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Comment by winternett | Hacker News Reader

As someone who runs a music label, ans has been doing this since 1999, it's not worth it to invest heavily into music. The people that make money in the industry, aren't the people that play the instruments.

It's a long gone dream of just making music that has turned into payola, social media corruption, fake audiences, and negative things like drug abuse, lip syncing, fraud, suicide and ghost writers. Don't wish it on your kids, there are countless kid stars that succumb to this toxic industry like Britney Spears, Aaron Carter, and Michael Jackson. For the rest, there's working at guitar center and ripping off others with overpriced music equipment to grant you a health-care-less descent into oblivion as a broke ex musician.

The players that give up may well be saving their own life, if not for a ton of frustration and false hope.

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You don't have to be a career rockstar to get personal satisfaction and enjoyment from playing instruments for yourself or with friends. When people quit as a child its really sad, because they deny themselves an opportunity for a lifelong hobby. Picking up the guitar again after I quit as a kid was the best thing I could do, but I still kick myself for not sticking through it all the years and all the potential experience I wasted playing tf2 instead.

I really hated to sound so grim... I've had some great experiences and I still do, nothing beats playing your music for crowds of people... The money is the problem. If you as a musician don't make it, there are others making it off of you. Scams are reampant. I just got an email from a fake Instagram account posing as a real journalist asking me for money for a feature in a big magazine...

To tell you the truth it's utterly depressing to be a musician with integrity after seeing the deep levels of corruption, usury, and depravity that happen in this industry... The wots part, is that tons of the people that act like they are rich are actually fat from it, and many people simply lie about success or buy it (trust fund babies).

Music is a great hobby and a terrible career.

I love playing mandolin, and i'm taking up fiddle now. Someday I hope to learn piano. It's is all in good fun.

My day job is programming. I'm lucky that I enjoy it as well, but there is only so much time I can write code in a day, and that is less than 8 hours (i'm glad for meetings for this reason, they prevent burn out) I get paid well for it.

  And bluGill doesn't mind, if he doesn't make the scene.
  He's got a daytime job, he's doing alright.

I think the equation changed recently. Many more gigs, because so less people are playing an instrument to a certain level nowadays. Here in Hamburg Germany (with a population of 1.8m) there are maybe like two good pianists. It's actually relatively easy to earn money with music through concerts nowadays.

I don't know what the situation is like in Germany, but here in the US there are far more people who are good at music than there are jobs. There are a lot more than 2 great Pianists in Des Moines (population 700k). I'm pretty sure just out local universities' piano professors account for more than two, plus their students are presumably great in their own right (I have not checked to see what they have) I have to believe Hamburg has some form of university with great professors.

Okay, there are some great pianists. But not many that can organize a show. It was a bit tongue in cheek, but so many are feeling entitled and have no business skills.

Agree. Avicii was also a rather high-profile case:

"When he stopped touring, he wanted to find a balance in life to be able to be happy and to do what he loved most – music. He really struggled with thoughts about Meaning, Life, Happiness. He could now not go on any longer. He wanted to find peace. Tim was not made for the business machine he found himself in"

"His manager, Arash Pournouri, admitted that he knew of Bergling's anxieties but refused to label them a problem of mental health"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicii#Death

The more I practice, the more enjoyment I get out of playing. TBH, it never occurred to me to seek financial gain from it.

Are you a kid, though?

Not anymore, but I did practice when I was. I know not everyone is wired the same way. I sympathize with kids that are pushed when they’re not into it.

I love playing but the idea of financial gain from it is laughable. I get lots of other benefits, though.

I imagine, like most other creative arts (e.g., programming), first you have to really want to do it, then that makes you learn how to do it, and if you wind up learning to do it well you may be able to make money at it. Maybe.

Same. I've played guitar for 22 years (mainly steel string acoustic), but last year started learning classical and I cannot get enough of it, even though I'm pretty shit at it. It's so much fun to learn, even though no one will ever hear it.

It depends on what genre you're going in to as well. Classical and jazz musicians usually have a very different experience than what you describe.

Although there's one thing in common among them all -- it's difficult to make good money.

They may not get as rich as pop stars -but they suffer lots of substance abuse (though many themselves likely think they are enjoying the substance abuse).

Meh, the vast majority of classical or jazz musicians don't have any time to take drugs -- because they have day jobs.

Heroin, in particular, seems to get a lot of jazz musicians.

There is a reason why most musicians will tell you to stay far away from heroin even if they are quite the partakers of almost everything else.

I've been a performing jazz musician for 40+ years. I've never heard of or observed heroin use, never been offered it. I doubt that jazz musicians are more or less likely to partake, than the population in general. Alcohol is a big problem.

I would suppose that the top-tier symphonies pay pretty well -- but making the cut there is probably the equivalent of a basketball player making the NBA.

I did the math once years ago -- If I recall the results correctly, top-tier symphony job sits between the NBA and NFL in terms of selectivity.

Are session musicians still a thing?

I would guess that the way music is recorded and produced now, session musicians are much less in demand, but I really don't know. Just seems that the ability to sit down and sight read a part and play it perfectly through in one or two takes is not really needed anymore, when songs are pieced together almost note by note in a computer/DAW.

"Before Pro Tools, there were pros"

Session musicians make sample CDs now mostly I would imagine. Sample services like splice have kind of gutted the worth of sample CDs, so that complicates life for session artists a lot I imagine.

Session playing is one of the better career paths in music performance, such as it is, because it rewards being a highly-skilled technician. Producers can do marvelous things in a DAW, but it's all sampling. If they want a live part and they want to sound like it, bringing in a player for an hour can be more cost-effective.

The problem is that you need superstar skills to pass the threshold of actually getting those gigs - you have to show up and just be able to nail things on the first take, and even improvise your part if asked.

If you aren't fussy about sound quality, then it's not really important how the part is played, but that's also why music has such a crisis as an economic activity; sequenced and prerecorded substitutes for live performance aren't timbrally the same, but they let you communicate all the structural information of the music. In a sense, it's like we replaced listening with reading, and that's a problem when so much of music is relatively similar.

Yes they are absolutely still a thing.

Albeit the amount of work available has been in decline for decades and it's now a fraction of what it used to be, but there's still enough work to keep a core of the very best working almost full time in the remaining major recording studios (here in London at least).

I think you'd be surprised at how much music is still produced by composing, arranging for and recording real musicians. But London is still one of the best places on the planet to get that kind of work done so it's an admittedly skewed experience.

Oh, and there's more than just session musicians who need to sight read perfectly first time - that's just table-stakes for professional commercial musicians in my experience (source: am professional-level jazz trombonist).

You can choose to work outside the industry.

I left the industry in 2013. I saw some of that toxicity and bleak future that you described.

This year I am starting to get back into a music side career, treating it like a bootstrapped startup. Using email marketing funnels to sell digital or CD, being cautious about investing into it. Haven’t proven it out yet, but I think I will enjoy trying.

If anything, it’s a good excuse to learn digital marketing, which would come in handy if I want to try selling anything else online.

Life as a musician is fun if you have cashflow from other sources or savings that pad you well from harsh life... It's a great way to kill time. When people cite corruption though, they're talking about the tolls on people who don't operate off of a safety net. It's important to keep the perspectives distinct. Most people don't have the luxury of being able to fail at something they work hard on, this is why I feel it's supremely important to be honest about music background and experience, which many artists aren't.

The majority of "successful" musicians in public life right now had industry connected family members, or prior wealth as an assist to their current career. Upward mobility (financially) without cash and connections is severely limited in today's music industry, as well as in many other professions like acting etc...

That’s what I learned too…

Working in the music industry shattered a lot of the glamorous illusions. I also learned that from peers who were chewed up and spit out by the major label machines.

For those 7 years, I was constantly broke, and being taken advantage of by people in the industry with more leverage.

Then I met someone in the office that thought it was crazy that I had a music career before I became a programmer. But it’s the same reason they’re in the office too! It’s really hard, and even if you have that special “it” factor, it can require more runway than most people are willing to give to get there.

> The people that make money in the industry, aren't the people that play the instruments.

I've got to say I'm legitimately shocked that anyone still thinks this. I can absolutely state 100% of my friends who play instruments don't do it for the money. Granted none of them are signed, but the point of music is not to get signed.

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