Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

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I'm curious if anybody here has the experience to compare how much harder it is to make a living in music as an artists vs how hard it is to break into tech.

I'm biased myself, having spent the last 20 years studying software dev and then working in software. I feel that while it is a lot of work, the market is quite hot for any technical talent, and making a decent living is straightforward. Even a shitty software dev likely makes a comfortable living, you don't have to be Jeff Dean. In CS you can graduate from MIT and probably be set for life, but in music you can graduate from Juliard or Berklee and likely still be living on a futon for decades. Or am I off here?

Whereas as a solo producer/composer (or someone in a band) it seems that getting anywhere near ramen profitability is really really hard. It's reminiscent of startups: you have to find your niche, you have to constantly stay relevant, you have to market yourself incessantly on every medium, and most likely you'll be drowned into obscurity by someone else who became a winner-take-all in that space. And while the payoff for founders in small to medium startups is still pretty decent (and can be life-changing), as an artist is seems like the polarization between starving and huge is even greater.

Even in photography you can always "sell out" and shoot weddings in perpetuity while you're doing more artistic work on the side. And that "main gig" pays reasonably well, even though it's exhausting. But with music things like playing gigs will likely not get you anywhere close to sustainability. Maybe teaching is the "weddings" of music?

I have flirted with the music industry for longer than I've been an engineer, and the reason I kept getting pulled back into programming is that it is much easier to make much more money. But I think your question makes a false dichotomy. Building a band/solo act is like founding a startup, and being a programmer is more like being a wedding DJ. I think in both cases, you have better odds in the tech world.

I once had a piano teacher who remarked: "why do musicians make so little money? For the same reason they do so many drugs. Professional musicians are paid in dopamine."

There is nothing like a crowd cheering for you.

But you're right, you can make a living being a wedding DJ, or if you can get gigs at upscale hotels/restaurants playing cello or piano, you can make a pretty decent living as a musician. But it takes a lot more work than learning to hook up a bunch of web forms to a database, and usually, it pays a lot less money. Then there's always teaching; and I believe if you have the ability to kindly teach music to children, you have attained enlightenment.

If you are striking out on your own, the grind is like founding a startup. If you build yet another photo-sharing app (or you're a guitar player who sings about love), you have to be uncommonly talented and lucky to break through. Similarly, startups come in many genres; maybe high tech startups are like jazz - often founded by PhDs, and very often failures because no one can wrap their head around it - even though it is brilliant.

If you can make it work - either startups or music, you get paid in dopamine and money. If you make it out the other side of that gauntlet, I believe you have also achieved enlightenment.

If you want to "make a living", it can be done in music. However, you will generally be more stable and comfortable in the world of tech.

> musicians are paid in dopamine

That's a good point, never thought of it that way. As a developer, it's satisfying to get better at your craft and to get small dopamine boosts from elegantly written solutions, but it's not like the rollercoaster of being in front of a bajillion people and sweating bullets and nailing your part, especially when playing in a band and melting away into something bigger than you. You can only get so much transcendence from writing login flow #65 and getting your integration tests to pass.

To be fair, as a startup founded you also don't exactly feel these incredible peaks of dopamine, but there's a longer sense of satisfaction, confidence and ownership of being a big part of something successful that puts food on the table for a bunch of people and solves pain points for even more people.

The way I see it, and I'd be curious to hear what you think, is that trying to get big the hard and old way in music (aka make a "stale" genre album, release album, hope you go viral) is kind of like starting yet another pizza shop in the middle of new york city. You're one of many, you likely don't have anything so revolutionary to suddenly crush your competition. You're very much of a commodity. Seems to me that you'd be much better off being at the beginning of a new fashion or trend in music genres, or using a new music or distribution technology (e.g. drum machines & synths, or maybe streaming your music on Twitch, or maybe TikTok) that's suddenly getting people's attention. Like with a startup, you'd be better off taking advantage of a landscape shift of sorts rather than making photo sharing app #57365 in 2020. Still won't guarantee success, but at least will improve it.

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