When I was little I always though that being famous was a merit thing. If a musician was known it was because he or she was excepcional in his/her art: an incredible singer, a highly skilled guitarist, an amazing drummer.
But then I got older and saw a lot of gigs, and a lot of disciplined and truly amazing musicians that nobody heard about… And most were struggling financially, having a side job just to get by. How come? What is missing from them that the “icons” have?
Famous is different from working. I have known plenty of artists who just hustle and make a living - singing telegrams, weddings, bar gigs, teaching, they make enough to get by. They are working musicians.
Then there are all those bands who plug on, famous but not wildly so, I think they are making enough to live on just their band earnings.
Then a very few who get rich. Mostly those are kids of connected people, not always but often.
It’s the same with any entertainment industry, right? Average earnings on onlyfans is something like $3 a month.
And there is just So Much Talent in the world, and people have limited entertainment budgets.
At some point it because a binary thing.
You don’t need to just be good at something.
You need to be good at something AND do something else. AND be likeable. AND be pretty. AND have good contacts. AND …
And if any of those other things aren’t the case, you don’t become the super star.
Sometimes, it’s being at the right place at the right time. Some things can be solved with money, or being the friend or child of a celebrity, and others can’t.
If you have the right connections you don’t even have to be good looking or talented!
Merit as a musician can only take you so far. In any creative career, the big famous artists aren’t just good at doing their craft, they’re also very good at making business deals to sell them. And even that’s not always enough to become a superstar, you also need luck - your breakout/masterpiece needs to coincide with the latest trend, and preferably early in your career - a one-hit-wonder might be enough, but maybe not.
It’s just much more profitable for record labels to have a few superstars than thousands of mini-stars. A usual person won’t follow and buy from 100 music artists. They’ll buy from 1 to 10 or whatever. Having large fandoms allows you to sell more tertiary things like plush toys and shit like that, it wouldn’t be feasible to do that for thousands of artists.
Large fandoms also make people feel like they belong, when there’s a Swiftie fanclub in any small town with dozens of people there’s a community, if only 1 person in a town were a fan of a specific artist, even if there’s 1 in every town, the networking effect would just be basically nonexistent.
And in general there’s just too many amazing musicians. People love making music and as such there’s an oversupply. In addition to the above points that’s just capitalist supply and demand in play.
Hell from what i have seen is now a days, you become a YouTuber reality influencer first. Then you start your music career tying it to a cause in the news. Then bam you are number 1 on billboard.
In answer to the making a good living:
Historically, record labels, then streaming becoming the norm allowing the collision between record labels and streaming services driving down the artist’s cut. Now increasingly so more recently, Live Nation/Ticketmaster and similar live event conglomerates taking bigger cuts and liberties from the last line of revenue traditionally successful artists have. And it’s at every level, there will be a local event promoter behaving as the live nation of local music in your area.
For new artists, most people discover music via streaming recommendations these days, if the algorithm doesn’t smile on a given artist for whatever reason, they won’t get played, and therefore they won’t get signed (given more and more up and coming artists self publish their earliest stuff these days)
Video killed the radio star
