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And it's true. Recoded music ravaged the ranks of movie organists and other accompanists to the point that providing incidental music has not been an occupation

And it's true. Recoded music ravaged the ranks of movie organists and other accompanists to the point that providing incidental music has not been an occupation in many decades. In more recent decades, being a session musician for regional or mid-tier bands has stopped providing a living, following the huge consolidation in radio and music publishing in the 90s and 00s. There is far less live music today, at least in the US, than there has ever been in my lifetime.

jnovek 4y ago
“There is far less live music today” Subjectively it doesn’t feel like less than when I was in high school and college (late 90s early 2000s), it feels like substantially more. Especially as pandemic precautions have wound down, I can’t seem to walk into a bar without running into a live band. I think there’s quite a bit more studio music coming out, too, as people can self-release on Spotify, etc.
- GCA10 4y ago
  We've probably made it easier for people to have "half a career" in music -- getting paid a modest amount of money on weekends, evenings, etc. to do what they love. In my own circle, I've got friends who earn $5,000 to $30,000 a year playing live music -- and then round out their earnings doing some amount of teaching, bookkeeping or whatever. Ditto for actors, writers, semi-pro athletes, etc. The more I think about these tradeoffs, the harder it is to see them as unilaterally good or evil. It's a second-best solution for dealing with the gap between what people love to do, and what pays the bills. Not sure if there is a first-best solution. Some countries have created "artists' cartels," which provide subsidized higher incomes for people in the club. That does make it easier to make a living as an approved artist. But the jockeying about who gets into the club, who pays the subsidies and what it takes to stay in -- argh! it all gets really protracted and ugly.
  - jakelazaroff 4y ago
    It’s not a silver bullet, but an expanded social safety net would make it significantly less risky to pursue art (or open source software or whatever) as more than just a “nights and weekends” thing.
    - robocat 4y ago
      > an expanded social safety net would make it significantly less risky to pursue art Paraphrased: workers should be taxed so that we can 100% subsidise some other people’s dreams. Fuck that. I accept our society should subsidise some: art (I do like the BBC, especially so because I don’t pay for it), or music (I like CreativeNZ videos), or sports, or hobbies (HAM radio spectrum), or open source (yayyy), or even subsidise sitting around doing nothing (society should not demand all our time just for us to survive). But the idea that society should subsidise everyone to follow their dreams is simply unworkable. And if you want to start ranking which dreams are worthwhile, well, society ends up with systems such as we already have.
      - kiba 4y ago
        Some of our greatest scientific achievement come from aristocratic or independently wealthy folks who don't need to earn a living. So I wouldn't knock these subsidies. I think we could rearrange society to provide such subsidies on a sustainable basis if we choose to.
      - jakelazaroff 4y ago
        That’s not an accurate paraphrasing; many social programs actually cost less than the alternative. Sounds like you live in the UK, so maybe you take the NHS for granted. It would be a vast improvement from what we have in the US, where we have amongst the most expensive health care system in the world with far from the best outcomes. Group insurance is generally negotiated by employers; access to affordable healthcare is a huge obstacle to pursuing anything other than a traditional job. Even loftier goals like ending homelessness don’t turn out to require the financial tradeoffs you’re talking about. Study after study, we’ve seen that simply giving people homes is costs less than shelters, police raids and a Kafkaesque system of requirements to prevent people who Don’t Deserve Help from getting it. Consider that US workers are taxed in order to subsidize the dreams of the second wealthiest man in the world, for not one but two of his businesses. Would SpaceX or Tesla have succeeded without government handouts? We’re never asked to question that, but as soon as we suggest that people be able to make art without worrying about medical bankruptcy or homelessness, people start looking at the balance sheet with a magnifying glass.
  - cik2e 4y ago
    Probably, UBI is the best first solution. In the sense that it acts as a collective bargaining system for all citizens who are forced to trade their time for income.
  - harimau777 4y ago
    This is of course not scientific, but my observation has been just the opposite. It seems like in the past it was possible to be an artist who supported themselves working 9 to 5 as a waiter. I don't see how that would be possible with the skyrocketing cost of living even before the inflation spike. Lots of people have multiple jobs just to make ends meet.
    - asdff 4y ago
      Some popular artists over the years have funded their initial studio time with some ill gotten gains.
  - analog31 4y ago
    I'm one of those musicians, though my day job as a scientist has produced an ever increasing share of my income. I'm a double bassist, and I play mostly jazz. Even full time musicians need multiple income streams. Teaching classical music to children is not a half bad occupation, but you have to enjoy it and live in a fairly affluent town. A violin teacher makes more per hour than I make playing gigs. There are things that you can't do if you're not full time, such as traveling to perform. I'm pretty much limited to a 40 mile radius around my home. Recording is possible of course, but I don't do it. It's not something that I really enjoy, and it's not easy or free even with modern tools. And getting paid for it is difficult. The musicians I know who actually make money from their recordings, sell CD's at their performances. I think part of the situation with music is that we face competition from non musical forms of entertainment, that are extremely sophisticated. Perhaps at the top of the food chain is televised sports. It's very hard to put together a musical performance that's as exciting or entertaining as a major league sports broadcast. What live musicians depend on is the audience that's actually interested in the experience of live music per se. And it's no longer the music of their youth. The jazz era is 100 years old. The majority of the jazz audience grew up listening to rock 'n' roll.
mjr00 4y ago
> Recoded music ravaged the ranks of movie organists and other accompanists to the point that providing incidental music has not been an occupation in many decades. In more recent decades, being a session musician for regional or mid-tier bands has stopped providing a living, following the huge consolidation in radio and music publishing in the 90s and 00s. And yet it's never been easier for a musician to share their music on Soundcloud, use Bandcamp for album sales, put their music on Spotify/Beatport/etc and collect streaming royalties, and set up a Patreon to get recurring revenue from fans. Musicians who refuse to adapt won't succeed, and those who do thrive. Would you feel bad for a software developer who learned Visual FoxPro in the 90s, refused to learn any new tools, then complained that their occupation was no longer relevant? > There is far less live music today, at least in the US, than there has ever been in my lifetime. Is there any data to support this? I would be shocked if this were true outside of the COVID years. There's certainly more music readily available to people now than at any point in history.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > And yet it's never been easier for a musician to share their music on Soundcloud, use Bandcamp for album sales, put their music on Spotify/Beatport/etc and collect streaming royalties, and set up a Patreon to get recurring revenue from fans. This just means that it is far more complex to be far less likely to make a living.
- fooooobarbaz 4y ago
  > And yet it's never been easier for a musician to share their music on Soundcloud, use Bandcamp for album sales, put their music on Spotify/Beatport/etc and collect streaming royalties, and set up a Patreon to get recurring revenue from fans. People love to say stuff like this, but having gone through that grind myself, it's not nearly as easy or accessible as you describe. These platforms also make it easier than ever for artists to face things like copyright strikes and takedowns, which people are more than happy to abuse. Additionally, streaming royalties pay peanuts for the vast, vast majority of artists and they get to determine how artists are paid based on calculations they determine. For example, Spotify pays artists by calculating their "stream-share", not a fixed amount per stream.[0] Sure, it's easier to platform your music, but that doesn't necessarily make it any easier to generate meaningful income, particularly when you need the service to be priced as cheaply as possible in order to get reach. In the long run, I think this is going to further incentivize entertainment that is created passively and augmented by things like AI, which I'm personally not that excited about. 0: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2022/10/22/how-much-per-spotify-stream/8094437001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2022/10/22/how-much-per-...
lachlan_gray 4y ago
It’s true that it’s possible to reach a wider audience than was every possible, but now a handful of musicians take up all of the listening time. My parents are both blue collar musicians and use to make good money. before recorded music was as popular as it is now, being a musician was a viable career path because anytime anyone wanted music at the wedding or the holiday party, or any party really, there needed to be a band. Now it’s more common to hire a DJ or just make a Spotify playlist and hear recordings of the tiny minority of top musicians.
int_19h 4y ago
But, conversely, how many more people got easy access to music in form of "canned music", where previously they had none at all because they couldn't afford to regularly hire live players?
IAmGraydon 4y ago
>There is far less live music today, at least in the US, than there has ever been in my lifetime. Objectively, this is a complete fabrication (barring Covid). https://www.statista.com/statistics/306065/concert-ticket-sales-revenue-in-north-america/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/306065/concert-ticket-sa...
- Retric 4y ago
  Concert ticket sales represents a tiny slice of the total number of paid musicians. A band playing at bars and bar mitzvah’s are just as much live music as someone playing in front of 50,000 fans at a major venue.
- wutbrodo 4y ago
  Is this sufficient to call it a "complete fabrication"? Climbing concert revenue is plausibly consistent with a disappearance of lower-overhead non-ticketed live music, like at a bar. In fact, those two are very compatible with each other: where I live now, it 's harder to see live music casually, so my bar for whether I want to go to a ticketed concert is lower.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  I would bet that increase in revenue has much more to do with the skyrocketing ticket prices than actual attendance. For example, U2 ticket prices have gone from $17 in 1985 to around $130 today. That's way more than can be accounted for by inflation (if inflation alone were responsible, you'd expect ticket prices around $44). https://gametime.co/blog/how-u2-concert-ticket-prices-have-changed-along-the-years https://gametime.co/blog/how-u2-concert-ticket-prices-have-c... I know I rarely go nowadays, and that's entirely due to the outrageous ticket prices.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    Personally, there’s just rarely any shows I want to go to. A large majority of stuff seem to be cover bands, or just something I’m not that much a fan of. Venues have also been falling off, I know at least one local place I’ve been to hear had to shut down because of covid. And then, at the last show I went to, they charged you for goddamn cups of water at the bar.
peterkelly 4y ago
You could make the same argument for the the organists themselves though - theatre organs were designed to take the place of an entire orchestra, needing only one musician instead of 30.
mathlover2 4y ago
> In more recent decades, being a session musician for regional or mid-tier bands has stopped providing a living, following the huge consolidation in radio and music publishing in the 90s and 00s. How is this a problem of recorded music being a thing rather than of mindless consolidation that has affected many, many industries since that time? This is like blaming recent consolidation among publishers on the invention of the printing press.

jnovek 4y ago

“There is far less live music today” Subjectively it doesn’t feel like less than when I was in high school and college (late 90s early 2000s), it feels like substantially more. Especially as pandemic precautions have wound down, I can’t seem to walk into a bar without running into a live band. I think there’s quite a bit more studio music coming out, too, as people can self-release on Spotify, etc.

GCA10 4y ago
We've probably made it easier for people to have "half a career" in music -- getting paid a modest amount of money on weekends, evenings, etc. to do what they love. In my own circle, I've got friends who earn $5,000 to $30,000 a year playing live music -- and then round out their earnings doing some amount of teaching, bookkeeping or whatever. Ditto for actors, writers, semi-pro athletes, etc. The more I think about these tradeoffs, the harder it is to see them as unilaterally good or evil. It's a second-best solution for dealing with the gap between what people love to do, and what pays the bills. Not sure if there is a first-best solution. Some countries have created "artists' cartels," which provide subsidized higher incomes for people in the club. That does make it easier to make a living as an approved artist. But the jockeying about who gets into the club, who pays the subsidies and what it takes to stay in -- argh! it all gets really protracted and ugly.
- jakelazaroff 4y ago
  It’s not a silver bullet, but an expanded social safety net would make it significantly less risky to pursue art (or open source software or whatever) as more than just a “nights and weekends” thing.
  - robocat 4y ago
    > an expanded social safety net would make it significantly less risky to pursue art Paraphrased: workers should be taxed so that we can 100% subsidise some other people’s dreams. Fuck that. I accept our society should subsidise some: art (I do like the BBC, especially so because I don’t pay for it), or music (I like CreativeNZ videos), or sports, or hobbies (HAM radio spectrum), or open source (yayyy), or even subsidise sitting around doing nothing (society should not demand all our time just for us to survive). But the idea that society should subsidise everyone to follow their dreams is simply unworkable. And if you want to start ranking which dreams are worthwhile, well, society ends up with systems such as we already have.
    - kiba 4y ago
      Some of our greatest scientific achievement come from aristocratic or independently wealthy folks who don't need to earn a living. So I wouldn't knock these subsidies. I think we could rearrange society to provide such subsidies on a sustainable basis if we choose to.
    - jakelazaroff 4y ago
      That’s not an accurate paraphrasing; many social programs actually cost less than the alternative. Sounds like you live in the UK, so maybe you take the NHS for granted. It would be a vast improvement from what we have in the US, where we have amongst the most expensive health care system in the world with far from the best outcomes. Group insurance is generally negotiated by employers; access to affordable healthcare is a huge obstacle to pursuing anything other than a traditional job. Even loftier goals like ending homelessness don’t turn out to require the financial tradeoffs you’re talking about. Study after study, we’ve seen that simply giving people homes is costs less than shelters, police raids and a Kafkaesque system of requirements to prevent people who Don’t Deserve Help from getting it. Consider that US workers are taxed in order to subsidize the dreams of the second wealthiest man in the world, for not one but two of his businesses. Would SpaceX or Tesla have succeeded without government handouts? We’re never asked to question that, but as soon as we suggest that people be able to make art without worrying about medical bankruptcy or homelessness, people start looking at the balance sheet with a magnifying glass.
- cik2e 4y ago
  Probably, UBI is the best first solution. In the sense that it acts as a collective bargaining system for all citizens who are forced to trade their time for income.
- harimau777 4y ago
  This is of course not scientific, but my observation has been just the opposite. It seems like in the past it was possible to be an artist who supported themselves working 9 to 5 as a waiter. I don't see how that would be possible with the skyrocketing cost of living even before the inflation spike. Lots of people have multiple jobs just to make ends meet.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Some popular artists over the years have funded their initial studio time with some ill gotten gains.
- analog31 4y ago
  I'm one of those musicians, though my day job as a scientist has produced an ever increasing share of my income. I'm a double bassist, and I play mostly jazz. Even full time musicians need multiple income streams. Teaching classical music to children is not a half bad occupation, but you have to enjoy it and live in a fairly affluent town. A violin teacher makes more per hour than I make playing gigs. There are things that you can't do if you're not full time, such as traveling to perform. I'm pretty much limited to a 40 mile radius around my home. Recording is possible of course, but I don't do it. It's not something that I really enjoy, and it's not easy or free even with modern tools. And getting paid for it is difficult. The musicians I know who actually make money from their recordings, sell CD's at their performances. I think part of the situation with music is that we face competition from non musical forms of entertainment, that are extremely sophisticated. Perhaps at the top of the food chain is televised sports. It's very hard to put together a musical performance that's as exciting or entertaining as a major league sports broadcast. What live musicians depend on is the audience that's actually interested in the experience of live music per se. And it's no longer the music of their youth. The jazz era is 100 years old. The majority of the jazz audience grew up listening to rock 'n' roll.

mjr00 4y ago

> Recoded music ravaged the ranks of movie organists and other accompanists to the point that providing incidental music has not been an occupation in many decades. In more recent decades, being a session musician for regional or mid-tier bands has stopped providing a living, following the huge consolidation in radio and music publishing in the 90s and 00s. And yet it's never been easier for a musician to share their music on Soundcloud, use Bandcamp for album sales, put their music on Spotify/Beatport/etc and collect streaming royalties, and set up a Patreon to get recurring revenue from fans. Musicians who refuse to adapt won't succeed, and those who do thrive. Would you feel bad for a software developer who learned Visual FoxPro in the 90s, refused to learn any new tools, then complained that their occupation was no longer relevant? > There is far less live music today, at least in the US, than there has ever been in my lifetime. Is there any data to support this? I would be shocked if this were true outside of the COVID years. There's certainly more music readily available to people now than at any point in history.

pessimizer 4y ago
> And yet it's never been easier for a musician to share their music on Soundcloud, use Bandcamp for album sales, put their music on Spotify/Beatport/etc and collect streaming royalties, and set up a Patreon to get recurring revenue from fans. This just means that it is far more complex to be far less likely to make a living.
fooooobarbaz 4y ago
> And yet it's never been easier for a musician to share their music on Soundcloud, use Bandcamp for album sales, put their music on Spotify/Beatport/etc and collect streaming royalties, and set up a Patreon to get recurring revenue from fans. People love to say stuff like this, but having gone through that grind myself, it's not nearly as easy or accessible as you describe. These platforms also make it easier than ever for artists to face things like copyright strikes and takedowns, which people are more than happy to abuse. Additionally, streaming royalties pay peanuts for the vast, vast majority of artists and they get to determine how artists are paid based on calculations they determine. For example, Spotify pays artists by calculating their "stream-share", not a fixed amount per stream.[0] Sure, it's easier to platform your music, but that doesn't necessarily make it any easier to generate meaningful income, particularly when you need the service to be priced as cheaply as possible in order to get reach. In the long run, I think this is going to further incentivize entertainment that is created passively and augmented by things like AI, which I'm personally not that excited about. 0: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2022/10/22/how-much-per-spotify-stream/8094437001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2022/10/22/how-much-per-...

lachlan_gray 4y ago

It’s true that it’s possible to reach a wider audience than was every possible, but now a handful of musicians take up all of the listening time. My parents are both blue collar musicians and use to make good money. before recorded music was as popular as it is now, being a musician was a viable career path because anytime anyone wanted music at the wedding or the holiday party, or any party really, there needed to be a band. Now it’s more common to hire a DJ or just make a Spotify playlist and hear recordings of the tiny minority of top musicians.

int_19h 4y ago

But, conversely, how many more people got easy access to music in form of "canned music", where previously they had none at all because they couldn't afford to regularly hire live players?

IAmGraydon 4y ago

>There is far less live music today, at least in the US, than there has ever been in my lifetime. Objectively, this is a complete fabrication (barring Covid). https://www.statista.com/statistics/306065/concert-ticket-sales-revenue-in-north-america/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/306065/concert-ticket-sa...

Retric 4y ago
Concert ticket sales represents a tiny slice of the total number of paid musicians. A band playing at bars and bar mitzvah’s are just as much live music as someone playing in front of 50,000 fans at a major venue.
wutbrodo 4y ago
Is this sufficient to call it a "complete fabrication"? Climbing concert revenue is plausibly consistent with a disappearance of lower-overhead non-ticketed live music, like at a bar. In fact, those two are very compatible with each other: where I live now, it 's harder to see live music casually, so my bar for whether I want to go to a ticketed concert is lower.
Turing_Machine 4y ago
I would bet that increase in revenue has much more to do with the skyrocketing ticket prices than actual attendance. For example, U2 ticket prices have gone from $17 in 1985 to around $130 today. That's way more than can be accounted for by inflation (if inflation alone were responsible, you'd expect ticket prices around $44). https://gametime.co/blog/how-u2-concert-ticket-prices-have-changed-along-the-years https://gametime.co/blog/how-u2-concert-ticket-prices-have-c... I know I rarely go nowadays, and that's entirely due to the outrageous ticket prices.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  Personally, there’s just rarely any shows I want to go to. A large majority of stuff seem to be cover bands, or just something I’m not that much a fan of. Venues have also been falling off, I know at least one local place I’ve been to hear had to shut down because of covid. And then, at the last show I went to, they charged you for goddamn cups of water at the bar.

peterkelly 4y ago

You could make the same argument for the the organists themselves though - theatre organs were designed to take the place of an entire orchestra, needing only one musician instead of 30.

mathlover2 4y ago

> In more recent decades, being a session musician for regional or mid-tier bands has stopped providing a living, following the huge consolidation in radio and music publishing in the 90s and 00s. How is this a problem of recorded music being a thing rather than of mindless consolidation that has affected many, many industries since that time? This is like blaming recent consolidation among publishers on the invention of the printing press.