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.

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

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I 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.

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?

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?

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.

Not really comparable experience though.

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.

John Philip Sousa had the right opinion on recorded music.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/01/writers-recall-time-dole-unemployment-benefits

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.

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.

80s entry level coder

90s team lead

00s manager

10s cto

20s cto with help from parents

Wage stagnation and inflation and asset inflation.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

Universal basic income is impossible to justify morally.

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.

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.)

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.

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 ~

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.