> Spots are limited, but it's not super hard.

This depends on the instrument and your location. If you play a popular instrument (say the violin) in a metro area with just one orchestra (some have zero!) then you ain't getting on that orchestra any way short of nepotism. If you live within commuting distance of multiple orchestras, there are more spots, but you still aren't going to be playing violin in the orchestra, and it's even possible that nepotism won't help you.

This is definitely not my area, but in other contexts I have heard of blind auditions as being a common practice in orchestras (i.e. people auditioning literally are hidden from view while they play and evaluations are then based only on hearing one play) which improved gender diversity in hiring, but not really racial diversity. How does nepotism work in this system?

How do you find out about the audition?

Also (though perhaps closer to a privilege issue than a nepotism issue):

How did you find the teacher who helped you get ready for the audition?

How did you "pay" for the practice time to prepare for the audition?

Many orchestras will hold open auditions. They'd post them on their website and probably a few regional music target outlets/websites.

Also networking, if you do gigs in the same region the orchestra is located you're bound to bump into a few of the members.

You can also just email the orchestra and ask when they hold auditions.

It still feels incredibly easy to cheat that system if you were motivated? Pre-share the candidates order list, chosen candidate will signal with an additional three note bar on the finale, etc.

Not all orchestras do blind auditions. Not all orchestras hold open auditions. You need both for nepotism to not give you a leg-up.

It very much is super hard

I studied and played classical into college during my engineering degree and have some insight into the realities of the profession - it's much harder than that and the pay for those stable gigs are oftentimes less than $300 / month. You're looking at one of the classic professional survivorship bias that I thought even the layman understood very well. Firstly, orchestras are in dire straights currently where programs are oftentimes supported by movie and pop media performances (see: National Symphony Orchestra playing Fantasia, Danny Elfman scores, and even freakin' Super Mario Brothers). This is a similar situation to ballet and theatre - legacy performance media I guess I'd call them. These orchestras don't pay much at all and most of the money classical musicians make are from lessons, typically the children of fairly affluent professionals, including from tech, finance, real estate, and other usual suspects of said caste. I saw grad students have to skip meals and beg and plead students to continue lessons to eat while I went off to recruiting events sponsored by tech companies where I ate food constantly and I never stopped feeling guilty even after inviting some friends to avoid pizza waste.

Some very lucky others that do well are from multiple generations of musicians that were essentially born, bred, and raised to be among the world's best and live and breathe music. There was no way I could ever compete with these kinds of folks and the hard life I saw so many talented people including professors that _are_ established after decades to live a very modest life made it clear to me that it wasn't something I should do for a living despite how much I love and respect it all. My role I feel is to support these folks now, so I go to shows, buy merch at the show, etc. and try not to take up space or attention too much and let people do what they do while trying to show appreciation for the work I was too chickenshit to ever do.

The arts and now entertainment fields are very much "tournament" style careers where given very limited public attention the winners take basically all and the remainder struggle quite a lot. It's nothing like professional fields like tech, accounting, medicine, law, or trades like construction, hospitality. In fact, any field that becomes more mass market-driven seems to become substantially more "tournament" style which has greatly impacted sex work - a top n% take an increasingly higher percentage away from an elastic but fundamentally highly dynamic demand.

The misattributed quote "find what you love and let it kill you" is the typical path of the career musician like most arts. I prefer to at least have some money to have more options to make it more fun on the way without resorting to the trap that is recreational substances.

I think you've captured and analogized it very well. Very good points, never tied it together this way myself, thanks!