Only for the most successful ones. But I guess that is the future we are headed to: a cutthroat industry where there are a few successful musicians that give us the illusion that music is still created by people, and the rest of them out of a job anyway because of AI.
There's also the wedding band business, and people hire live musicians for parties all the time.
It's a supply and demand thing. There are so many musicians, the idea that they all can make a living doing it is simply not realistic. Only a very few will, regardless of whether they make a few pennies off of streaming or not. Having the government pay them through taxes is a terrible idea.
I know many people who are musicians. It's always a side gig.
I know artists, too. No money to be made there, either. Maybe a few pennies at the local arts&crafts fair.
Musicians are more likely to stick around these days because you can get a small piece of the pie instead of just immediately dying off if no label or radio station will pick you up.
The underground is dying though due to a plethora of other forms of entertainment. Shows were a great spot to get some social interaction, but people just don't go out as much anymore and are more likely to do discord and videogames instead of hitting up a basement, bar, cafe, or warehouse.
Which would include the family of working musicians | fencing contractors over the road from me in rural Western Australia.
The husband and wife lead performers are in their early forties and have been playing music live for 20 years .. they sell recordings but their main music income is hotel venues and music festivals - they tour almost half the weekends of the year, mostly local, sometime by plane to the other side of the country.
When not touring they're building fences by contract (ATM mostly around solar setups for Telstra and mobile repeater towers in the rural telecomm domain)
They're not a super band, the live performances pay for themselves and turn a profit, all up they're making something like $200K (AUD) per annum from both jobs.
They're not especially well known by name outside of blues hotel gigging.
This has always been the case with artists, and copyright utterly failed to change this dynamic. It functions primarily as another mechanism for a few incredibly wealthy private individuals to wield state power to attack artists. If you want to help artists then I almost cannot think of anything more counterproductive than treating their cultural output like a physical good subject to market forces and capture.
> treating their cultural output like a physical good subject to market forces and capture
Like it or not, that's always going to be the case. The Law of Supply & Demand cannot be repealed. It's in play even when the government fixes prices and payouts.
data based products aren't subject to the supply law, obviously, since the supply is infinite and would therefore have a zero price if it were not for copyright laws.
Exactly! Imagine if FOSS weren't a social norm in the space of programming tooling. You'd probably see something like what's gone on in the music industry, with Microsoft, Apple, and Google buying up exclusive rights to nearly every language and toolchain, then selling subscriptions to be allowed to use them (subject to T&C), and they'd be able to do this only because they could wield legally-granted power punish anyone distributing their purchased toolchains. The world would be significantly worse.
Why are you talking about the future? It has always been like that. I am pretty sure it was already like that in the trobadors days, antic Greece or Olmec civilization.
Artists have almost always been poor unless they found wealthy or state sponsors.
