[merciBien]

Insightful article, music celebrity is fascinating. I have a musically-gifted friend in her twenties who got a full-time job singing and playing in a band in a live-music nightclub, she's the only musician I've met who plays music for a living, without a non-music side gig. Her own band has never toured and has a tiny instagram presence, she seems happy with that.

[kasey_junk]

I have a friend who has been a working musician with no side gig for over 20 years. He makes money in a wide variety of small band types (pipe & drums for funerals and parades, Jimmy Buffet cover bands for festivals, jazz groups for events, etc).

What I take from his experience is that the things that make him successful are the same as many other jobs. He’s dependable, competent, on time and has a large professional network.

[HPsquared]

It's kind of cruelly ironic that a jobber artist needs to be very strong on "business qualities", while the stereotype is that artists are bad at those things.

[merciBien]

that's good to hear! I always wonder when I see a band playing a live gig how they're doing. My friend's bandmates are very creative, but struggle with the professionalism part.

[dxbydt]

I know of atleast three software engineers who quit programming to pursue music fulltime.

This lady[1] got a Computer Science degree from UC Berkeley, as even an intern at one of the faangs I believe. Quit the whole thing and caught a flight to India. She's sung about 100 songs now and is quite famous.

This guy[2] got a Computer Science degree and worked as a Visual Basic programmer. Also wrote some FoxPro and Clipper code. Was working at Leading Edge in those days. Quit software and started singing. Has sung over 7000 songs. Very rich, 9 figures.

This guy[3] got a PhD in Computer Science and wrote an algorithm to reduce non-standard matrices to approx Hermite Normal. Wrote a bunch of NLP papers, even published in a pure math journal! Then quit software and started writing songs. Has written over 1000 songs now. Very busy songwriter.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manisha_Eerabathini [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shankar_Mahadevan [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhan_Karky

[an_aparallel]

i grew up around a lot of Indians - I was always jealous of how engrained being good at a musical instrument is within the culture. And the lineage of master to student presented with great importance before every Carnatic performance i've watched.