It's extremely easy to make a living from music right now. With a weekend's worth of YouTube training, any decent musician or songwriter should be able to invest 40hr/wk and reliably generate $5k/mo within a year.
That's a territory of 1M views per month (or more, not sure what's the pay/ad-tolerance on music videos). That's a slightly higher level of views than Postmodern Jukebox and Pomplamoose are at. Being able to pull that off easily is pretty optimistic...
Also "reliably" is optimistic given YouTube's issues with policy/copyright enforcement and channel restrictions. (I.e. do you want your 5k income to be dependent on a few sudden bogus claims you can't dispute?)
You're pretending that YouTube ads are how musicians make money, and that's just not the case. YouTube is one tiny piece of the marketing map -- not the revenue one.
Add Patreon + Merch sales. You know, where they interrupt the song to pitch stolen t-shirt designs on their shopify site. Yeah, if you're just making YT content w/ patreon support and stuff you might be able to crack $5k/mo if you're decent at music theory. That's a lot of hustle. Where-as you used to be able to record a master, work your shitty job for duplications, go tour clubs and spots selling t-shirts you designed and your album to your audience as well as on your online shop. Now, you can just sit in your bedroom, where a mask, start up twitch, and let AI generate beats while you look like you're DJ'ing.
You're absolutely correct. And it shows how out of touch Hacker News is that the people who understand the existing market get downvoted, while the people who claim "YouTube ads are the only way to make money" somehow get upvoted. What a sad state this site is in.
There aren't that many topics to learn. If you pick one music industry content creator, they will have around two days worth of videos that you can watch. If you do the things they say, you will make money. There's no magic to it.
Many thousands of live streaming musicians have had no trouble going from $0 to $5k/mo. You're welcome to check out Twitch or TikTok any time for evidence of this.
It's extremely easy to make a living from music right now. With a weekend's worth of YouTube training, any decent musician or songwriter should be able to invest 40hr/wk and reliably generate $5k/mo within a year.