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> I heard one answer more than any other: the government should introduce universal basic income. This would indeed afford artists the security to create art, but it’s also extremely fanciful.

Until we start viewing "fanciful" ideas as realistic, our problems will persist. This article is another in the long series of observations of seemingly distinct problems which are actually facets of a larger problem, namely that overall economic inequality is way too high. It's not just that musicians, or actors, or grocery store baggers, or taxi drivers, or whatever, can't make a living, it's that the set of things you can do to make a living is narrowing more and more. Broad-based solutions like basic income, wealth taxes, breaking up large market players, etc., will do far more for us than attempting piecemeal tweaks to this or that industry.

I played in a cover band with some well-paid engineers. We enjoyed music enough to consider going full time, but even with four-figure bookings were were barely taking home minimum wage. We looked into getting a manager to find us more high-paying gigs, but management fees and travel costs eat up the gains.

For a band, it's virtually impossible to find work outside the weekend. If a region had a few restaurants that were known for year round "live music Mondays", "live music lunches", etc, it would increase the number of hours that a musician could work during the week, and make full time performance viable for more musicians. Of course, people would also need to support these performances by patronizing the venues that host them.

But until a working musician can fill their weekday calendar with paying gigs without excessive travel/lodging costs, you'll continue to see talented musicians drop out and do something else.

I assumed the article would be about orchestral musicians (for whom there is a high, and increasing skill threshold) or session musicians (whose work is increasingly being replaced by computer synthesis). Instead, we get a very long narrative about a rapper who is still struggling to "make it" as a recording artist. In the era of sound recordings (which began well over a century ago) there is little incentive for the consumer to choose one with middling appeal over the most popular options. This makes the task of becoming a star, but on a small scale, a difficult one. Instead, a prospective "middle-class musician" must find a niche of some kind, perhaps by focusing on the local market. For example, a busker could potentially make more (than his cited $250k in recording revenue) over a period of 9 years with sufficient dedication.

Most musicians who can make it now are only middle class, with a handful of superstars and a huge legion of poor artists.

I’ve played many gigs for $20-100, which is once a month or week and tough work relative to typing some code from home. I played for 25 mins in front of 1000 people and spent 8+ hours total all-in to make 200 bucks. Way harder money than coding.

Really, think back through history. Musicians were needed for dance, parties, all occasions. Now hit play on your phone connected to a speaker, GG musicians.

How many financially self-sustaining musicians should there be? Streaming has caused the number to fall, but recorded music before that likely made it fall as well.

Should we stop thinking about music as a job and start thinking about it as a hobbyist art form? Nobody is out there lamenting that you can’t make a living off of landscape painting. It’s a fun form of self expression that people will do regardless of the economics, so maybe the problem was ever thinking you could make a profession out of it?

What has been developing for awhile is that musicians are coming from richer backgrounds on average. They can dally around trying their hand as a working musician and can fail and not be destitute. The age of a working class or lower class musician is waining.

I left a career in music production five years ago and moved into programming (data science). there's no turning back.

I was very aware that I was lucky. You can be the best, you can have a great network, but (in my experience), luck is the main factor. and the "luck" window in the music space is more and more narrow currently.

Surely for most time, musicians have been working class. And precarious?

I'm not arguing in favour, I'm noting the deep historical social worth of a musician. It's classic veblen goods for a few, and serfdom for the rest.

Composers had ambiguous social standing. Virtuosi were superstars, but you didn't want your daughter to marry one.

What if the underlying relative value of music was returning to its organic roots? Maybe this is a version of the burger index and their labour value has been overweight for 50 or more years?

The cost in time and effort to become a musician is comparable to an apprenticeship or a surgeon. That cost isn't reflected in their value in the market.

This feel like it's related to the problem of no more mid-budget movies. Now that physical media (CD/VHS/DVD) isn't a thing, there is no long tail of fans to sustain mid-market efforts. Movies that cost a few tens of millions usually didn't make their budget back in the theater -- it was VHS and DVD sales that made up the difference. But now that doesn't happen, so those movies either don't get made, or they're made by the streamers.

Same thing with music. Streaming pays so little compared to physical media now that artists never make up the difference.

We were discussing this on another musician forum.

It has been a double (triple, even) whammy for musicians, compared to mid 90s and back. There used to be a time where you could play in a band, not a huge signed one, and still make a living. Just off playing the door, on the regular bar / club circuit.

People went out much more back in the day. A regular weekday gig could bring you more money than a weekend gig does today. Unless you play in the most tourist-y hot spots, in the largest cities (think Nashville Broadway), you're not going to find places that play music all days. Not even 3-4 days a week. If you're lucky, it is going to be live music a couple of days, and almost only during weekends. Assuming you're paid $70 - $200 pr. gig, calculate how many gigs you need to play a year to not live in poverty.

Pay hasn't really changed much, either - for the musicians that play for a flat fee, that figure has been standing still for decades.

Almost every professional musician I know will have a battery of side hustles, these days. They will take every gig they can find, they will give lessons, they will do studio work, they will work as techs, become niche influencers, they will do whatever it takes.

But more often than not, they will have abandoned music as their main revenue stream, and rather pick up regular job that generates a steady paycheck, and gig during the weekends.

I can count on one hand the musicians / artists that have managed to make it "big", as in being C- or D-lister artists, and thus making a living off their recorded and touring music. They still spend equally much time on their social media, as that is what gets your name out. There is an immense pressure to play the algorithm, because that could make your tune blow up and become viral.

In fact, that is often how musicians become "famous" these days. Suddenly their tune becomes viral in tiktok vids, and that's how they manage to get millions of listeners...doesn't actually pay much, but it puts a big spotlight on your name.

After invention of the electric bulb.

>It’s easier than ever to light lamps, and harder than ever to make a living from it

Lamplighter used to be a job. Now it’s not.

The point of anything becoming trivially scalable for most people is that it suddenly stops being profitable.

My favorite years in Austin for music were between 2007-2010. You could always see a band who were making music for fun, free drinks and girls, not to be famous. You can see a gig every day or so for $10 or $20. Just people doing it to make a few bucks and for fun.

Then I moved to NYC. Every venue was "who are you here to see" bands had to make relationships with venues to make them money. Everything was about the industry and getting famous. None of it was about having a good time. I hated every minute of it.

When you can listen to any artist from around the world in your earbuds all the time, most people won't be able to make a living from it. Still, you'll be able to go to a honky tonk in Austin on the weekends for $20, because there will always be folks making and performing live music, not for the money, but because it's fun.

Time and time again, stories on totally different topics hinge on: during or just after the pandemic, there was a major change in cost of doing just about everything. Now of course, the pandemic was A. Big. Thing. and there was also an overlaid global supply-chain disruption when the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal in '21.

But: fundamentally, why did all of this happen, and why haven't prices normalised (i.e. dropped) since?

Does anyone have a hypothesis, beyond 'corporate gouging', which I can accept, but seems too simplistic to explain what seems to be an enduring global phenomenon?

I had a look at this artists YouTube page. Clearly he is just not very popular despite winning some awards, having various CBC interviews, being endorsed by the city of Edmonton and playing for Justin Trudeau.

As has always been the case with music, success is extremely rare. For every winner, there are a million losers. So, better to think of it more like a lottery than a normal industry / job.

I'm a software engineer by trade, but have played bluesy / rock guitar since I heard Jimi Hendrix as a teenager. I try to run a band, to fuel my mid-life crisis but I've come to the conclusion that it's essentially a hobby, not a device for making money.

Streaming is the biggest scam to have perpetuated the entertainment industry. The way the money is divided among the content creators is absurd and the prices are both too high and too low at the same time.

I do wonder about actual numbers, though.

* Is the amount of music listened to in a day down? * Is the rate of music creation down? * Given some metric of diversity is music diversity down? * Given some metric of quality is music quality down? * Are there fewer artists per capita / in total? * Has the Gini coefficient really shifted?

I assume that for almost all of these, the answer is actually no. Presumably, technology has made making more higher quality music easier and cheaper than ever, and people are listening to more than ever.

Many skilled but repetitive jobs became automated away. From middle-class weavers (1760s) to middle-class car assembly workers (1970s) to middle-class journalists (eroding since 2000s) to middle-class software developers (happening now, alas).

All these professions did not disappear. They have transformed though more to tending and overseeing machines, at an income level below middle class, with a much smaller number of highly-skilled professionals doing the exceptional things which machines don't do too well.

When the technology is good enough for a one person to record an entire album, it's hard to be a specialist musician, like a violinist in an orchestra, or even a guitarist in a band

I suppose the skilled professions that will resist machine replacement for longest time are these which require a lot of custom work and adjusting to unique local circumstances: electricians, plumbers, car mechanics, doctors, hairdressers, maybe construction workers. But they will likely handle mostly special cases, where standard, machine-friendly solutions don't fit well, a bit like modern tailors.

In my region of the world an artist of any kind would fall into one of two groups:

-Poor and malnourished member of the common folk.

-Part of the elites, who is set for life anyway and creates art thanks to the ample spare time they have.

I used to be in a band and one major point of contention in our group was whether we could make a living out of this. My opinion was that no, we couldn't.

I have a friend who enjoys moderate success with his band - they're doing historical reconstruction so they're invited to events in the space and, of course, paid. He keeps his day job though. Truth be told in the historical reconstruction field only smiths and tailors can pull off this being their main thing and it's not a given.

In Jan, my son ordered a mystery box from ... I dunno who. It just showed up. Evidently it was someone connected with King Gizzard because it was recently released KG vinyl, inc a test pressing. Also a sealed cassette of another band that we don't recognize. Also stickers.

Connect with fans, treat them well and stay creative - and they'll buy your stuff. Often a lot of it.

The 80s song Sultans of Swing is about this. Don't think it's new.

Well this is timely. I just started EDM production as a hobby 2 weeks ago! I did it a long while ago for a bit and it's time to rekindle the music flame. Well, I guess I've always been beatboxing but I'm never aware of that. My subconscious mind plays a lot of tricks on me when it comes to my musicality. My musicality is quite a subconscious thing actually. Well, not anymore!

I haven't read the article yet but I suspected as much that there is not much money in music, not even a livable wage. That's not why I'm doing it though. I have a few tracks in my mind since childhood (and a few more recent ones) that I want to get out. Also it's a fun thing to learn about marketing while I'm at it.

My point: I think that should be enough. Not everything we do has to make enough money.

It's finally time to put that perfect pitch and subconscious OCD style melody generation to use!

Middle class musician has been a recent phenomena that probably started in 1800s and is now going away again.

all this was obvious the moment napster became popular. and for more than a decade anyone who explained what was happening was ridiculed, especially in tech circles.

spotify in particular cemented a payment structure that disadvantages any “serious” music versus endless repeat pop songs, while also being completely corrupted by conflict of interest from record labels with an ownership stake. now they manufacture their own muzak and steer your playlist to it, draining the last bits of revenue possibility away from these “middle class musicians.”

youtube streamed music for free for years, paying no artists, and it was one of its core growth engines. completely asymmetrical outcome.

the whole thing denigrated musicians, and music itself. hordes of early online young tech professionals making great money at their office jobs poo pooing the concerns of an entire industry which previously enabled some of the most sophisticated artistic endeavors our culture ever attempted.

just dumb. a complete victory of lowbrow values.

baffling someone is writing this article in 2025. at every fork in the road, the path was taken that would give less revenue to the musicians. and ~no one in tech felt it was a problem.

talking about it like there is a revelation or an emerging phenomenon here mystifies, while rubbing salt in the wound.

Part of the problem is that the barrier to entry is really low now. In the old days, you had to be relatively talented on your instrument, hone your skills for years playing clubs to gather an audience, and then a record label would finally give you a contract. Now you can download Logic and it will generate most of the music. You just sing along, autotune your vocals and you've got a tune that can be uploaded to Spotify, Apple Music, etc. I just saw MonoNeon in concert. His albums are mediocre but I'm guessing he's making an ok living because he's extremely talented on bass. The place was sold out.

The part that really stuck with me: how success in music now feels more like surviving a battle of attrition than "making it". The irony is brutal—more people are making music than ever, but fewer can live off it.

Even cost of hobby aside (art supply cost already killed middle class visual artists dead), stuff like suno is making mass dabbling and production of competent sounding music a commodity.

Ah, the music industry.

I know of one songwriter with multiple number 1 hits that was with a large american label for a while ... then moved to another, and the original label kept collecting the royalties when they were no longer contractually allowed to.

Their answer: "So sue us, it'll cost more than you'll get, we can drag this on for years, and you can't get costs awarded, so if we were you we'd just eat the L".

Writers have been experimenting with paywalls (substacks etc) - musicians aren't? Indies keep complaining about streaming and platforms killing their livelihood but I wonder if this is just because the target for "justice" seems clearer (eg. Spotify cut, etc)

Seems to me that music has an additional challenge which is most revenue channels requires middlemen: streaming infrastructure, merch factories, venues owners, technicians, etc which artist can't/won't replace.

At some point musicians - as product creators - need to have a clear biz model for their enterprise and passion to try it. Not just passion to create, passion to sell.

Few people should make a living with music, or indeed any other form of art. Art is a hobby.

Literally everyone is an artist, even if their art consists of bad doodles and singing in the shower. Sure, some people are more talented than that, but expecting to make a living with art? Nah...

I'm disappointed - this article is very short sighted. Everything in it is about recording and making money from concerts and stuff. It's all modern. When was the time of the middle class musician? What was the distribution of musicians as a primary job vs all jobs?

Throughout history it seems that there has always been an imbalance of musicians that make good money and those that don't. It seems that most musicians did it for free as part of a community/spiritual ceremony, or did it as a part time thing.

The modern issues are related to the technological advancements. The true cause of issue the article talks about is right in the beginning of it - music has never been easier to make and record. Supply and demand?

"The Death of the Middle-Class Musician"

* The Death of the Middle-Class

There I fixed their title

I expect the "death of the middle class" musician to be part of the same phenomenon that is sweeping through all our western societies.

The hollowing out of the middle class, wealth distribution producing more unequal societies where few people amass wealth and more of the (previously just working class but now more and more of the middle class) are pushed out a lower rung of the income/wealth bracket and ultimately completely displaced.

Fundamentally in a healthy economy the money is the blood that circulates around. If you create an economy where most of the wealth is held up by few rich individuals who then use the wealth to buy more assets and produce more wealth it means that other less well off people will get displaced in the society and that means that they will also not be able to afford to participate in the society to buy goods and services simply because they have no financial means to do so.

And to those who immediately go "but the economy isn't zero sum game", yes that's correct. But when the real economy is growing at 1-2% rate and the musks and bezos and other wealthy individuals are growing their wealth at +20% per year that means it effectively is a zero sum game and some people's slice of the pie is ever growing at the cost of everyone else.

But then people say "but the rich people invest". Yes but how much of that is actually active investment in new businesses and how much of that is just investing in asset portfolios, property and other financial instruments?

Also to grow more businesses and start new businesses you need an individual who has financial means to take risk, has an idea, stomach for risk and determination and drive to start business. Many people do not have that.

For the economy to grow new businesses which one is better? 1 person with $1m and 9 with $0 or 10 ppl with 100k each? What are the chances and probabilities in each scenario that the person who has the qualities to start a new business is capable of doing so?

If you want to see the future (especially relevant for US and UK since they're furthest along the way) just look at the economy of Nigeria or India for example. Few rich people, tiny middle class and large swathes of people in poverty.

In a discussion about the outstandingly high cost of concert tickets, I had a breakthrough moment just on Friday (today is Sunday where I am). Artists no longer make a living selling recorded music because of streaming platforms. They now make their living performing, hence exceedingly expensive concert tickets.

I used to go to shows that cost $30-80. Now they are hundreds and the biggest artists may cost >$1k. I'm lucky that I make a good living, cause I wouldn't be able to go to most shows otherwise.

Has life ever been easy for musicians? Has it ever been easy to make money from making/playing music in the history of mankind?

The main rehearsal space in San Francisco closed more than two decades ago.

I venture that live music has suffered because of it.

Patronage should return. That is all.

Well, I guess I was right... Ill be listening to 80s and 90s music for the rest of my life.

What's the deal with always wanting to turn art into a day job, anyway? These things are almost antithetical, as exemplifies by thousands of YouTube channel that turned into soulless content-producers in an effort to keep a schedule.

Damn, people somehow made art in 10000BC, when everyone was a hunter-gatherer by necessity.

ctrl-f "dole" not found, but the musical explosion from GB in the 60s was in part due to generous welfare

It's wild watching other Americans trying to carefully avoid acknowledging the absurdity of "get a job and submit to capitalism or die".

Admitting that there might be another way and that it might be much better would be admitting the unthinkable cruelty of the status quo.

When people use terms like "neofeudalism", this is the sort of thing we're talking about. It's capitalism working as intended. There are an increasing number of jobs that are only available to the children of the wealthy. There are several reasons for this:

1. Any of the creative professions have way more applicants than positions so nepotism dominates. It's almost shocking how many nepo babies there are in Hollywood. It infects every level. It could be that some rich person will fund your indie movie as long as you give a major role to their child. It can be family connections to studio decision-makers,. It can be currying favor with Hollywood heavyweights. Whatever. Either way, getting in as a nobody is increasingly difficult;

2. Education. First, you have legacies. Roughly a third of Harvard's undergrad class are legacies ie the children of wealthy donors. That's the real DEI. But also it's the cost. The wealthy can absorb the cost of an elite education.

This is a real issue with medical school. Someone can often graduate with $300-600k in student loan debt. By the time they finish residency they may owe $500k-1M. The wealthy can absorb this. There are a few medical schools now that offer free tuition thanks to some large endowments. Many medical schools try and have people from more diverse economic backgrounds but it's difficult. Not having to worry about money means you caa afford to spend a year doing unpaid research to pad your resume. The free tuition schools seem to have skewed more to students from wealthier backgrounds because they're simply better connected and better able to game getting into such schools;

3. Housing costs specifically and the cost of living generally. 30 years ago if you were trying to make it as a musician in LA you could rent an apartment for $300-400/month. You could live cheaply. You could chase that dream. Now? The average apartment seems to be near or over $2000/month.;

4. The disappearance of third spaces. Higher housing costs mean the higher cost of businesses. If a bar or a coffee shop needs now absorb rent of $200,000/year where once it was $10-20k, that affects what busineses are viable and for those that are, it's an input to the cost of everything. Well, those were performance spaces for up and coming acts. You see this in the UK, for example, where the number of pubs just keeps going down as they sold and converted into apartments. Community spaces just cannot survive with the high cost of property; and

5. The freedom to fail. I saw a clip of Allison Williams recently who acknowledge this. For those that don't know, she was one of the main cast of HBO's Girls. She's the daughter of Brian Williams, a long-time news anchor. Fun fact: the entire main cast of this show were all nepo babies. It cannot be overstated what relieving the fear of becoming homeless can do to your opportunities.

Now some, particularly here, have long pointed to tech as their key to social mobility. That's been true for a long time but I suspect many here are in for a rude shock. We're already seeing it with the layoffs and how many people apply for any given job. AI will make this worse.

And who do you think will get positions in this shirnking pool of opportunities? It'll be the same children of wealthy people. It'll be connections, access to funding and other factors that give you opportunities.

Isn't it clear that we just need a levels.fyi for rappers?

...in Canada.

It's weird to call it dead because I'm not sure it was ever truly alive.

"onetheless, the state has a role to play. The government has long forced commercial and campus radio stations to play at least 35 percent CanCon—that is, music that meets two of the four criteria of MAPL (music, artist, performance, lyrics): that the music was composed by a Canadian, performed by a Canadian, and recorded in Canada, with lyrics written by a Canadian. But imposing such requirements on internationally owned streamers has proven challenging."

When the state dictates artistic content, that is socialism.

They been dead

all art will suffocate until artists unite and supercede capitalism.

To be blunt, the numbers show that the main problem is the listener. Most just do not care to choose so they consume what they're told is cool. If you think you care but consistently listen to artists present in Spotify's top 100 by choice, sorry, you're part of the problem too. Most being passive consumers has always been the case, but the system perfects itself with time and less and less attention trickles down.

Notice, how I used "attention" and not "money" or even "listens". Just look at the first and the main goalpost independent artist set for themselves. It's no longer "buy our music" or "come to our show", by now they strive to convince the audience to attempt to listen to their songs.

By this time I consider an artist that's only present in streaming services and lacks a visible way of direct distribution of their music (which includes such services as Bandcamp, for now) either an utterly mismanaged one or, again, a part of the problem†.

The only way for the artist to feel appreciated is building their loyal fan base, but if you don't want to wear the "entertainer" hat (which now equals becoming a circus monkey for the trending social media) this becomes harder and harder for a bunch of reasons:

1. Music is just not as culturally important as it was 50 years ago. 2. Live shows are in decline and dominated by cover/tribute acts. 3. As correctly mentioned in TFA, you're fighting with everything else plus everything that came before you. 4. The world is closing. Visas have always been a curse‡, but nowadays even if I jump through a myriad of hoops and get one, I can't even cross the border to the countries we usually started the tours from in a previous life. 5. The internet feels like a collapsing space too, though it's probably the most controversial opinion of mine.

There's also a problem of NNGC. At least the previous boom (blockchain) promised to make things better in some way (and it did, but underdelivered tenfold), but the current one ("AI") doesn't even do that — there's not even a positive scenario how the life of a common artist becomes better, unless "post-scarcity" truly happens (it won't).

---

†: To clarify, this is about modern artists, things are a bit different when we speak about "legacy" acts that jump started their careers in a different era.

‡: Even though in case of EU most artists entering didn't care and used their tourist visas because they did not make any money anyway.

The lede of this article, about Rollie Pemberton, is about a "360" deal where the label gets a cut of all revenue related to the act (Pemberton's "Cadence Weapon"). Unusually, in Pemberton's case, it appears that most of his revenue came in from prizes and grants, not from recording sales or touring. The structure of his deal thus made Upper Class Records an outsized return. The deal seems pretty exploitative.

The problem with this as a framing device is that it doesn't describe very many working musical acts. 360 deals are probably generally gross? But Pemberton's situation is weird. In most cases, labels are in fact going to lose money from midlist acts.

The more you look at these kinds of businesses the more striking the pattern is. It's true of most media, it's true of startups, it's true for pharmaceuticals. The winners pay for the losers; in fact, the winners are usually the only thing that matter, the high-order bit of returns.

What's challenging about this is that you can't squeeze blood from a stone. The package offered to a midlist act might in fact be a loss leader; incentive to improve dealflow and optionality for the label, to get a better shot at the tiny number of acts whose returns will keep the label afloat. There may not be much more to offer to acts that aren't going to generate revenue.

David Lowery (a mathematician and the founder/lead vocalist of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker) had an article about this years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850935

It's worth a read (though things have probably changed in a number of ways since then). It's an interesting counterpoint to the automatic cite to Albini's piece that comes up in these discussions. Not that you should have sympathy for labels, just it's useful to have a clearer idea of what the deal was. The classic label deal with a mid-sized advance that never recouped (and which the labels never came back looking for when it didn't) was basically the driver for "middle-class" rock lifestyles; it's dead now.

Well, AI is here and I give it a high chance than in a few years all the music streaming platforms will go the way of the mastodon. Even recorded music in general may take a hit. I'm already skipping tracks in YT-music that I suspect they are AI-generated. When I find that the majority of the tracks are AI-generated, I'll start looking up individual producers and getting back to maintaining my own music collection in a harddrive and an MP3 player. Maybe I'll even buy a ticket and go to a concert, something I've only done once so far in my four decades and counting.

You may say that people just care about the music and not the musician, and that thus an AI-generated track is as good as any. Perhaps. But when I was a kid, all my pals developed their musical taste by word-of-mouth and I-want-to-be-cool-like-you-and-listen-to-Rammstein. Can't imagine all edgy teenagers will fall in love with an AI model.

The death of the middle class everything. I have no idea how median wage statistics are possible. There is not a single neighborhood in my city where median income in that neighborhood can afford rent or a mortgage in that neighborhood. It’s all non-wage sources of wealth and no traditional middle class lifestyle is possible

Interestingly, and that may be a personal opinion - I have bought more music from more obscure musicians in the last few years, mostly thanks to Bandcamp.

Before that, I mostly gravitated to 'blockbuster musicians', old classics, 1970s psychedelic rock. Today I buy some unknown musician's album every few days (and I pay what I'd pay for a 'proper' album, even if it is pay what you want).

Part of that is simply availability. The old record stores of old were often just "what's popular" with a side dish of "what the owner likes". Today? I found some Touareg rock band the other day. In the 1990s, that was virtually impossible even for music lovers.

Part of it is that today, I pay for what I like. Radio sucks, the classics are oversaturated, and often enough new releases are just qualitatively worse - both in composition as well as remasters which tend to sacrifice nuance for loudness. But indy bands? I don't expect perfection, but often enough find it.

Now, I understand I am a rare breed. In a Spotify world, the one buying FLACs is exotic. I do understand that the mid-range musician is not going to become a millionaire - but who ever did?

The example in the article sounds a lot like the artist has been bent over a barrel by the record company - a pattern even "successful" musicians have experienced. Maybe instead of chasing fame, the solution is to do your own marketing.

The musical middle class wasn’t thinned out by the audience, but by labels and streaming models. If you’re not topping the charts, you vanish between promotion costs and algorithmic obscurity - unless you go directly to the listener.