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Comment by tanilama | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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