I went to music conservatories before getting into this industry.<p>At least for classical music. As a general rule, the people that get steady orchestra jobs that pay around 100k have a lot of natural talent, practice a lot, use practice time well, and have great teachers.<p>It takes all of these in US because of supply and demand. There are a lot of very good players and relatively very few jobs.<p>An analogy might be if the only 100k+ programming jobs in US were at Google, and almost all other programmers had to freelance because no other jobs were available.