Hacker News

This is a technology problem. Media technology (radio, recordings, television, and movies) has essentially killed live performance of all kind compared to what it was once like. Bars and hotels that used to rely on gig musicians can now play a Spotify playlist over the speakers. Repertory theatres once existed in every small and medium sized city in the country, each supporting several actors earning salaries sufficient to raise a family—all wiped out by television.

It would have once been unthinkable for even a small city of <=100,000 people to lack multiple live entertainment options 7 days a week. No more—we’re all at home, watching our particular chosen thing, listening to our particular chosen album, playing our own chosen game.

Some will claim this has been an advancement. “How lame,” they say, “it must have been to have to go to the Local Entertainment Venue and just listen to whatever act was on that night. Nowadays I can listen to Acid Techno Super Hop, my particular chosen favorite, as much as I want.” But the losses in communal behavior have been significant. Most critical is the disappearance of dance. Dance is a fundamental human behavior, stretching back to Paleolithic times. It is nowhere to be seen in many cities today, because no one has any occasion to do it except weddings, at which it is very common now to stand around awkwardly after the bride and groom have fumbled through some rehearsed step.

Most people who make a living as a musician these days do so by being a "renaissance man" of sorts, where they make their money doing a multitude of different things. This includes playing live, but some other examples live sound, stage tech, lighting, promoting/booking events, instrument trade shows, and composing music. You can think of this as being "T-Shaped" in the software industry, except the difference is in the music industry, you need to be "T-Shaped" just to survive, not simply to excel. The "long part of the T" is what you generally want to do most of the time, and it's usually how people identify their job when asked. But really, most of us do a combination of many different things to get by, almost none of these jobs pay enough or are regular enough to do it on their own.

This was, and still is, a HUGE shift in the way I live my life after moving careers from software development into music composition...

Even as a film scorer, who has jobs that last for a long time and include many personal conversations with the film makers, you're not guaranteed to get back-to-back gigs, so when you're done with one score, what's next? It's not like there's always someone handing you jobs if you're doing this by yourself. But that's my preferred angle, because the jobs do last longer and there's a more regular (and higher) payout. It just takes a lot of back and forth with the people making the film, in order to get the vibes just right.

From what I have seen as an occasional musician and running sound is that these days most musicians are not willing to make the sacrifices and put in the time, they will not take that poorly paying weekly gig and spend a year or two refining their performance and learning to read the audience which is a major part of making it in music.

I know a good number a professional musicians who have made it to the point where they can live off of music without constantly working, every single one of them started out the same way, playing every single show they could regardless of pay or location. This started to change around 2010, the venue I used to do sound for primarily targeted musicians who were starting out either on the local scene or national scene (just starting to tour and trying to make a name out of their home town), by 2015 music was mostly done there because the 19 year olds who had only played a few shows were not happy with $25 and a meal to sit on stage with their guitar for an hour, they wanted $100 and expected to play to a full room.

The boom in home recording also probably played a role, the starting out musicians are often resistant to it because they see it as pedestrian and not for serious musicians, musicians record in studios, not at home. Record on anything anyway you can and bring a few dozen copies to sell at those poorly paying gigs.

There was a brief period in history when Being In A Band was a big deal. That's bracketed by, perhaps, the British Invasion and Myspace Music. Before that, musicians were low-paid background music systems. After that, anybody could do it at garage-band level. In between was the brief era of the Rock Star. The nostalgia here is for that era.

Not a new observation.

I've played music my entire life (picked up a guitar at 6 years old and just never put it down). I actually just released a new record last Friday (https://open.spotify.com/album/6JU0jmz537a6r2xrTvCcmn?si=eg4...). I joined a band when I was 15 (~2004), and we had some long tail success. We were able to tour, play huge shows (the Gorge in Washington, sell out the Showbox in downtown Seattle, an arena here or there). After high school I went to school for audio production, and even then I knew it was going to be tough to make a living. I ended up pivoting, studying math, now I'm in machine learning.

Music is the thing I love more than anything. I love writing it, releasing records, playing shows, and connecting with people on an emotional level. Never once have I considered it possible to have a fruitful career as a musician, despite seeing more success as a musician than most can ever dream of. Additionally, the industry (like many others) has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. In many ways, it has put much more power back into the hands of artists: you don't need a huge studio/record label/promotion to release a record. You can just release records, and promote them yourself. The flip side of that is there are SO many more people releasing music these days, which makes it really difficult to cut through the noise if your music is halfway decent.

Finally, recommendation algorithms have truly transformed the landscape of content creation, likely irreversibly. I get messages _daily_ from people who have "hacked" the TikTok algorithm, and can get my bands plays. There is an entire cottage industry of algorithm "hackers", some of them actually have results too.

One odd anecdote: I love Alex G. I've been listening to him for over a decade, and have flown out to see him play in places like New york/Austin TX. A few years ago he played in Seattle, and the entire demographic of the audience seem to've changed overnight. Way younger, more "mainstream" looking kids, filled the Showbox in Seattle. The strangest part was that no one seemed to know the words to his songs anymore. I did some digging, and he'd gone viral on TikTok. A few of his songs went absolutely bananas on there, and it completely transformed his fanbase. They knew the words to those songs, but not his entire set. Is this bad? I have no idea, but the trimming down of content into bite sized morsels _feels_ bad to me, and I believe it will dramatically alter this next generation's baseline attention span. Again, not a moral judgement, just a factual claim.

Is always striking when I see a really good musician perform live.

It hits you like a ton of bricks.

This is a local Bay Area band and all 3 members are exquisitely skilled in more than one instrument.

https://www.howelldevine.com/

Is there data to support "the decline" or just anecdotes?

There are half a dozen venues within a mile of me that have 3 bands a night five days a week. I also work with musicians that have full schedules of church gigs, weddings, etc on top of symphony and opera appointments. This is in a city smaller than NYC. I cant imagine NYC is any worse?

I live in a small town in a rural area near the centre of the UK.

I was recently told by a guitar shop owner that he sold more PAs than anything. Why, I asked, is hard to get gigs now?

"I'm playing 3 nights a week", he said, "1 with my Beatles cover band, 2 general covers". His band was a twosome with backing tracks. £350 a night, split 2 ways. I was suprised you could do that well in such a remote area, but it would be a good start towards a living.

Lefsetz, Let the Clubs Close https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2024/11/04/let-the-clubs-close...

I have a group of friends I know since middle school. They created a band when we were ~15 and did not stop. When we were 30 or so they were having regular gigs in bars and auditoria.

When I was discussing with the owners of the bars, I always asked "why us?". They would often say that we were the only ones that did not look desperate to get a gig.

And that was true: we all had high paying jobs, they even self produced a few CDs for fun (and Christmas presents). The band was always for fun because nobody relied on it for their life.

When I read many comments here I realize how lucky we were.

"You used to be able to make a living playing in a band."

Yes, but not a good living.

I have no aspirations to ever get paid gigs as a musician. To the point where if anyone ever does try to pay me, I'm not sure how I'd deal with it.

But I play lots of gigs on the streets and similar. My favourite is the rehearsal in a public space that accidentally turns into a gig. Life-changingly wonderful stuff.

Tough life being an actual pro musician, although there's an OK living to be made in teaching for the right people.

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/HQAtf

Can't it be enough? Do we have to endlessly repeat everything that worked once? Hasn't enough pop been made? I feel the same way about actors and movies: if actors or set designers never work again because of AI, shouldn't we just mourn them (or watch the millions of hours of film we already have) and move on?

Recorded music killed people playing music to entertain the rest of the family. You used to teach your kids how to play instruments so they could entertain your guests or have a good time during a boring day. We can still do that, playing music alone is fun, and playing music together can be transcendent. Singing in harmony or in unison is intimate.

There's an athletic element. I'll always want to see somebody, in person, playing music live. It's like watching a juggler. What we've done is isolated music to these horrible alienating mass consumption venues, rather than it coming out of every bar, and every other restaurant, and from the street, and in people's homes. It's a debasing and commoditization of music, helped by the introduction of artistically unintelligible lyrics in the 60's, and draconian, authoritarian intellectual property laws that demand that you never play any song that you hear, you have to create new product.

And as above, this goes for movie entertainment, too. People will always want to watch plays, they're assemblages of memorization, vocalization, and coordination of movement. They astound. You can do it yourself: you can memorize a poem and bring it to a party, or you can come up with a skit. This is how people entertained themselves before being colonized by the tyranny of mass-produced recordings.

I don't know if it's clear from the above, but I hope AI completely devalues recorded music, and ends the celebrity worship industry that is built up around it. Generated music will be everywhere, and it will feel like slop. Watching someone in front of you, showing you what they can do, will never be devalued. Joining in because you know the song will bring back the feeling of the Irish and English broadsides that we derived this pop stuff from, through the blues, and that we enjoyed together for centuries.

Going to a concert in an arena and sitting half a kilometer from a band to listen to them play is dystopian. People who lived through a time where the production of music was commonplace and pervasive, not just its consumption, if they were teleported to this era, with its paid streams through earbuds, would be depressed.

edit: was a professional touring musician for a number of years a long time ago.

I don't know. I still have gigs every weekend. It's still a major part of my income. I fill-in a lot for other people too. Guitar, Bass, Percussion.

Can I survive only on weekend gigs? No. But then again, I can't go without them either. Most of the time I look at it as a part-time job.

The article doesn't mention Patreon once. What a gig is, has changed.

the endless need for ever-increasing profits is what kills any creative profession.

You see this in Hollywood with the stremaers now underpaying the people that make TV shows and movies possible, offshoring to save a few dollars, reducing the number of writes on staff and so on.

I'm not surprised to see the same forces at play for session musicians and so forth.

This is a systemic problem. Companies will happily kill an industry to increase short-term profits.

What holds this system together is that too many people believe that they will ultimately benefit from the exploitation built into the system plus people who love the creative skills they've spent years honing willing to work for pennies to stay in that industry. You see the same dynamic in the video game industry.