Most musicians barely make money from music. Most artists don't make money from art - and I should know, being the son of two. You are either the top seller/musician or you are everyone else and in 99.99% of all cases, you are everyone else. Here's another example: a friend of my mom spent the last decade pushing her paintings on etsy. Then trump added all his tariffs and she went from making a minimum wage or there abouts to a literal 0. Meanwhile my mom never bothered with any of those and simply gave her paintings to two local art galleries - no websites, no social media, just tourists walking about and even if this isn't her main revenue income, she outsells her friend easily. And that is far more common than you think.

Admittedly, I don't think HN is a good place to promote your product either. It used to be a place where innovation and doing something complex was appreciated. These days it's all about people praising slop.

As for my friend - I've said it to his face multiple times but as they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

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Imustaskforhelp 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Admittedly, I don't think HN is a good place to promote your product either. It used to be a place where innovation and doing something complex was appreciated. These days it's all about people praising slop.

I do sort of agree with that, I mean I literally saw within another thread related to music (Misfits) where this guy https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hustleracer is clearly using AI and just joined

I am seeing lots of people use AI within hackernews now. I have flagged them for what its worth but yes, I do sort of agree with that hackernews has decreased a little bit in value.

But I used to hear the same thing a year ago as well, I would still be considered relatively new to the forum but I heard stories of how one day PG would just decide about elixir and have front page all about elixir/erlang and people sometime ago reminisced that, which happened many years ago.

But even with all of this, I feel like hackernews is a place where sanity is still intact for the most part and there is still some authenticity more than other places but that's just my 2 cents.

I do agree that musicians struggle with making money sometimes. Its definitely a winner takes all market from my viewpoint and median musician doesn't make much but the mean is skewed because of the billions racked in by famous people.

I am not exactly sure how to preserve Music,Art though. One of my closest friend said to me that her sister wasn't studying well and now my friend is 99 percentile kind of fellow, but to me that moment, Man it felt like that poor girl was put into expectation by her brother and her family and sometimes feeling too. So I said to him that hey if she wants to pursue music/art/anything, then let her do that and my friend basically told me again about the struggling economy of that.

I am not sure what can be done with all of this. Universal Basic Income seems to be the solution. I think Ireland passed UBI for artists sometime ago, maybe that might help preserving music/art.

An answer I feel like is happening is that atleast for my generation, it feels like a lack of culture. I am not quite satisfied by how the social algorithms can promote brain rot but not show music and just, like, I feel like our generation and next generations to come have lost something more meaningful for these algorithms to catch the money trail and the people to make such brain-rot.

My point is, Music/Art has some incredible contribution to the society but society doesn't reward them enough or fairly and then we have the other part of society turning attention into a commodity and churning out content like a factory. All in all, feels like a cultural degradation as time passes from one generation to another.

	▲	axegon_ 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm with you here as well. Not so much on the UBI side though. I only believe in social measures to a certain degree because it is a slippery slope. At the moment, my job is very demanding and sucks up a lot of my energy. In addition the last decade was an absolute bombardment with family problems and it all fell on my shoulders and I was not betting on myself to sort things out at all(even though I managed against all odds and at the cost of a lot of compromises with myself). And 10 years is a long time, especially in the 25-6 to 35-6 range. Now I don't have all that much on my shoulders anymore or rather it's very much under control but once everything is truly sorted, I have thought about it many times: I am truly exhausted and on a personal level a less demanding and less busy job does sound appealing in a way even for less money. And this is the catch: not everyone is greedy and many people are capable of saying "you know what, I have enough, let's take it easy". Which would become a huge problem on a large scale when the balance shifts. You have over 3 generations now (alpha, z, millenials and x to a very large degree) who have been bombarded for decades by social media and feel no desire to try or learn something new as opposed to just relying on slop. And it was bad enough as it was even before that - I haven't seen nor do I wish to see a large chunk of my family but to give you an idea, my cousin(at the time around 10 years old) did not know how to eat with a fork and knife or tie his shoes or button up his shirt. Not because of a mental disability but because his parents had a child instead of getting a small dog to take for a walk two times a day. Imagine when you have tens of millions of those that would gladly scroll through tiktok all day long and rely on UBI without batting an eyelash. I genuinely don't have a solution but UBI does not sound like it. I agree that for most of history, humanity has been pushed by a very small fraction of individuals but currently I don't see people that are doing it, given that we are currently living in a bullshitter economy: "within the next year we will have {x}". I don't know of a single instance in humanity where someone has made a big leap, granted that all the basics are provided to them in the same way no one has gotten out of poverty through charity. If I had to base everything off of my own experience(and those around me), my view is that a certain critical mass of unfortunate circumstances are required in order to get someone to reach their potential.