My aspirations to become a rock musician peaked right after I graduated high school in the US (2006). It was sort of the beginning of music-streaming being chea

My aspirations to become a rock musician peaked right after I graduated high school in the US (2006). It was sort of the beginning of music-streaming being cheap and possible for small artists. I decided to join a local singer-songwriter's band (self-titled) as a lead guitarist and backup singer. It was a huge wake-up call for me who had spent my youth idolizing musicians as to just how much work and hustle everything was. The music was just barely passable as mid-tier singer-songwriter John Mayer wannabe rock, but the hustle the leader had was insane. With all of that work we managed to have 40k MySpace followers (some had to be bots), 100k streams on PureVolume, and a decent number of CD sales, at least to my mind (in the several hundreds). But the barrier was no longer whether or not an artist could get to a studio or a record deal, the barrier now is the noise of the internet.