I'm going to have to agree with the other people who have commented so far. Music has never really been a middle class job. But I'm going to disagree with the entire premise that streaming and piracy have killed the middle class musician. I'm going to argue that streaming and piracy created the middle class musician.

Are there people living middle class lives in the music industry? Sure. Probably more today than ever before, and streaming (and possibly piracy) has a lot to do with that. Musicians don't make money from album sales, they make money from live shows. The middle class musician tours constantly because that's their full time job. It's not a 9-5, and you're not home with your family at night. I'm absolutely positive that this is the reason more people don't live middle class musician lifestyles.

Vanished? Nah. Never existed, at least not in any significant way. It's only now due to the Internet that small time niche musicians can make any money and get any sales without major labels. And major labels aren't in the business of making middle class musicians, as Jaron Lanier pointed out.

I'm also going to detour to your source... Jaron Lanier is famous for writing the story "Piracy is your friend", and a few years later writing "Pay me for my content". I would take Jaron Lanier's music industry opinions with a grain of salt.

Define significant. Session musicians were definitely a thing that earned a middle-class lifestyle during the last century, at least in larger markets. Of course, samplers and sample libraries likely had a larger impact on reducing the viability of that lifestyle (no need to hire everyone necessary for the string section on these three tracks when Kontakt and the one intern who knows his way around automating expressions will do), but shrinking studio budgets due to the impact of piracy helped put the nail in the coffin.

Is there actual data on this? I did not think the tail of professional musicians was ever fat enough to support a sizeable middle class. Mostly just a handful of megastars (who today are indeed capturing a smaller fraction of the value they create) and a large population of struggling musicians that have always supported themselves through other means.

He says he 'went looking for them.' I dug around a bit and there's not a lot of really concrete numbers. Here's what I found:

> Since 2000, the number of full-time songwriters in Nashville has fallen by 80 percent, according to the Nashville Songwriters Association International

https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/01...

> According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 39,260 people in the United States classified as “Musicians and Singers.” This is down 27% from 53,940 in 2002.

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir...

> At the same time, consumers spent less money on recorded music (both physically and digitally distributed) than they had in the 1990s.[13] Total "music-business" revenues in the U.S. dropped by half, from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009, according to Forrester Research.[14]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry

> For many musicians, the income derived from sound recordings is a small part of their overall revenue pie, and it’s decreasing. In aggregate, 88% of survey respondents derived between 0% and 10% of their music-related income from sound recordings in the past 12 months. Respondents who identified themselves as composers and/or recording artists were making a bit more, as were rock and hip hop musicians, but even when examined through various lenses like role or genre, income from sound recordings hovered under 15% of music-related income. Though differences exist by role and/or genre, the survey data suggests that income from sound recordings is a modest slice of most musicians’ income pies – a sentiment also expressed by a number of interviewees.

http://money.futureofmusic.org/sound-recording-income/9/

also relevant for the TV industry:

> According to the Writers Guild Association – West, screenwriters’ earnings were down nearly 25 percent in 2013 from 2009.

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir...

Thanks! The first quote is indeed a useful bit of evidence. the second one doesn't help us distinguish from the alternative hypothesis where almost all musician income is collected by a very small number of very wealthy people, with few middle class people in the first place.

It was interesting trying to find reliable stats on this. I might look into it more one day in the future

Music, along with other creative endeavors, is primarily a recreational pursuit. It's not socially necessary labor. A century of paying for the physical media necessary to transmit worthless (in a non-perjorative sense) ideas tricked many of us into thinking we were buying music itself. The true value of art reveals itself when these media are removed from the equation.

It's a net good for culture in the grand scheme of things. I'm hoping most professions eventually vanish along with musicians, including my own.

Music is like writing: the tools to create and distribute it have such low barriers to entry now that any sufficiently talented person can compete with the best in the industry.

Film isn't there yet. A solo director can't produce a Marvel movie on their own. But it's becoming easier every day.

Most musicians make their bread on tour or gigging.

Most musicians tour? Hmm. I don't have stats, but I doubt 95%+ of musicians ever tour, or hardly ever. The vast majority of musicians I know (musician here) pay their bills, support their kids etc by regular teaching, supplemented by gigs. Virtually all gigs are very low-paying compared to a few decades ago. A bass player friend told me that in a big city music venue, in the 1980s he was making 10x what the bar staff were; now they get paid more per hour.