Aspiring musicians appreciate the vast odds against them becoming the Next Big Thing. It takes an extremely young or naive person to believe that they will become a wild success off the back of some unpaid gigs or their YouTube channel.

In fact, most musicians that I know are rightly insistent on being paid for their performances and are suspicious of promoters and agents who are eager for them to gain exposure by playing for free.

Edit: Essentially there is a continuum of risk/reward between

* Consulting or creating a small and stable business (or, say, playing as a session musician)

* Buying lottery tickets.

I just don't think that people are always aware of where they are on that scale and it doesn't seem right to give people false impressions of where they and their ideas stand. Yeah I do sound like a grumpy sod :)

If an aspiring musician were only motivated by the chance of making it big, I would definitely tell them to stop trying. Not because they’re pursuing an irrational goal, but because that’s not sufficient motivation to get through all the shit it takes to have a chance at making it big in music.

Similarly with startups, if someone is only motivated by a huge exit then they won’t last through the years of low-success and failure that precede building a moderately successful business. Individual who succeed in these careers get some satisfaction out of the process and the small successes along the way (e.g. performing before ten people in a bar or having one potential customer get excited about your new product).

I read it more as he's telling aspiring musicians to not go all in on a <1% prospect, which doesn't seem all that nuts to me.

in order to pursue anything abnormal you need to keep looking for validations. A good validation for musicians is if listeners like and share their music. If there is potential then there is a way.