While it's not necessarily a solid plan, if your music attained popularity, it's not unreasonable to think it will be played regularly in sixty years.

Here in Denver (2M population in the larger metro area) there are at least:

- One AM swing/standards station (Benny Goodman etc) playing music from the thirties to the sixties.

- Two FM oldies stations, one of which is also AM, playing music from the fifties to the seventies.

- Two primarily classic rock FM stations and one progressive station that sits partly in their Venn diagram, playing music from the sixties to the eighties.

- A public FM station that plays folk/bluegrass/world, back to the thirties.

That's not to say that the retirement plan is any more solid than an NBA career, but the music itself, if it once had traction, will likely be played for a long time.

I remember listening to a documentary which interviewed the second tier of jazz, swing, and big-band musicians from the 1940's and 1950's. Along came the 1960's and rock and pop and they were sore out of luck. The top tier could still scrap a living, but not the rest.

Isn't that narrowing down, to a few super-stars who stand the test of time, quite typical? There must be lots of rock musicians from the 1970's who I cannot now remember and will never bother to listen to.

Musicians need to put some of their current income into a pension plan. They cannot expect to get royalties when they are old, whatever the duration of copyright.