Don’t knock the day job

I live and work in Nashville, and I don’t know anybody that actually make an enough money to support their family from playing or recording music (bear with me, this isn’t going to be a “downer” post).

Most musicians, engineers, and artists have one of the below situations going:

• They have a spouse or partner who works a good job, which allows them the time and resources to pursue their art

• They work a day job that doesn’t require a lot of them, and spend as much time as possible on their art

• They work a job that is in the music industry, but a large chunk of their day doesn’t involve actually making art

• They make money from their art, but the bulk of their income comes from investments and partnerships both inside and outside the music industry (this includes almost all top artists)

There’s some big upsides to this model:

• It takes the pressure off of art financially, since we’re not expecting it to pay all the bills

• We don’t have to feel imposter syndrome when we don’t get all our money from art, since nobody gets all their money from art

• Since we don’t have to push our art to pay for everything, we can be more choosy about picking what we work on

• We can build a long term career strategy that starts with the assumption that we need non-music revenue streams in order to keep making music

(I know there’s more, drop a comment if you think of other upsides)