“There is still money in music.”
For most people, no, there isn’t any real money. Crap wages. Music has become a commodity. Free music online everywhere. Glut of people wanting to perform with venues paying less and less. There is decent money for exceptional talent but not for most bands.
The market value of the product is ZERO. The industry is destroyed. As a former musician, my only hope is for Hollywood to soon suffer the same fate. It would be worth losing my former job to see them fall.
This was predicted in hundreds of articles in the late nineties written by musicians, economists, and computer journalists.
The Sun Records studio where Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins recorded their early records cost between three and five million dollars (depending on whether or not you counted rental instruments) at that time.
By nineteen ninety-eight a musician with technical ability could build a studio of equivalent quality and capability for about twenty-eight thousand dollars. In the twenty years since then the cost has plunged drastically.
The money that was in music depended on that towering wall of costs preventing everyone who simply wanted to be heard from taking a shot.
Now music is recorded by whoever wishes. A vast army of music lovers listens to new music and filters out the dreck (with scathing vulgar attacks on the music they don't like) through dedicated forums and social media.
Professional performers have to compete with talented amateurs who have a day job. And if you look back to before that first scratchy wax cylinder...we have come full circle.
All the kings horses, as it were.