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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that just a truism of the Pareto principle? Is there any field where that's not the case? 20% of lawyers make 80% of the money. 20% of doctors make 80% of the money. etc etc.

The difference I think is if 80% of professional musicians can't make a living & it's not clear that's actually the case (i.e. streaming isn't the only source of revenue). Similarly, music may have a higher "stickiness" for tenacity where people see it as a higher calling for them even if they're not making money (vs someone not cutting it as a lawyer/doctor to even pay the bills is going to quit & find something else if they weren't even weeded out during school).

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Perhaps the problem is there are simply too many musicians all fighting for the same fixed size pie. I'm guessing the reason is there are a lot of people willing to work for a very low pay because they want to be a musician and not that they see it as a profitable pursuit.

This is what is known in economics as a compensating differential. It's also my pet theory for why bog standard backend devs tend to get paid a lot more than game devs, even though the game devs tend to be more skilled and harder working.

So what you are saying is that because the job of the backend dev isn't as interesting as game dev,they are paid more? I very much doubt that's the reason.

No, it's the other way around. Gamedevs make less, because there are so many people that want to work as gamedevs.

While I absolutely disagree with the above comment that "bog standard" backend devs have less skills than game devs [0], the call to "passion" does tend to deflate salaries and inflate working hours (at very real costs of work/life balance and burnout/early "retirement") in games. (It's among many reasons game developers pretty much need to unionize to avoid mistreatment from management, because "passion" is always going to be a weakness in negotiation.)

[0] The call to "passion" tends to work the other direction too in that game developers are overwhelmingly young, fresh out of school, and the turnover ratio in the industry implies a huge turnover of skills and experience over time as well as consequent losses to institutional memory. There aren't a lot of safe spaces in games to build skills and game companies have fewer incentives to retain skilled workers than a lot of the, for instance, "dark matter" enterprise uses of backend developers where the backend developer becomes an institutional knowledge bottleneck.

Exactly this. No need to drag Pareto out of the barn just because you see 80%. The fundamental issue is a huge supply of wannabe musicians. If the distribution were completely flat, nobody rather than a small percentage would be making a living from Spotify. Not exactly new or groundbreaking stuff.

Pareto is an observation of the distribution, not some special insight into “why” the result is Pareto. Just saying this phenomenon appears everywhere - the underlying causes may be the same or they may be different but the distribution remains the same.

> 80% of professional musicians can't make a living

It might hurt people's feeling, but most of those are not professional musicians.

I don't think it is judgemental to say that to claim oneself as professional, one need to demonstrate that they could make a living out of it. Otherwise, it is no different than a hobbyist, albeit much more time is dumped on it.

In case of streaming, now more people can declare themselves as musicians, since the barrier of publishing has been significantly lowered comparing to physical CDs. But that doesn't mean profit would follow.

To produce hit music isn't easy, and luck is certainly a factor of it.

I think too many non-musicians believe this is a case the population being comprised of a small number of professional musicians and a huge number of untalented hacks.

The reality is that there is while there are a lot of hacks and untalented musicians alongside the professional musicians, there are also actually a ton of talented musicians that are working very hard to write, record, and release music, and just simply never get heard. They submit to pandora or Spotify or wherever and it never makes it into the algorithms. It's up to them to do all their own marketing. We're influenced by survivorship bias and it's easy to say "they should just tour and play out and submit to music blogs!" and it's difficult to communicate just how hard it is to find any traction at all.

This is true, but what ought to happen instead?

I personally don't have strong opinions on a solution, because I think it is a very hard problem. A lot of people that listen to music don't have any interest in discovering new music, or finding music that is a distinct match for their unique personality. They're just happy to listen to what is shoved in front of them. But if you change your approach away from what is good for each listener, and more toward what is good for a healthy culture, then maybe that starts suggesting some paths. I'd personally like it to be more of a combination of aggressively introducing people to new music, making hard not to rank/react to music, and heavily rewarding artists of new music that yield positive response. I also think there should be a form of progressive redistribution of the power law. Just because there's a power low doesn't mean the slope can't be flattened a bit.

If you fail MCAT or LSAT you can't even study for a medical/law degree. If you throw random samples into FL Studio and publish the result on iTunes or Spotify you can claim to be a part of the oppressed 80% that earns less than £200 a year.

But once you get your medical/law/MBA/HR degree you can be incredibly mediocre at your job and still get six/seven/eight figures a year.

It's entirely down to organised (guild) gatekeeping and managed perceptions of value, not actual value provided.

More, it's covertly about political power.

Medicine and law are not the sure fire lucrative professions they once were.

Law and medicine aren’t winner take all fields so that’s not a fair comparison. Should 80% of authors be able to make a living from their book sales? Athletes? Social media CEO’s?

Fair or not fair is subjective. In my opinion you shouldn’t go into fields with heavy power law dynamics unless you’re comfortable with a very high likelihood of coming out a ‘failure’.

At least it’s gotten more meritocratic than in years past.

This is confusing cause and effect.

Should 80% of middle managers be able to make a living from their work? Politicians? Bankers? Investors? Backend developers?

The fact that there's no question that these people are somehow magically worth it, while musicians and artists somehow magically aren't, is a symptom of the covert beliefs that define value, not a cause of them.

Realistically this is just a different kind of social credit - and no less brutal than the Chinese kind, even though the values are (somewhat) different.

People might think developers should be able to make a living from their work, but that doesn't translate into thinking that developers somehow "deserve" to make a living selling apps on the App Store. One is a job, the other is being an entrepreneur. Most entrepreneurs fail, of all kinds. I don't think it's a value judgement on art or music.

Percentages are different than absolute numbers, though. It would be surprising if, for instance, 80% of lawyers earn less than 200 GBP a year.

They wouldn't. They could just work in something else, as probably the majority of people with a law degree do. Only a fraction of those are actually lawyers.

I don't think it's true for doctors, the wealth there is more distributed.

Some professions are lottery professions. Others aren't. I suppose a lot of it is a demand/supply thing. Also independent contractor vs. employee.

Not to say employees all make a lot of money. Janitor probably makes a fairly predictable minimum wage level in the US.

On the other hand an employed software developer or other engineer might have a 5-10x wage disparity (even within a given country) for various reasons. But it won't be an "actor" waiting tables versus an A-list celebrity.

Once you expand this to doctors all over the world. This will become definitely true. There are enough doctors in third world who make < $10K a year.

Even in the West, a doctor who becomes the CEO of a successful medical supplies company or the administrator for an upscale hospital will make more than a doctor running their own practice who make more than a regular doctor employed by a corporation. Keep in mind there’s also a wide variety of “medical practitioners” like chiropractors, therapists, various “unlicensed medical practitioners” who practice eastern medicine etc. Even within traditional medicine you’ve got your small GP whose struggling to keep their practice afloat (it’s a regular business) and extremely wealthy surgeons or other doctors who identify a niche they can make extremey lucrative (eg unscrupulous pain management doctors who process high volume and low effort clients).

There’s a wide variety of outcomes even after the great filter that are MCATs and medical school.

For example, Thomas F. Frist Jr. is worth ~13 billion. Now granted at those levels he’s more an entrepreneur/businessman as all such people are. Still, the difference between his net worth and a regular GP making $400k is probably about the same difference as a musician worth $300 million and a musician making $200/year.

Although if that's the case there then the average earning of the top 20% of musicians is at most £800 a year.

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