I also always think of a very important point that I saw concisely expressed in an interview with Daniel Miller, about fifteen years ago. (If you don't recognise the name, Miller founded Mute Records and signed Depeche Mode, and is an influential electronic musician in his own right). The journalist commented on the ever-increasing availability of inexpensive recording equipment and asked, "is making good music easier than ever?" Miller replied, "Yes. But making great music is as difficult as it ever was."
I think that was the quote I misquoted. I had heard it somewhere years ago backstage. Or maybe on a podcast. It resonated with me to the point where I remembered it (my way apparently) and put it in the old Rolodex.
It was never easy making a living as a musician. If you were really good, and at least a bit lucky, you could. The vast majority had to have other jobs.
I agree it's probably tougher today though. The fact that producing and recording is something anyone can do with a laptop just makes the S/N ratio even smaller. And a lot of the surrounding industry jobs have probably gone away too, since big physical mixing desks and multi-track tape machines and record cutting and pressing machines are no longer used nearly as much.
It's extremely easy to make a living from music right now. With a weekend's worth of YouTube training, any decent musician or songwriter should be able to invest 40hr/wk and reliably generate $5k/mo within a year.
That's a territory of 1M views per month (or more, not sure what's the pay/ad-tolerance on music videos). That's a slightly higher level of views than Postmodern Jukebox and Pomplamoose are at. Being able to pull that off easily is pretty optimistic...
Also "reliably" is optimistic given YouTube's issues with policy/copyright enforcement and channel restrictions. (I.e. do you want your 5k income to be dependent on a few sudden bogus claims you can't dispute?)
You're pretending that YouTube ads are how musicians make money, and that's just not the case. YouTube is one tiny piece of the marketing map -- not the revenue one.
Add Patreon + Merch sales. You know, where they interrupt the song to pitch stolen t-shirt designs on their shopify site. Yeah, if you're just making YT content w/ patreon support and stuff you might be able to crack $5k/mo if you're decent at music theory. That's a lot of hustle. Where-as you used to be able to record a master, work your shitty job for duplications, go tour clubs and spots selling t-shirts you designed and your album to your audience as well as on your online shop. Now, you can just sit in your bedroom, where a mask, start up twitch, and let AI generate beats while you look like you're DJ'ing.
You're absolutely correct. And it shows how out of touch Hacker News is that the people who understand the existing market get downvoted, while the people who claim "YouTube ads are the only way to make money" somehow get upvoted. What a sad state this site is in.
There aren't that many topics to learn. If you pick one music industry content creator, they will have around two days worth of videos that you can watch. If you do the things they say, you will make money. There's no magic to it.
Many thousands of live streaming musicians have had no trouble going from $0 to $5k/mo. You're welcome to check out Twitch or TikTok any time for evidence of this.
