Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student
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Not quite independently wealthy, but I imagine there's a fair few artists out there in a similar position.
That said, also easy for people to use this as an excuse.
"Starving artists" have existed for millenia. The arts patronage system began either or thousands of years ago, depending on who you ask. People have paid lots of money for gold jewelry basically since we figured out how to pull it out of the ground.
I saw someone call dog-walkers a ZIRP recently. No! It's just a luxury! There's a difference!
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/pet-sitting-marketplace-rover-...
Hit max- https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate
But the business model of "I walk other people's dogs when they don't have time to" is not a ZIRP. It's just not.
People might have hired more dogwalkers! Because ZIR might have created more affluent individuals! But that's a couple logical jumps from "dogwalking is a ZIRP"
From the outside it feels somewhat more doable to be a pro , then a band or solo-artist, since there are quite a few orchestra's around that hire people on a stable basis. Spots are limited, but it's not super hard.
This depends on the instrument and your location. If you play a popular instrument (say the violin) in a metro area with just one orchestra (some have zero!) then you ain't getting on that orchestra any way short of nepotism. If you live within commuting distance of multiple orchestras, there are more spots, but you still aren't going to be playing violin in the orchestra, and it's even possible that nepotism won't help you.
Also (though perhaps closer to a privilege issue than a nepotism issue):
How did you find the teacher who helped you get ready for the audition?
How did you "pay" for the practice time to prepare for the audition?
Also networking, if you do gigs in the same region the orchestra is located you're bound to bump into a few of the members.
You can also just email the orchestra and ask when they hold auditions.
Some very lucky others that do well are from multiple generations of musicians that were essentially born, bred, and raised to be among the world's best and live and breathe music. There was no way I could ever compete with these kinds of folks and the hard life I saw so many talented people including professors that _are_ established after decades to live a very modest life made it clear to me that it wasn't something I should do for a living despite how much I love and respect it all. My role I feel is to support these folks now, so I go to shows, buy merch at the show, etc. and try not to take up space or attention too much and let people do what they do while trying to show appreciation for the work I was too chickenshit to ever do.
The arts and now entertainment fields are very much "tournament" style careers where given very limited public attention the winners take basically all and the remainder struggle quite a lot. It's nothing like professional fields like tech, accounting, medicine, law, or trades like construction, hospitality. In fact, any field that becomes more mass market-driven seems to become substantially more "tournament" style which has greatly impacted sex work - a top n% take an increasingly higher percentage away from an elastic but fundamentally highly dynamic demand.
The misattributed quote "find what you love and let it kill you" is the typical path of the career musician like most arts. I prefer to at least have some money to have more options to make it more fun on the way without resorting to the trap that is recreational substances.
One thing they all have in common? Mommy and Daddy were loaded.
- My brother who is a writer while his wife works at an industrial job that pays exceedingly well
- My friend who is an artist, whose husband owns an engineering firm with big medical device contracts
- My other friend who is a nature photographer, whose husband works in tech
- Yet another friend who is a musician, whose wife works in tech
- Another friend who runs a dog shelter, whose husband is a high paid engineer
- My other friend who is a writer, whose girlfriend is a real estate investment manager at a large bank
- My friend who is a social worker helping at-risk youth, whose husband is an oil and gas executive
- And yet another friend who makes jewelry and sews bags, whose wife owns an investment management firm
- Finally, a friend who volunteers to catalogue deer populations for conservation, whose boyfriend just happens to be a big wig executive for the city
I could go on, I see this phenomenon everywhere. There are no free lunches in life, someone is always footing the bill... just follow the money.
"Homeless."
Even something as simple as a supportive family is a huge leg up compared to those who don't have it.
That’s a strange wording, isn’t a supportive family widely known to be an absolutely huge benefit?
It's for sure a huge benefit; I think their point is that it's a huge benefit that doesn't require effort (just chance, or maintenance of good communication/relationship).
A tattoo.
1. We generally value as a society
2. Two people both working the job and married to each other cannot afford to raise two children.
There are some jobs which we romanticize as being this way (musicians and other artists being a big example), but are we okay with e.g. social workers all either starving, or from wealthy backgrounds?
Teaching in public schools would definitely fit in this category.
((Assuming we're talking about the US))
A lot of (rural) areas in the South are so poor, teachers are among the higher pay scale because they have a steady paycheck with health insurance. My area was a city though, so teachers were on the lower end.
Snark aside, it's hard to imagine how you could raise kids plural on what a teacher makes here in Seattle. Even the absolute top of the teacher salaries here, after 12 promotions and with a PhD, pay about what my very first tech job did, many years and much inflation ago. I would never have tried to raise kids on that money.
Maybe not fresh-out-of-college but after 5ish years they almost certainly can afford it.
The playground supervisors probably can't though.
Employers in high cost areas take advantage of the informal subsidies being discussed here to underpay social workers (as well as other socially valuable occupations such as teachers). But that won't change until the workers move away or switch occupations. There's just no incentive for employers to pay living wages as long as workers are willing to accept less.
Aside: what is the gender neutral term for Garbage Man? Garbage people sounds like I'm disparaging them.
I know a fair few day jobbing musicians and creatives of other stripes though, only one of which with parents of any real means.
One is a manager at a theatre, one does care work, one does WordPress and a bit of JS for small companies.
The most full-time musician I know did have the richest parents growing up, but he makes his cash teaching and doing session stuff in local theatres.
Given how income distributions work, I think day jobbing creatives are very much the majority.
I’m one of them. I work a good tech job and do photography as a hobby.
Forgive me if I seemed overly focused on these folks and their lucky circumstances. If I’m being honest, I’m a bit jealous they get to spend all their time focused on their creative interests when I only get to do it part time.
If money wasn’t a requirement, I’d be out photographing every day instead of writing web code.
All in all, life is good though, so even if I’m a teeny bit jealous, I’m grateful for how good I have it in life. I’m pretty lucky, all things considered!
I'm impressed by those who find the time and energy to be consistent with a craft, on top of the pressures of work and family.
I like a dabble here and there at lots of things, but don't make the time and don't follow through enough. Something to aspire to.
This is absolutely not in line with how most people I interact with seem to view marriage nowadays, especially not my fellow university students back when I attended.
From my perspective I think younger people mostly seem to view marriage as restricting, or backward and outdated, not an opportunity for something better.
I especially think younger people don't like the idea that in order to have freedom to pursue the things you love, you might need to marry someone who supports you financially. Otherwise you will be too busy financially supporting yourself to have that same freedom.
How many people have ever liked it? Hasn't it been one of the few avenues available for lots of people to pursue things they couldn't without financial help? What's a viable alternative?
My point was just that marrying someone to financially support you used to be culturally accepted, maybe even expected, and now it is less so.
Especially since most marriages can't afford to keep the household on a single income anymore anyways.
Man marrying his wive to financially support him was accepted and expected? Really?
Before the 20th century marriage and inheritance was practically the only way to climb the social ladder and acquire meaningful wealth. It’s basically half of what Balzac wrote about.
Among people I know who are my age, there is a real attitude that they should not have to attach themselves to another person. They want to self actualize without compromise, so if marriage (or honestly, even monogamy) is not something they want they shouldn't have to do it.
Part of this mentality is totally fair. No one should be forced to marry, or live monogamously or anything else if they don't want.
Where the disconnect lies is the self actualizing without compromising thing. They are often angry at the world because they cannot live their way, but often finding a supportive partner would allow them to, or at least a lot closer to what they want than when they are struggling on their own.
Nearly 100% of the people I know under age 35 who own their dwelling are couples, with both employed (and an overwhelming majority of those couples have at least one STEM income in that "portfolio").
And obsession. To fixate on the creation of the hour 24-7. To be master of my tiny creative walled paradise and let everything else go to hell.
Now I'm not doing that. I'm doing the opposite. I'm expanding. I like it.
Ha - I’ve known a number of friends who have had this same problem working a “useless 9-5” job and missing out over what they’re passionate about.
It’s all about trade-offs.
Trade-offs indeed.
I once went on hiatus from full-time work to "make it on my own" and after the manic honeymoon period, I found myself stuck between just a similar but shittier local maxima and despair. I've tried to understand this experience but it might just come down to this - that sufficient certainty in some level of security can't be overruled by attitude for too long.
> having nothing but one thing and that one thing isn't working out
After my experience I started to think about my life like a house supported by many pillars. It can withstand one pillar completely breaking, or a few in state of disrepair. But if there's only one or two to begin with (or if most are in disrepair), then when the next one breaks it all comes tumbling. And I might incorrectly attribute my problems to that pillar, when really it's the lack of others.
It's true that in our limited lifespans we will always have to choose trade-offs, but the current choice between crushing poverty vs crushing workload is not a natural one; it's contrived. most of us should be working fewer hours in the modern economy and have more leisure/creativity time.
personally, I've made it my goal as a SWE to get a 4-day work week and/or shorter work days. even if it means a pay tradeoff. maybe I'd even get back to coding fun things.
I wish more people realized this. But then again, my goal 20 years ago was to have a lifestyle that could be enabled by a job in a coffee shop. Now I look back and wonder what happened :-)
Part time work week + fully remote is the dream for me
I don't want to spend my whole life working to make more money than I realistically am ever going to spend just to save enough to retire just to die a month into my retirement.
Maybe for you it's only the shape of life that is the difference. But personally it was the quality of the things that filled that shape. Those tradeoffs weren't obvious at the beginning (ex: the kind of coding gigs that let me work 20h wks were boring as shit and dead ends).
Best of luck. There's a balance out there for everyone.
Personally I haven't ever worked anywhere the problems were super stimulating or interesting and mostly have worked in fairly dead end places. My advancement has been almost 100% from changing companies, which is kind of a tedious grind.
I think I would prefer to find somewhere that pays enough to support my home and needs, and have more free time.
I also suspect you were earning more with those 20 hours than I am now, since I'm low 6figs (in CAD no less) and 40+ hours a week.
But you are definitely right, it could be the grass is greener.
I hope you find it. Some folks are a good match for what I had. A best friend just got there and is an infinitely better fit (doesn't really care about work, has lots of hobbies, enjoys moving around, has community)
It works and is useful for me already, but without the time needed to polish it and add more content, won't be that useful to other people.
One can dream.
Lots of us have side biz, or are working on something important to us, and we often think our product is better than the leaders of the industry. Heck, from a data/math point of view, mine is the best, without a question. I just don't have the charisma or connections to make it the number 1.
I know my output(science) is going to last beyond my lifetime, even if I'm not nationally popular. I have academics and international leaders reading my work. Good enough for me.
t. Dayjobber
Unfortunately, I have found similar. A prime example I feel is Reddit mods, who all do it for free and spend countless hours moderating a community. In fact powermods, the most influential ones, were moderating a decent handful of communities. There wasn’t necessarily any reason for them to be in power specifically other than they had the time and desire for that power. No real need to interact with the community or even know what they were saying, as long as you could remove enough low quality content to retain your position.
Successful languages don't become successful without a rich ecosystem behind them. The people responsible for those projects are probably more important to your continued success than anyone contributing to the language itself.
What processes you have makes a huge difference in terms of who you give power to. If you have formal processes that ensure that folks have time to weigh in on things, and you make it easy to follow what's going on (signal-to-noise ratio is important here!), you can get much more relevant feedback from a much larger and more important group of stakeholders than if you handle things in a noisy, fast-moving zulip.
New York? A city founded on repeated waves of immigration. The city that put "give us your tired masses" on a big statue in the harbor. New York is not a city setup for locals. It is and has always been a dynamic city for new people doing new things. Being "local" isn't the advantage it is in other areas.
Seems wishful thinking that New York would owe something to anybody that grew up there. If anything, growing up there should give you the opportunity to have a network already, that would be a local's leg up... from kids you grew up with, to people you practiced music with etc.
This might also be a case of a naive perspective from Billy thinking that the work is all that matters. Nope. Having connections also matters. Do you know bar owners? Do you know venues? Have you done someone a favor that they can pay back? That should be the a "local kid's" advantage. Maybe Billy just didn't form those connections or capitalize on that.
Beyond not feeling bad for taking a side-job, maybe the advice should have been: Network. Get out there, meet people, do favors for people, help them and get help back eventually.
The blogger's point is that the game is rigged to the point where if you're not That Guy, you can gtfo. The reality is that there are now millions of international rich kids bringing their parents money to outbid you for that crumbling walkup. So don't feel bad about not being able to compete in this ultra-stacked game without working another job, young musician.
“While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”
A unique paragraph. People fall in love with a story they’ve never been apart of, never will be apart of, that is told by people who only caught of glimpse of it.
Big cities have priced out any culture that is not either subsidized somehow (e.g. trust fund) or already established.
I’d argue that many have even priced out entrepreneurship that is not lavishly funded by VC or founder capital.
My generation (I am on the young gen-X / old millennial cusp) believed, with some truth, that one had to go to one of maybe six to ten cities to do anything cutting edge in most fields. For young people today I don’t think this is true anymore, and if anything these cities have become traps that will destroy your ability to become established.
As would be predicted by the “law of rent,” real estate costs have grown so as to soak up any advantage in being in these places.
Activism takes time and resources to be successful and get your name out, and the moral status attached to it creates a similar set of incentives such that you end up with the same pattern of lifers who are perpetually broke, independently wealthy folks who can be heavily involved and live decently at the same time, and folks with a dayjob who are involved but never really wield much influence on any level.
It's an interesting problem and I'd argue it serves as evidence that this happens to anything with attached status. Journalism I've heard has the issue as well.
Reminds me of that quote. Rilke, a poet, was an apprentice to, Auguste Rodin, a sculptor, who taught Rilke how to be an artist. Although different disciplines, the nature of creativity and its manifestations are the same.
A quick check of the suicide statistics shows that many have confessed this to themselves.
Why is it somehow bad that musicians need a day job? There are a lot of aspiring musicians out there compared to the audiences waiting for them to perform. A day job is a quite reasonable way to make sure they contribute something to society while we’re waiting to see if they are truly talented or not.
Would we have the same feelings about the “rigged” brewing industry that doesn’t give a young brewer a chance to develop his craft? After a certain point it seems like we’re forgetting that a job is about a contribution to society, not just an expression of some inner identity.
At least until the robots and AI take the wheel.
Several years ago I was mulling starting up a retail store in my town and when I looked closer at some of retail stores I liked in similar/adjacent markets I couldn't help but notice the backgrounds of the young founders of those stores, that they just so happened to come from enormously rich families and were obviously independently wealthy.
Their outwardly appearing successful stores may have well been simple hobbies and passion projects.
Possibly these persons were also great business persons and those stores were genuine profitable successes, but there was really no way of knowing. It was something that did dissuade me somewhat from my idea of venturing down the same path.
I absolutely did not have the sort of infinite safety net that they had.
What's the point of it all if you can't invest in your loved ones? Are you a bad person for loving your kids more then some other random kid that they would be competing against? I fail to see anything bad about this.
If you refuse to help other people’s children get an education, you’re evading taxes and that is unethical.
I went to a wealthy private high school. 15 years later, most of the children from wealthy parents didn't amount to much. The top 50% work a high level role at their parent's company (probably taking the job from someone more skilled). At worst, they are still supported by their parents in their 30s, career-less. Only the top 5% multiplied their parent's wealth.
The money spent on private education could have been used to support low-income students, which would reduce crime and create a more powerful middle-class.
If I could change the tax code I would cut income taxes (why discourage work?) but jack up taxes on inheritances/gifts.
UBI is this generation's fusion - it's going to be 10 years away until the late 2070s, if at all.
Pilots have been done all over the place [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
It would cause lots of things to increase in price that are currently priced low simply because someone's parents happened to be from a poorer country that did not speak English, and so on and so forth.
Without that, the benefits of UBI can never be observed.
I mean, that's you changing the definition of what a pilot is. Have you looked into how they were conducted in those countries and how they determine success/failure?
Only once all the lowest paid workers (who ostensibly are doing their job because they have no other option) can drop their jobs and negotiate better compensation can the effects of UBI be seen.
2030 is much too soon for UBI to be an established norm, and even more much to soon for economies to support it at a level which would radically change this dynamic rather than just mitigating perverse incentives that exist at the edges of means-tested poverty support programs.
You say it yourself: If UBI is introduced, then none of the hard jobs gets done.
UBI enables meritocracy, it doesn’t kill it.
Another way to think of it is as a negative income tax - as a simple example the equation could be ((income * 0.2) - 20000), so if you make no money you get 20k, if you make 100k you pay no taxes and get nothing, if you make 200k you owe 20. This is using a flat tax rate for simplicity but then everyone get taxes 20% and everyone gets 20k. It's similar to public school - everyone pays for it and everyone gets it, but the purpose is to ensure it's there for people that wouldn't be able to afford it privately.
As another way to think about it - do bonuses disincentivize workers? At least personally that just makes me want to do more because it's freeing up a bunch of mental energy I need to spend on finances, and then I can focus on important things aside from basic survival
I don't personally know anyone that would opt for 20k/yr over their current salary, but I know several people making over 250k that want to make more to drive their sense of societal value.
I don't agree with it, but if you want to maintain the threat of poverty to force labor you can still do that with UBI
$20k is not quite enough, but I can tell you that I lived the life of my dreams on $25k a year from 2016-2018. If I could guarantee that lifestyle forever I would take it over my current $300k+ job in a microsecond.
But government policy (even that notionally of a Constitutional character, which most UBI proposals wouldn’t be) isn’t a permanent guarantee (see abortion rights for a recent example), and if that was really true, it doesn’t take long living a $25k lifestyle on a $300k income to be able to save and make yourself a firmer guarantee of a $25k lifestyle forever than government policy would ever do.
Approximately no one does it, because as much as people making lots of money might rhetorically appeal to the attractiveness of such an idea, no one actually making that money now feels it enough to act on it.
The people who would be content to rely on minimal poverty support are, largely, doing that already, since we have such programs now and they have a much stronger disincentive to additional income than would exist with UBI due to means testing, which takes benefits away rapidly (sometimes more than 1:1) with additional income.
It's much harder to live a $25k lifestyle while working a demanding full-time job than it is while having all your time free, though.
- You can choose a low cost of living area.
- You have plenty of time to cook all your own meals.
- You can fix your own car.
- You can travel during off-times when prices are lower.
And so on.
Almost certainly the same number as are making 200k now that cease additional effort beyond what is necessary to make 20k, i.e., 0.
Probably even at lower levels more people would work (at least in the open economy paying full taxes) than dobcurrently, since pushing any clawback of benefits from the low levels and high marginal rates that they kick in with means tested benefit programs to somewhere higher on the income spectrum at a lower marginal additional rate reduces the disincentive to additional work compared to the status quo.
I don't think so, because making $20k usually requires much more than 10% of the time and effort needed to make $200k.
A lot of people making 200k+ have grown accustomed to the kind of lifestyle that income enables (nice house, nice car, nice restaurants, foreign vacations, sending their kids to private school, etc)-and couldn’t afford to keep doing that on 20k. Given the choice between 200k job and 200k lifestyle, and no job and 20k lifestyle, I think the majority of people already accustomed to the first option would choose to continue in it. Also, a lot of people on 200k+ already have more than 20k of savings/investments, so if they are willing to run those down, they could choose the no job/20k lifestyle today, no need to wait for UBI-yet few do.
Most people don’t settle for poverty level income if additional effort provides a better standard of living, and UBI increases the degree to which that is true compared to means-tested aid programs (which is why, under a different name, it was proposed as a right-libertarian alternative to such programs long before becoming popular on the left.)
Edit: And of course, what would be the motivating factor for someone to give their best possible work, if the other 12 guys in their position get paid the same for less quality work?
UBI gives that to everyone, giving everyone a shot at developing their merit.
The merit comes from people being able to take risks that otherwise only the wealthy could do
2. "what would be the motivating factor" They don't, UBI is not communism. And what you say is already true at many places, and the world is still turning. The motivating factor, with UBI, is the same without it: to achieve more. UBI would just let you not fall into homelessness and / or under the poverty threshold.
I really do like the idea of a country keeping all of its citizens above the poverty line though. If UBI isn't the way, then some other way - maybe providing goods and meals instead of money? Taking a page from the Sikh's book.
How do you figure? Why wouldn’t landlords, businesses, etc just adjust their prices based on the UBI amount. They’ll be happy to collect more money courtesy of the taxpayers.
The same reason why they don’t capture all income now: “landlords, businesses, etc.” aren’t one single monopolistic entity, there is price competition in markets for necessities that aren't regulated public utilities. There may at times be (natural or artificial) supply constraints in one or anothet market, but those are (1) separate issues from UBI, and (2) natural poison points which create political pressure for resolution.
UBI isn’t “no one gets paid on top of UBI for value delivered”. UBI does nothing to limit that motivation.
Meritocracy is already dead (if it existed in the first place).
As for a career, other people finding your work so valuable that they're willing to pay you $$$$ for it is the ultimate compliment.
This seems kinda backwards - UBI gives people the ability to take more risks. Success is mostly determined by how many bets you're able to make, and UBI lets people place more bets. There's plenty of people that would want to start a business but don't have parents able to loan or gift them the money. You'd be opening up more possibilities for people, and people naturally want to do useful things. I'm not sure what hard jobs you're imagining but anything valued by society will still get done because people want to see themselves as valuable.
I think the confusion here is because you have a false premise that there is a meritocracy now - UBI is something that could help us get towards a meritocracy. Right now it doesn't matter how good you would be at something if you can't afford to do it
In a true meritocracy everyone must have the same starting point and rise up within the ranks based on their merits from there. In our society we do not all start at the same place. There are people born into wealth and people born into poverty. So some people have to struggle harder to get to the same place as others where born into. Essentially an anti-meritocracy system.
If anything UBIs will help make the system more meritocratic since the ones the bottom no longer need to climb the first hill.
So is having a rich family. The article provides a long list of examples of great artists who's success is largely enabled by already being wealthy, not necessarily being the best. Even just being lucky enough to already be established puts you far ahead of people trying to break in. I can walk out the door and likely find a job in my industry because I have lots of experience to point to and references who will vouch for me. I think I'm good at my job, but I was also in the right place at the right time to get it and now I'm a safe bet for someone who needs my skills, even if I'm not the best bet. Someone who's trying to break in that's ten times more talented than me might never catch that break. I know for a fact that I've hired lesser candidates because I needed someone who was a known quantity more than I needed someone who was possibly great.
Meritocracy is pretty far down the list as a factor of success in my experience.
There's also an economic side to this: Higher skill most often has higher costs, so it would not be rational to overshoot in a business setting.
In an Art setting higher skill very rarely commands a higher price. At least for the Visual Arts (painting, sculpture, etc) producer skill is hardly the most requested property. IOW it's mostly a matter of provenience and history of the artwork in question, not much the skill required to produce it. Also, for Music, Visual Arts, Performative Arts (excluding Sports!) personal preferences seem to dictate a substantially larger proportion of the price level than performer competence.
Unless the work is paid highly enough for people to take the job, no? What prevents a company from raising wages?
How does UBI kill meritocracy?
> none of the hard jobs gets done.
Hard jobs that society doesn't value won't get done by humans, but hard jobs that society does value will certainly get done. UBI does not remove free markets, and if anything increases the reward of working hard if large swaths of the labor force do decide to drop out.
> how should you be expected to earn a living using their platforms unless you find a way to game the system? Do you have 20 smartphones lying around, per chance?
This is the message I'd take away. Once you learn that the whole capitalist hellscape operates in approximately the same way, you can start to explicitly target its mechanisms in order to improve your life.
Having moral flexibility helps so much. Being actively willing to "fuck over" arbitrary, faceless entities makes all the difference. If you start looking at the law in terms of "how much does it cost to do whatever I want", then you are now effectively playing by the same rules as those who seek to control your life.
the GP hit the nail on the head saying,
> If you start looking at the law in terms of "how much does it cost to do whatever I want", then you are now effectively playing by the same rules as those who seek to control your life.
laws are for the powerless.
if you really think the kingdom can be neatly divided into wolverines, nuthatches, and happy people on one side, and "honorable" people on the other side, you do you. aren't you amazed that an animal like me can argue with you though?
Like I said, each of us gets to make that choice.
An observation - many people brag about things like cheating in school "because everybody does it", or other excuses. When other people hear these, they smile and nod and move them to the "do not trust" list in their heads. The cheaters unwittingly miss out on a lot of opportunities that way.
But understanding that doesn't give you any power back. Knowing that you can just pay large fines to do illegal business things doesn't help someone who isn't running a business or can afford to pay those large fines
It allows you to maybe optimize for a different state within the system, but that state will still be one that you are "allowed" to optimize for.
Knowing the casino is rigged does not give you the ability to beat the house. It only allows you to better decide to go home, but in reality there's no equivalent to "going home".
There is also the fact that many things you could be fined for aren't worth it if you're small enough not to be a threat. Most of those threats come from other companies holding you to the flame, not from public institutions.
Follow the rules enforced by public institutions, but take risks when it's not worth it for private institutions to complain.
That said, if you don't have money for multiple years of expenses, it doesn't help you much directly.
I think you are mostly reacting to GP's word choice of "moral flexibility," and are missing the point.
Do the moral thing, but view the legal as pay-to-play.
A great example is parking tickets. Violating parking rules results in a fine and is not immoral in many situations.
I understand and agree with that.
"Having moral flexibility helps so much. Being actively willing to "fuck over" arbitrary, faceless entities makes all the difference. If you start looking at the law in terms of "how much does it cost to do whatever I want", then you are now effectively playing by the same rules as those who seek to control your life."
This clearly advocates no honor at all. It is not dishonorable to not follow an unjust law (such as a law requiring you to inform on your neighbors), but it is dishonorable to be a cheater because others are cheating.
and please define what honor means to you in this conversation, we've moved too far past pithiness.
They are the same. You said it yourself: STEALING
Doing something that negatively impacts their stock price could be categorized as "stealing" from a billionaire. Is that really stealing?
Purposely infringing on a company's trademarks/copyrights/marketing/etc (I don't mean pirating movies/books/etc) to gain publicity/get started could be called stealing from that company. But I don't consider that immoral in the slightest.
There often isn't simple terminology for discussing these differences, so people use shortcuts like this.
> Doing something that negatively impacts their stock price could be categorized as "stealing" from a billionaire. Is that really stealing?
No. There isn't much of a grey area around stealing.
> not meant to be literal
What's amusing when people try to reframe stealing as "liberating", or "getting paid", meaning they know it's dishonorable.
Such is the case when I'm talking about subjects I have practical experience in but little formal knowledge of.
A friend of mine years ago worked at Microsoft. He noticed that one of his colleagues was pilfering things in the office, and when asked about it said it was ok to steal from Microsoft because it was a wealthy company. One day, he found a stack of 4 hubcaps on his chair. He asked around, and my friend said "oh, I put those on your chair. I figured I'd give you a hand so you don't have to steal hubcaps from the parking lot." He got the message and that was the end of the pilfering.
I disagree with this. Cheating can be moral or immoral. Cheating just means not following the rules. At least as often as not, the rules are meant to maintain the status quo or benefit the existing organizations.
Terms of Service (TOS) are great examples of this. Companies blatantly stick in illegal terms just because they can since it's expensive to challenge them. I don't want you to do this, so I will make unfair rules in my favor.
That said, I agree with the sentiment, but it's too reductive to allow the creativity needed in problem-solving to compete against entities that have many times the resources.
When you agree to follow the rules, and then cheat, that is dishonorable. Even if everyone else does it (the Lance Armstrong defense).
What's your word worth to you?
How could you even square that view with something like the civil disobedience of Gandhi or MLK Jr.?
When I'm in a situation where one party is able to make demands unilaterally, then my word is worthless. And I will gleefully disregard portions of these agreements.
On the other hand, when all parties have at least some consideration, my word is worth its weight in gold.
That's a pretty sad thing to say.
> How could you even square that view with something like the civil disobedience of Gandhi or MLK Jr.?
Did they break rules they freely agreed to? I don't think so.
It's not dishonorable to do things forced to do at gunpoint.
My dad taught me the importance of being honest early on. It was very important to him and it's important to me. I teach my kids the same thing.
If you're a dishonest person, everyone will know it and treat you accordingly. It'll be the first thing out of someone's mouth when asked about you. It's not a shortcut. Even though some people can win that way, most don't.
They can include literally anything they come up with and often, with enough time and rewriting, make it sound fair and equitable.
How do you propose addressing that? You can't be on the rules-making groups of every institution you participate in.
Tell me what standard of conduct do you ascribe to if fairness or equity aren't included? It sounds like you have an unrealistically strict definition of honor if those aren't included.
I never said that being honorable was the only thing I aspire to. Fairness and equity are different topics. It shares some aspects with morality, but is not interchangeable with morality.
Honor is things like keeping your word. Not taking things from others that aren't yours. Not trying to trick or force others into doing things. Not being abusive towards others. Not betraying a confidence. Not cheating.
Is dishonesty such a hard concept?
Doing the moral thing in many of those situations requires going against the laws or rules of those unjust systems. In other words, it requires cheating for the purpose of changing the system.
Civil rights disobedience, Gandhi's fight for independence in India, fighting against monopolies, and unionizing all require rejecting others' rules or laws which you feel are immoral.
If you go around telling people that it's fine to steal from them, do you think they'll consider doing business with you? I wouldn't.
I had a conversation once with the contractor who was fixing my roof. He said that he'd have a customer now and then who didn't pay. He said the roofing contractors all knew each other, and they kept a list of those customers and would refuse to bid on jobs for them.
I’m not saying wealthy people can’t make incredible artists. Without Marcel Duchamp’s monthly allowance from his father throughout his adult life, we would never have Dada. Giacinto Scelsi was literally the heir and Duke of La Spezia castle estate. Something more contemporary? Grimes’ mother was a Crown Prosecutor, the Canadian equivalent of a District Attorney, in Vancouver. Frankie Cosmos’ dad is the guy from Wild Wild West, no, not Will Smith, the other guy. Julian Casablancas’ father ran New York’s top super modeling agency while young Julian hung out at the kid’s table with Ivanka Trump at Christmas time. The list goes on.
The argument is supposed to be that these kids didn't have to worry about paying the rent, so they were able to devote more time to their craft. But I don't think some of the contemporary examples listed were necessarily like that.
Take Grimes -- a Crown Prosecutor is a public servant, so you can look up their average pay ranges: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/careers-myhr/all-employee... . That's definitely a solid middle class life, but not exactly generational wealth. Now, compared to a poor kid who has to take on jobs in high school to support their family, I'm sure she had more time and less stress in her teenage years which let her practice more, but there are lots and lots of middle class children who have that level of free time which they devote to all sorts of extracurriculars.
Moreover, Grimes, Casablancas, and Cosmos blew up when they were in their very early 20s: Cosmos released her debut studio album at 20, Grimes at 22, Casablancas at 23. So, despite any family wealth they may have had, it's not like they spent years and years of their adult lives living off their parents' support, or at least not any more so than hundreds of thousands of college students do every year. Of course, they had it easier than kids who cannot even afford to go to college, or who are working 20 hours a week to pay their way, but I'm not sure it's at all comparable to Duchamp or Scelsi.
Maybe there's an argument that social connections helped them to get their record deals, but the argument presented doesn't seem to apply.
However, success is never just one thing. Because there are plenty of people with the same or greater level of support that Grimes had that never make it.
But the point is that there are plenty of people as talented or more than Grimes who achieve no success at all.
Success is more often than not the result of avoiding catastrophic issues than it is from anything you actively choose. And the more chances you have to try, the more chances you have of doing something that avoids catastrophe.
Hard work, support, talent, luck, determination, these will all help you, but none of them will guarantee you success. Not singularly or in combination.
No doubt she's had a good life, but Devon Welsh was himself basically a nobody when they dated, and she was already extremely successful as an artist by the time she became Elon's partner.
It's just strange of the author to pick someone who had already released two studio albums during her time as a student at McGill as a supposed example of someone being able to succeed because their parents paid their bills for an interminable amount of time. This is after a paragraph where the author said:
> Who paid for all this time? How does someone outside of a conservatory program have the time to compose, record, and perform new original material every month, let alone to even practice their instrument an hour a day? The answer almost always comes down to the ability to not have to worry about paid work while pursuing your craft. As in, most likely, someone in your family pays your rent.
The answer, in the case of Grimes, is she was a college student, probably neglecting her studies a bit, being supported the way many college students or even people in conservatories are.
Failure wouldn't even be a blip on her radar at any point in her life. I really can't see at any point in her life where something had to work in order for her to survive.
Which is the case for a lot of people. They have to do things that are lower risk because losing that bet means you're simply fucked. You can take the 1 in 1 million chance you become a successful recording artist or you can take the 100 in 1 chance you get a job to sustain yourself. If your survival is the thing that is at stake, the smart play is to take the job. If you'd survive no matter what, you not only take the 1 in a million shot, you take it as often as you can.
Be like Einstein, make the post office work for you. Maybe that's a better way of thinking about it?
Obviously as this article mentions its not great for the artists themselves, but perhaps the cutthroat nature of the industry makes it so that only the best of the best rise to the top, even if it means it comes from an independently wealthy musician.
So, not to be brutal, but playing music is not an especially valuable thing, and so people really don't need to pay much for it. Ditto for writing books, making ceramics, pretty much anything artistic.
I say this not to be a dick, but simply to point out the economics. When a million other people can do what you do, and live in the same city, then don't expect to make much of a living at it.
Sure there are exceptions (hi Taylor) but that has less to do with actual music and more to do with other factors.
They aren't. So it's not a commodity. Because that's what commodity means.
You could let your playlist run for years, but you don't and nobody else does either because repetition and familiarity and quality are things people care about musically.
Playing music well in a way that is liked by millions is an unbelievably valuable thing. Playing music badly is utterly worthless from an economic standpoint.
I'm actually a big fan of pop music, but that doesn't mean that non-pop is financially unsuccessful because it's "bad", it's just not put into the marketing machine because it very well may be too good.
It's not really about marketing. Everyone thinks that and they're wrong. You learn this instantly when you are actually in the business and see all the artists and projects that get the exact same amount of marketing effort as the massive hits and go literally fucking nowhere.
It's like home run batting, even the best in the world at picking and promoting music are lucky to have like a 10-20% success rate.
Audiences have a mind of their own, they like what they like. The problem people have with understanding this is usually that they don't like the same thing that mass audiences like, and they consider what they do like higher quality. So in their minds the masses are being duped, marketed to.
Which is true to a point, they are being marketed to. And having resources and labels and monopolies behind you can definitely expose you to more people. But it's not enough, at all, if people don't respond to it. And conversely, if you have no resources whatsoever it's way harder, but it's not impossible at all and stuff that really has wide appeal most of the time really does bubble up and catch attention pretty quickly.
Mass market success is basically a crap shoot and doesn't really reflect the quality of the musician. You said:
> Playing music badly is utterly worthless from an economic standpoint.
And that's not true at all, being a virtuoso is pretty much worthless from an economic standpoint. It's pointless to try to equate skill to economic success because in pop art they don't have anything to do with each other. It's all about marketing and distribution. Not to say that the studio musicians that make the pop music aren't virtuosos, but they're definitely playing simplified songs.
My point is just that some music is incredibly valuable economically, and most is not worth anything at all.
Which is clearly true.
As such, music is not an interchangeable commodity it's an extremely idiosyncratic and heterogenous market.
I've heard the argument about how nobody cares about "better" music and so on my whole life. It's like the thing people like to talk about. But it's kind of boring, there's no definition of better that everyone is going to agree on.
For example I think Pitbull fucking sucks, deeply and profoundly, and objectively. When he rhymes Kodak with Kodak in the song "Give Me Everything" I want to throw rocks or other durable objects at whatever speaker is subjecting me to that fucking song. Somehow, 12 years after its release, this is still happening to me on a regular basis, usually within the first 2-4 hours after entering the state of Florida.
But people seem to like it. So that's the only actually objective way to determine the value of music. All the other ways are just people talking.
I agree. Part of that is that economically successful music also isn't "better", it's just making money. I like Madonna but she's an objectively crap singer. Just because something is popular, it doesn't make it good. That's like saying Coke is the best drink in the world because it makes the most money. Commercial success is due to marketing, distribution and luck.
But we're back here. I still disagree with this, it's a poor analysis of what's actually happening.
In music, commercial success, more than any other factor, comes from making music that is liked by large numbers of people.
If you can make music like that you'll probably have commercial success.
Most bands never have a chance to see if their music is liked by a large number of people because they don't have that kind of distribution. Through the 20th century the labels created a distribution network into which they pump hand selected artists (that match their marketing channels demographics). They, like you say, have roughly a 1 in 10 chance of success with this model (like vcs). Most bands will never know if their music will be popular because the won't get signed to find out.
Most bands never get signed because nobody likes them. They play a gig to fifty people in March and when they play the same place in June twenty people show up. By fall it's just girlfriends and siblings and by the following year they're working as a roofer or something.
Artists make demos of their music and send them to people and those people don't like them, and don't play them over and over and don't share them with friends, and it never reaches the ears of people with influence because nobody cares, because it has no real connection or mass appeal.
Conversely, artists that do have mass appeal get attention very very quickly. I've been around awhile, I started working professionaly in the music business in the late 1980's. So much has changed, back then it was true that distribution mattered a lot more. In the 90's corporate radio mattered a lot more. In the 2010's you had a much clearer shot via Youtube or similar. So yeah there's substantial change in how it all works.
The basic core part is the same though. Most music doesn't even have a small chance of being genuinely popular. Because it's the kind of music that isn't really liked by mass audiences.
You're saying this:
> Most bands will never know if their music will be popular because the won't get signed to find out.
That's not true. Those bands do know that their music will not be popular. They just don't know why.
I've been to tons of packed clubs with unsigned bands. I've seen absolutely amazing musicians who don't even play live, just give lessons...
The "band as a brand" is a 20th century anachronism that equates commercial success with "goodness".
...and from another post
> will bubble up...
Excuse me for being blunt but this is way too simplistic and the world does not work like that. Artists (= suppliers in over-crowded markets) don't just "get discovered". An artist has a job, and that job is definitely not marketing, sales, public relations, or really anything other than doing their thing.
If artists were left to their own devices they would happily rot in their basements, attics and/or garden sheds and die in anonymity. The (potential) audience needs some way to actually discover said artist _before_ they can even form an opinion on likes/dislikes. And, the market is over-saturated with extremely good artists, globally. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of artists. Only, 99.999% plus is not known by anyone except perhaps their near social circle and/or relatives.
An artist without an agent or an agency* (proper marketing and networking etc) is just a random person with a creative hobby.
* added: Or patron
It's not really about the quantity of marketing effort, it's a butterfly effect. Of all the marketing effort that is put in, it might be the tiniest thing that makes the difference, it's not a linear relationship.
Commodity has a very specific meaning in economics.
You can very easily tell that a Taylor swift song and a local jazz song are not the same song. They are not interchangeable. If someone replaced some songs in your playlists, you would notice. Therefore, not a commodity.
I don't think this is true.
In the Spotify world, people have playlists where the songs sound similar to a certain song or band, rather than a hand curated one.
Some are more valuable or desirable than others, but if you want fruit and you can't get what you want, you substitute with something else.
Music has a lot more variety than fruit, and some varieties are much more valuable, but still. If you're thinking about a career in music, realistic goals are going to be in education, maybe session musician, live music at entertainment venues (theme parks, cruise ships), maybe symphony; maybe something in support of music like a sound tech at a venue, etc. Being a headlining act is a career, but not a lot of people get to do that.
> You could let your playlist run for years, but you don't and nobody else does either because repetition and familiarity and quality are things people care about musically.
I mean, I typically listen to a specific internet radio station and it feels like they have let their playlists stagnate, but I still listen to it. So I wouldn't say nobody does. They've been down for the last two days though, currently listening to a local radio station with similar tastes (but they're constantly adding new music to their catalog).
An apple (or type of apple, to be specific) can be a commodity because I don't care or who which orchard made the apple, and I am completely indifferent to the apples of various orchards when I go to the supermarket.
Recorded music isn't like that, at all.
I care if the song is Fly Me To The Moon sung by Frank Sinatra or Stairway to Heaven sung by Frank Oz using the voice of Kermit the Frog.
Some products are commodities. Some aren't. The word has an actual substantive meaning.
You're not understanding how some people use music. Does the supermarket care who the artist is? Not really. Do I care who the artist is? Not really, I just need dance music to keep part of my mind occupied so I can get into the zone easier; saccharine vocals help too, no substance please.
Every movie, every scene. Same song in the background.
Every first dance at a wedding, same song.
Before a baseball game, standup and put your hand on your heart, same song.
You’re indifferent right?
I'd probably just stop listening to music at that point. Or find some work where they're still running large collated copy jobs; those copy machines make some good beats.
In fact if you told me that my understanding of physics was wrong, and that I had in fact only eaten one banana ever in my life, which had been reconstituted and delivered to me each time, I wouldn’t have anything to say. Because I wouldn’t be able to tell if that was true.
Because bananas are all the fucking same from a practical standpoint.
That’s what a commodity looks like.
I think it's useful to bisect music into commodity/non-commidty categories.
Category 1 is things like Taylor swift's music which is not a commodity.
Category 2 is the music playing on lofi hip hop radio[0] is a commodity. 28,000 people are listening to the music on that channel as I type this and and approximately zero people know or care who made that music. The specific song basically doesn't matter so long as it fits the genre and meets a quality bar. They're analogous to handmade rugs - all slightly different but not in a way the consumer cares about.
So far as I can tell, most music that gets made is treated like it's in this second category: Generic Genre X song. Producing something that manages to break out of this commodity status is deeply unusual.
In anecdotal support of this, I often go to venues to listen to "bluegrass" (category 1) in much the same way I go out to buy an apple. I want the bluegrass to be good, just as I want good tasting apples, but the particular purveyor does not really matter unless it's someone special like the Punch Brothers (category 2).
It's like saying Michelin-starred restaurants are a commodity.
They aren't.
Once they are on that list they might be sort of interchangeable to a specific sort of person who just wants a generic "nice" restaurant and picks one off the list when they get to a city.
But they're all unique and different in really substantive ways, and also different from non-Michelin starred restaurants.
Your example of venues that hosts bluegrass works the same way. You trust the guy who books the bluegrass bands. If they just offered a gig to every band that asked you would hate going there and they'd close soon. Have you seen genuinely bad bluegrass? You don't like it, I can assure you of that.
You're just talking about curation. And the fact that curation is even possible proves what I'm saying.
If recorded music was a commodity there would only be one playlist because you would not be able to tell one playlist from the other.
Can your car tell Exxon from Sunoco? Can you drink a glass of milk and know which dairy it came from? Of course you can't.
THAT is what a commodity looks like.
Corn is a commodity too, but I buy my sweet corn exclusively from one of a few vendors growing varietals that I enjoy more than what I can get at a super market (the varietal can be sold on the futures markets).
One definition of a commodity is:
> a mass-produced unspecialized product
My claim is that most lo-fi hip hop (and other genres) really looks like it fits this definition. The songs are produced in their thousands and have differences in the same way honeycrisp apples have slightly different colors and sizes, but ultimately are interchangeable.
Any further than this feels like it's nitpicking at technical details. I cannot tell the difference between lo-fi hop hop playlist A and lo-fi hip hop playlist B because the differences in the songs are not meaningful to me.
Recorded music just like isn't a commodity. It's not close.
In fact, if you took a spectrum of all mass consumer products and ranked them from most like a commodity to least like a commodity recorded music would probably be on the side of least like a commodity.
It's not really an argument. Recorded music is not "kind of like" a commodity. There are tens of millions of recorded songs and literally every different iteration is wildly different, people consider some of them literal core elements of what gives their life meaning while other examples of the exact same product they have a visceral and intense hatred for.
We have a basic disagreement on facts here. My experience of the world is that very few songs have any substantial difference from the world as 1,000 other songs. With a small number of songs having the properties you describe. They are different in the way the patterns on the skin of an apple are different. Utterly unique, but not in a way that matters to consumers.
Diamonds are, perhaps, a good analogy here. Diamonds below a certain carat size are a commodity. They're ground up by the ton and sold for use in a variety of products at a cheap price (category 1 songs). Larger diamonds are not a commodity - a 45 carat diamond might be considered a national treasure (category 2 songs).
No, because ...
> Can your car tell Exxon from Sunoco? Can you drink a glass of milk and know which dairy it came from? Of course you can't.
I can't, and yet Exxon and Sunoco both exist.
Commmmodity:
"In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them."[0]
Fungibility:
"In economics, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable, and each of whose parts are indistinguishable from any other part" [1]
"Fungibility refers only to the equivalence and indistinguishability of each unit of a commodity with other units of the same commodity, and not to the exchange of one commodity for another."
Music _is_ a commodity when one item (a song) is _perceived_ so similar to another item that their value _in_the_given_context_ is _perceived_ as equal by a consumer (the case for one poster below).
If a consumer assigns equal value (not preference, value) to Song A and Song B then these two are commodities because they are _interchangeable_ in some context. Both are "fit for purpose"
On the other hand, if the consumer does not want to replace Artist A with Band B then these are not interchangeable, and as they are not interchangeable they are not commodities either (the case of another poster below).
So, the customer is always right. Ie, commodity or not is a matter of context.
I hope this helps.
I'm not particularly partial to what comes up. There's obviously a degree of quality that I'm expecting in order to keep the experience smooth and a set of genre and musical conventions I'm expecting.
I wouldn't say that's exactly commodified, no, but I definitely feel like my engagement with the difference between Taylor Swift and some other well-produced halfway reasonable pop artist is pretty minimal. At least in that act of listening.
I used to care a lot more about this. I used to keep up with my favorite artists and look forward to their releases excitedly. Now, I feel everything is such a continuous stream of mild-novelty that I'm less attuned to these differences.
So in that sense, I think I agree with the grandparent in that something feels interchangeable and indifferent about music. I don't want to pay a ton for it, even as someone who used to love buying albums. Or, at least, the times when I engage with music in that way seem fewer and further apart.
Music seems to serve two purposes. The majority of my listening is unintentional, background listening. Much more rarely am I more engaged in the experience. Only in those latter times do I feel all that attuned to a difference in quality.
Now, instead of using an algorithm of music selected by a mass market service that is playing you an endless stream of songs that are proven to have a large audience, try listening to the raw feed of uploaded music to major services.
Like the literal feed coming in that is just a firehose of every major label, all the indie releases uploaded via Distrokid or similar, and so on.
You'd find it instantly unlistenable. Nobody wants that because it sucks. Most music, even music people have taken very seriously, has almost no appeal to anyone at all.
I don't know a term for that other than commodity, but sure, it's not the strict definition in economics. Please suggest an alternative word if you know it.
Which is to say, it's not.
That's the point.
There's no fashion choices in West Texas Crude or Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil. Those are commodities. Each producer of the product produces an indistinguishable result from each other producer. You are producer indifferent. Most of the time you don't even have a way of knowing who produced the commodity you're consuming.
Fashion, music, cars, hotels, laptops, and many other things aren't that.
You care if it's Chanel, BMW, Hilton, Apple, or Taylor Swift, versus H&M, Honda, Motel 6, HP, or Metallica.
If an option were removed, something (not a random substitution, but eventually a substitute would be found) else would take its place and fulfill the same function even though it isn't the same it's close enough to fulfill the purpose.
That doesn’t make it a commodity, words have meanings.
The distinction is important.
The original thread here posited that music wasn’t a lucrative field because it’s an interchangeable commodity.
That’s just flat wrong. It’s the opposite. It’s not lucrative because it’s very highly differentiated and the popularity follows a power law distribution and you’re probably not in the top echelon.
But you could be. Which is why people try so hard.
That’s an entirely different analysis.
You could've avoided this whole digression by providing the word people were searching for and doing a mental search/replace then moving the conversation forward.
Something many musicians don't understand is that music is not primarily artistic nor technical but cultural.
Taylor is where she is because of an extraordinary amount of hard work (not sufficient by itself) an extraordinary amount of writing skill (not sufficient by itself), supporting parents who moved etc to maximise those skills (not suffcient by itself), an understanding of her audience (not sufficient by itself), some element of luck (persistence) and so on. Its not one thing that makes you stand out in music, its everything.
Sure if your definition of value is "income generated".
Of course there are other benefits to playing music (it's fun!) But the post was about doing it for money.
Between ww1 and ww2 military planes had a lifespan of a few years, tops. The Spitfire was conceived in the 30s, obsolete before the end of the 40s. [1] Today military planes have much longer lives, B52, F15, F16, A10 are all still in active service since the 70s or earlier.
I was lucky enough to have a career in the golden age of computing. The next generation will oversee the consolidation, and in 40 years time work in hardware, and software will be commodity jobs for a small handful of multinationals.
[1] prototype 1936, production 1938, 24 major upgrades in 9 years production ends 1947, retired by the RAF in 1954.
Frankly, at some level, software is already a commodity. Some markets have matured and it's increasingly unlikely you'll make a living there[2]. I needed a compass app on my phone the other day, there are a million to choose from, they're all free, and there's no way to differentiate one app that shows North from another.
We are currently in the phase of new platforms, and that helps. I've worked on DOS, Windows, Linux, Web and Mobile. Each platform asks for the existing work to be redone.
Once platforms settle down, once the library of work is big enough, and feature-complete enough [3] then the software development market will become very unvaluable. Itll exist, but it won't be a high-flying job.
[1] I use the term commodity here in the sense that it's interchangeable in use , not that they're identical. Cars are a commodity because they all perform their function (transport) while differentiating on more-or-less irrelevant details (Cup holders). Sure a 2023 car is "better" in a million ways, but a 2012 car does the transport job perfectly well. There was once 50 car manufacturers in a single town in the UK. Today there are a handful globally. It takes a new platform (Tesla) or a new market (China) to make anything new in this space.
[2] outside the odd viral game, which has its 15 minutes of popularity, you can't make money with a soley mobile app. You can make money with the app as an interface to a big backend system, but its the system making money not the app.
[3] in some cases it's already there. How many times are upgrades basically a collection of visual updates coupled with features nobody uses? We fiddle around the edges but most languages are interchangeable. Good luck making money in developer tools these days - novelty is not enough. Yes tool x is better than everything else, but so is tool y, z and a. Sure everyone has their favorite editor, but the reason we can't decide on vi or emacs Is because functionally they both do the editing job just fine.
I feel like these conversations often ignore the middle class of musicians that make a decent living gigging, touring, doing studio work, publishing with small labels, etc., but are not making huge money pumping out top 40 hits and filling stadiums.
I think that's proven false, by the existence of Marketing as a field. Deep pockets achieve that it's not the "best X" that reaches places, but whatever they are pushing is reaching places. Not 100% the case, but still, music production is so an industry, and it's arguable whether this is good for the artists - or the public, for that matter.
TL;DR the deeper the capitalism, the more exclusively the capital prevails
I have never had my rent paid for. I did not have a secret pile of cash or someone funding me.
"Everyone who made it when I couldn't was secretly wealthy" is an interesting take but it seems more like coping mechanism than reality.
Very different markets.
Your worldly achievements and accomplishments in code should not be compared to a version of you who indeed had a secret pile of cash or someone funding them and never had to sacrifice things for their art, who might have achieved more worldly things.
In contrast, I've been making music for over ten years of my life and have gotten paid a handful of times.
It's hard to make money being an artist.
The game is not rigged. It's not some death of meritocracy.
He sort of gets near an important idea when he talks about spotify leading to bandcamp sales, but then misses it: being a successful musician is about more than just playing an instrument, just like being a successful business person is about more than wearing a suit and holding meetings.