A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music
For all of human history, we&#x27;ve been making music and art.  And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money.<p>For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art.  Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter.<p>Then only in the last 100ish years has it been possible to make art for mass consumption (and mass money), but that&#x27;s only because of artificial scarcity.<p>Now that the scarcity is gone, we are back to patronage (see Patreon) and making money from the <i>performance</i> of music, by doing live shows and such.<p>I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not &quot;the way it should be&quot;.