The author's basic premise is false and his article is riddled with basic factual errors.
The vast majority of artists never made a significant proportion of their income from recorded music, due to the extremely shady accounting practices used by the industry to deprive artists of royalties. For detail on this, see Steve Albini's notorious essay The Problem With Music.
The internet has hugely undermined the value of recorded music, but it has greatly increased the marketability of live music, which is and always has been the most reliable source of income for musicians. If you've got a mailing list with a few thousand people who'll pay to see you perform, you've got a career. You don't need a record contract, you don't need a booking agent, you don't need radio airplay, you just need 40 or 50 towns with enough fans to sell out a small venue.
Prior to the internet, building that mailing list almost always involved a record deal, because there was no other way to reach the public; a few independent artists made it through 'zines and word-of-mouth and tenacious effort, but most didn't. If you didn't get on a radio playlist, nobody got to hear your music and nobody came to your shows. Today, the equation is completely different. There are a thousand different niche acts with absolutely no recognition among the general public, who nonetheless make a respectable living from touring because they can connect directly with fans.
I found it underwhelming that the author talks about "artists are no longer making a living making music" but provides no numbers. Do we have fewer professional musicians per capita? Do they make less on average/median/mode?
The closest he comes to evidence to support his thesis was the informal survey he gave his students about their perceptions about becoming a professional musician. Yet even here he fails to provide any evidence that this perception has changed relative to any of the other time periods he talks about. I don't think "professional musician" has ever been seen as a particularly valuable career path and has usually been a choice made based on love, rather than greed.
The closest he comes to an argument to explain his students' belief is not an argument about the money making potential of music given our current technology, but an argument about how there is too much competition.
Then he says this:
> And so what of the future? Since the death of Steve Jobs, Apple has not released any new platforms in the last five years. Are technological changes slowing down after 30 years of whirling change?
He ignores the two of the most important newer platforms for music: youtube and then later, spotify. Looking at the future without considering the effects of royalty paying platforms with complex recommendation engines completely misses the point about how high competition and new types of centralized discovery platforms will change the face of music. Overall, this is a poorly constructed article that reads like it is about 10 years out date, I actually scrolled up to check when it was published.
Yeah - /any/ "star" role has always been a risk that it is foolish to go for without a back up plan! That is simply the case of all winner takes most jobs. If you want to complain about low level viability being ruined you need to go back to before recording where getting rich was even rarer.
Not to mention the downright dishonest exclusion of song downloads while lamenting decline of CD sales.
Much of what you say is true, but then the live music scene is dominated by an oligopoly for ticket sales (Livenation & Ticketmaster) and for bookings (GoldenVoice). Commercial venues tend to sign contracts with these big players and that's killed off most local and regional booking agencies that used to set people up. It's better than it used to be in some respects, but also centralized and excessively driven by analytics.
The problem is that people took Steve Albini's legitimate criticisms of large end of the music industry and threw the baby out with the bathwater. It's far easier to launch a music act in some respects, but at the price of destroying a lot of economic infrastructure and favoring the lowest common denominator, eg things like 'Gucci gang'.
I sort of remembered that but then I told myself I was getting carried away on my anti-monopolistic rhetoric and exaggerating the issue, and it didn't seem important enough to pause and research the issue :)
hard to say, as i haven't dug into it at all. on the face of it, using their stronghold in venues/marketing (livenation) to get their way on ticketing (ticketmaster), or vice versa, seems like it would be ripe for abuse as well as regulatory scrutiny.
> it has greatly increased the marketability of live music
Yet that might be a blip. Some of my friends who used to be passionate concertgoers, now say there’s no reason to pay for a concert, deal with getting to the venue, etc. when bands are uploading full-length concerts in fine video and audio to YouTube. Also, since musical tastes have fragmented enormously due to the wider supply, people are less likely to share favourite bands with friends, and so you might not have anyone to go to concerts with you. Concerts used to have an attraction as a social outing, but if you’d have to attend alone, what’s the point?
Mind if I ask how old these friends are? This seems like more of a general age thing. I'm 26 and wouldn't even begin to compare watching a concert on Youtube to actually being there. I've watched Stop Making Sense 1,000 times but it would still be my first stop in a time machine.
The vast majority of artists never made a significant proportion of their income from recorded music, due to the extremely shady accounting practices used by the industry to deprive artists of royalties. For detail on this, see Steve Albini's notorious essay The Problem With Music.
https://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17
The internet has hugely undermined the value of recorded music, but it has greatly increased the marketability of live music, which is and always has been the most reliable source of income for musicians. If you've got a mailing list with a few thousand people who'll pay to see you perform, you've got a career. You don't need a record contract, you don't need a booking agent, you don't need radio airplay, you just need 40 or 50 towns with enough fans to sell out a small venue.
Prior to the internet, building that mailing list almost always involved a record deal, because there was no other way to reach the public; a few independent artists made it through 'zines and word-of-mouth and tenacious effort, but most didn't. If you didn't get on a radio playlist, nobody got to hear your music and nobody came to your shows. Today, the equation is completely different. There are a thousand different niche acts with absolutely no recognition among the general public, who nonetheless make a respectable living from touring because they can connect directly with fans.