able to conjure up whatever you want with AI.

But, do it live, in front of 1000 people.

Or, even 10.

I can walk through my city today and encounter 100 (easily) musicians making money every hour, plying their wares into the stones of the streets and pedestrian bubbles.

But yeah, it’s hard work. Why not make an AI do it?

mettamage6• 1 year ago

What do you mean by: music, itself, is a form of currency?

I really am missing some context here.

ggm-at-algebras2• 1 year ago

Surely for most time, musicians have been working class. And precarious?

I'm not arguing in favour, I'm noting the deep historical social worth of a musician. It's classic veblen goods for a few, and serfdom for the rest.

Composers had ambiguous social standing. Virtuosi were superstars, but you didn't want your daughter to marry one.

What if the underlying relative value of music was returning to its organic roots? Maybe this is a version of the burger index and their labour value has been overweight for 50 or more years?

The cost in time and effort to become a musician is comparable to an apprenticeship or a surgeon. That cost isn't reflected in their value in the market.

micromacrofoot5• 1 year ago

surgery isn't an additive market though, we don't all have access to hundreds of thousands of surgeries for $10/mo

ggm-at-algebras2• 1 year ago

Surgeons also police membership, it's an old school guild. We could have many more sugeons, if the restrictive practices were changed. I don't think this answers your fundamental point btw, I think musician==surgeon is only analogous in the time to achieve mastery, the application of the skill diverges.

We did in some ways (cosmetic procedures) go to low cost rental models. They're terrible.

weatherlite3• 1 year ago

"The Death of the Middle-Class Musician"

* The Death of the Middle-Class

There I fixed their title

TimByte6• 1 year ago

The part that really stuck with me: how success in music now feels more like surviving a battle of attrition than "making it". The irony is brutal—more people are making music than ever, but fewer can live off it.

melvinroest2• 1 year ago

Well this is timely. I just started EDM production as a hobby 2 weeks ago! I did it a long while ago for a bit and it's time to rekindle the music flame. Well, I guess I've always been beatboxing but I'm never aware of that. My subconscious mind plays a lot of tricks on me when it comes to my musicality. My musicality is quite a subconscious thing actually. Well, not anymore!

I haven't read the article yet but I suspected as much that there is not much money in music, not even a livable wage. That's not why I'm doing it though. I have a few tracks in my mind since childhood (and a few more recent ones) that I want to get out. Also it's a fun thing to learn about marketing while I'm at it.

My point: I think that should be enough. Not everything we do has to make enough money.

It's finally time to put that perfect pitch and subconscious OCD style melody generation to use!

bitlax• 1 year ago

Isn't it clear that we just need a levels.fyi for rappers?

TrackerFF3• 1 year ago

We were discussing this on another musician forum.

It has been a double (triple, even) whammy for musicians, compared to mid 90s and back. There used to be a time where you could play in a band, not a huge signed one, and still make a living. Just off playing the door, on the regular bar / club circuit.

People went out much more back in the day. A regular weekday gig could bring you more money than a weekend gig does today. Unless you play in the most tourist-y hot spots, in the largest cities (think Nashville Broadway), you're not going to find places that play music all days. Not even 3-4 days a week. If you're lucky, it is going to be live music a couple of days, and almost only during weekends. Assuming you're paid $70 - $200 pr. gig, calculate how many gigs you need to play a year to not live in poverty.

Pay hasn't really changed much, either - for the musicians that play for a flat fee, that figure has been standing still for decades.

Almost every professional musician I know will have a battery of side hustles, these days. They will take every gig they can find, they will give lessons, they will do studio work, they will work as techs, become niche influencers, they will do whatever it takes.

But more often than not, they will have abandoned music as their main revenue stream, and rather pick up regular job that generates a steady paycheck, and gig during the weekends.

I can count on one hand the musicians / artists that have managed to make it "big", as in being C- or D-lister artists, and thus making a living off their recorded and touring music. They still spend equally much time on their social media, as that is what gets your name out. There is an immense pressure to play the algorithm, because that could make your tune blow up and become viral.

In fact, that is often how musicians become "famous" these days. Suddenly their tune becomes viral in tiktok vids, and that's how they manage to get millions of listeners...doesn't actually pay much, but it puts a big spotlight on your name.

triknomeister• 1 year ago

Middle class musician has been a recent phenomena that probably started in 1800s and is now going away again.

ZoomZoomZoom2• 1 year ago

To be blunt, the numbers show that the main problem is the listener. Most just do not care to choose so they consume what they're told is cool. If you think you care but consistently listen to artists present in Spotify's top 100 by choice, sorry, you're part of the problem too. Most being passive consumers has always been the case, but the system perfects itself with time and less and less attention trickles down.

Notice, how I used "attention" and not "money" or even "listens". Just look at the first and the main goalpost independent artist set for themselves. It's no longer "buy our music" or "come to our show", by now they strive to convince the audience to attempt to listen to their songs.

By this time I consider an artist that's only present in streaming services and lacks a visible way of direct distribution of their music (which includes such services as Bandcamp, for now) either an utterly mismanaged one or, again, a part of the problem†.

The only way for the artist to feel appreciated is building their loyal fan base, but if you don't want to wear the "entertainer" hat (which now equals becoming a circus monkey for the trending social media) this becomes harder and harder for a bunch of reasons:

1. Music is just not as culturally important as it was 50 years ago. 2. Live shows are in decline and dominated by cover/tribute acts. 3. As correctly mentioned in TFA, you're fighting with everything else plus everything that came before you. 4. The world is closing. Visas have always been a curse‡, but nowadays even if I jump through a myriad of hoops and get one, I can't even cross the border to the countries we usually started the tours from in a previous life. 5. The internet feels like a collapsing space too, though it's probably the most controversial opinion of mine.

There's also a problem of NNGC. At least the previous boom (blockchain) promised to make things better in some way (and it did, but underdelivered tenfold), but the current one ("AI") doesn't even do that — there's not even a positive scenario how the life of a common artist becomes better, unless "post-scarcity" truly happens (it won't).

---

†: To clarify, this is about modern artists, things are a bit different when we speak about "legacy" acts that jump started their careers in a different era.

‡: Even though in case of EU most artists entering didn't care and used their tourist visas because they did not make any money anyway.

giantg210• 1 year ago

I'm disappointed - this article is very short sighted. Everything in it is about recording and making money from concerts and stuff. It's all modern. When was the time of the middle class musician? What was the distribution of musicians as a primary job vs all jobs?

Throughout history it seems that there has always been an imbalance of musicians that make good money and those that don't. It seems that most musicians did it for free as part of a community/spiritual ceremony, or did it as a part time thing.

The modern issues are related to the technological advancements. The true cause of issue the article talks about is right in the beginning of it - music has never been easier to make and record. Supply and demand?

Tade0• 1 year ago

In my region of the world an artist of any kind would fall into one of two groups:

-Poor and malnourished member of the common folk.

-Part of the elites, who is set for life anyway and creates art thanks to the ample spare time they have.

I used to be in a band and one major point of contention in our group was whether we could make a living out of this. My opinion was that no, we couldn't.

I have a friend who enjoys moderate success with his band - they're doing historical reconstruction so they're invited to events in the space and, of course, paid. He keeps his day job though. Truth be told in the historical reconstruction field only smiths and tailors can pull off this being their main thing and it's not a given.

mft_• 1 year ago

Time and time again, stories on totally different topics hinge on: during or just after the pandemic, there was a major change in cost of doing just about everything. Now of course, the pandemic was A. Big. Thing. and there was also an overlaid global supply-chain disruption when the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal in '21.

But: fundamentally, why did all of this happen, and why haven't prices normalised (i.e. dropped) since?

Does anyone have a hypothesis, beyond 'corporate gouging', which I can accept, but seems too simplistic to explain what seems to be an enduring global phenomenon?

osigurdson22• 1 year ago

> But: fundamentally, why did all of this happen, and why haven't prices normalised (i.e. dropped) since?

Because governments printed an enormous amount of money during the pandemic. Money is worth far less that it was pre-pandemic, so prices are higher.

3PS• 1 year ago

For prices specifically I think it's fair to say that inflation only goes in one direction, but for larger market trends, IMO the key here is _habit building_.

Many things were technically feasible pre-pandemic but not done habitually: remote work, streaming movies instead of going to the theater, ordering delivery instead of dining out, and so on. The pandemic forced many people to change their habits and get over any initial inertia (e.g. investing in a WFH setup or home theater). The result is that when the world returned to normal, the markets didn't: consumer habits had already moved on.

osigurdson22• 1 year ago

I had a look at this artists YouTube page. Clearly he is just not very popular despite winning some awards, having various CBC interviews, being endorsed by the city of Edmonton and playing for Justin Trudeau.

As has always been the case with music, success is extremely rare. For every winner, there are a million losers. So, better to think of it more like a lottery than a normal industry / job.

bethekidyouwant3• 1 year ago

His success can be attributed to Canadian content law all the prizes he won, and whatever are government funded

almosthere• 1 year ago

Well, I guess I was right... Ill be listening to 80s and 90s music for the rest of my life.

nine_k2• 1 year ago

Many skilled but repetitive jobs became automated away. From middle-class weavers (1760s) to middle-class car assembly workers (1970s) to middle-class journalists (eroding since 2000s) to middle-class software developers (happening now, alas).

All these professions did not disappear. They have transformed though more to tending and overseeing machines, at an income level below middle class, with a much smaller number of highly-skilled professionals doing the exceptional things which machines don't do too well.

When the technology is good enough for a one person to record an entire album, it's hard to be a specialist musician, like a violinist in an orchestra, or even a guitarist in a band

I suppose the skilled professions that will resist machine replacement for longest time are these which require a lot of custom work and adjusting to unique local circumstances: electricians, plumbers, car mechanics, doctors, hairdressers, maybe construction workers. But they will likely handle mostly special cases, where standard, machine-friendly solutions don't fit well, a bit like modern tailors.

alsetmusic• 1 year ago

In a discussion about the outstandingly high cost of concert tickets, I had a breakthrough moment just on Friday (today is Sunday where I am). Artists no longer make a living selling recorded music because of streaming platforms. They now make their living performing, hence exceedingly expensive concert tickets.

I used to go to shows that cost $30-80. Now they are hundreds and the biggest artists may cost >$1k. I'm lucky that I make a good living, cause I wouldn't be able to go to most shows otherwise.

philjohn• 1 year ago

Ah, the music industry.

I know of one songwriter with multiple number 1 hits that was with a large american label for a while ... then moved to another, and the original label kept collecting the royalties when they were no longer contractually allowed to.

Their answer: "So sue us, it'll cost more than you'll get, we can drag this on for years, and you can't get costs awarded, so if we were you we'd just eat the L".

alldayhaterdude• 1 year ago

They been dead

eweise• 1 year ago

Part of the problem is that the barrier to entry is really low now. In the old days, you had to be relatively talented on your instrument, hone your skills for years playing clubs to gather an audience, and then a record label would finally give you a contract. Now you can download Logic and it will generate most of the music. You just sing along, autotune your vocals and you've got a tune that can be uploaded to Spotify, Apple Music, etc. I just saw MonoNeon in concert. His albums are mediocre but I'm guessing he's making an ok living because he's extremely talented on bass. The place was sold out.

rpmisms• 1 year ago

Patronage should return. That is all.

tehjoker3• 1 year ago

ctrl-f "dole" not found, but the musical explosion from GB in the 60s was in part due to generous welfare

timbit42• 1 year ago

This article is Canadian where 'dole' is not a word. I only know what it means due to THHGTTG.

tehjoker3• 1 year ago

I'm American, the reason I used the word "dole" is because that's what it was called in the UK at the time.

samiv2• 1 year ago

I expect the "death of the middle class" musician to be part of the same phenomenon that is sweeping through all our western societies.

The hollowing out of the middle class, wealth distribution producing more unequal societies where few people amass wealth and more of the (previously just working class but now more and more of the middle class) are pushed out a lower rung of the income/wealth bracket and ultimately completely displaced.

Fundamentally in a healthy economy the money is the blood that circulates around. If you create an economy where most of the wealth is held up by few rich individuals who then use the wealth to buy more assets and produce more wealth it means that other less well off people will get displaced in the society and that means that they will also not be able to afford to participate in the society to buy goods and services simply because they have no financial means to do so.

And to those who immediately go "but the economy isn't zero sum game", yes that's correct. But when the real economy is growing at 1-2% rate and the musks and bezos and other wealthy individuals are growing their wealth at +20% per year that means it effectively is a zero sum game and some people's slice of the pie is ever growing at the cost of everyone else.

But then people say "but the rich people invest". Yes but how much of that is actually active investment in new businesses and how much of that is just investing in asset portfolios, property and other financial instruments?

Also to grow more businesses and start new businesses you need an individual who has financial means to take risk, has an idea, stomach for risk and determination and drive to start business. Many people do not have that.

For the economy to grow new businesses which one is better? 1 person with $1m and 9 with $0 or 10 ppl with 100k each? What are the chances and probabilities in each scenario that the person who has the qualities to start a new business is capable of doing so?

If you want to see the future (especially relevant for US and UK since they're furthest along the way) just look at the economy of Nigeria or India for example. Few rich people, tiny middle class and large swathes of people in poverty.

scoofy• 1 year ago

After invention of the electric bulb.

It’s easier than ever to light lamps, and harder than ever to make a living from it

Lamplighter used to be a job. Now it’s not.

The point of anything becoming trivially scalable for most people is that it suddenly stops being profitable.

My favorite years in Austin for music were between 2007-2010. You could always see a band who were making music for fun, free drinks and girls, not to be famous. You can see a gig every day or so for $10 or $20. Just people doing it to make a few bucks and for fun.

Then I moved to NYC. Every venue was "who are you here to see" bands had to make relationships with venues to make them money. Everything was about the industry and getting famous. None of it was about having a good time. I hated every minute of it.

When you can listen to any artist from around the world in your earbuds all the time, most people won't be able to make a living from it. Still, you'll be able to go to a honky tonk in Austin on the weekends for $20, because there will always be folks making and performing live music, not for the money, but because it's fun.

maxglute• 1 year ago

Even cost of hobby aside (art supply cost already killed middle class visual artists dead), stuff like suno is making mass dabbling and production of competent sounding music a commodity.

mystified50162• 1 year ago

It's wild watching other Americans trying to carefully avoid acknowledging the absurdity of "get a job and submit to capitalism or die".

Admitting that there might be another way and that it might be much better would be admitting the unthinkable cruelty of the status quo.

gverrilla• 1 year ago

all art will suffocate until artists unite and supercede capitalism.

The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

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