A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music
For all of human history, we've been making music and art.  And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money.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.Then only in the last 100ish years has it been possible to make art for mass consumption (and mass money), but that's only because of artificial scarcity.Now that the scarcity is gone, we are back to patronage (see Patreon) and making money from the performance of music, by doing live shows and such.I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be".