The Window that closed

The myth of making a living only by playing Music, and what we can do today.

My Latin and Greek teacher used to say that contemporary history does not really exist. At least fifty years must pass before we can understand events with any real clarity. And yet some ideas become so deeply embedded in us that we assume they have always existed, even when they are relatively recent.

The idea that a good musician should be able to build a stable life simply by playing music is, in my opinion, one of those ideas.

For most of human history, music existed within systems of patronage, employment, and obligation. Musicians served courts, churches, aristocratic families, and institutions. Income came through protection, formal positions, commissions, or teaching. Creative freedom was always negotiated against the expectations of those in power.

Bach held a formal civic and church position. Vivaldi taught and composed within an institutional structure. Mozart moved between patrons, commissions, and a much more unstable economic framework.

Then, at a certain point, the emergence of a mass audience transformed everything.

Between the 1950s and the early 2000s, a rare economic alignment took shape. For the first time, musicians could distribute recorded work to millions of listeners. A song that resonated with people could generate income every time it was purchased. Records, cassettes, CDs: the format changed, but the basic mechanism remained more or less the same.

Of course, record labels controlled production, promotion, distribution, access, and a large part of the revenue. The system was far from fair. Artists were often exploited, contracts were often terrible, and many musicians never saw the money they should have received.

Still, within that imbalance, the system worked for many people. There were fewer artists competing for attention, and there was a lot of money in recorded music. A lot.

Talk to almost any medium-to-big artist who worked in the 1980s, and chances are they will tell you stories that today feel almost unreal. Stories of budgets, advances, studio time, tours, royalties, excess, and possibilities that now seem almost dreamlike.

That period was not the historical norm: it was an exception.

And it is long gone.

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The Collapse of the Old Music Economy

Streaming has completely restructured the economics of recorded music. For most musicians, recorded music now produces only marginal revenue. Financial stability, when it exists, usually comes from a combination of touring, teaching, licensing, commissions, brand partnerships, subscription platforms, merchandise, and other parallel activities.

Recorded tracks have become less of a product and more of a form of exposure inside a much larger ecosystem. At the same time, the number of musicians releasing music has grown exponentially. Anyone can upload songs directly to Spotify and similar platforms. Is this a liberation from the evil Record Companies?

I think reality is more complex.
The possibility of freeing oneself from a label has enormous advantages, starting with the fact that artists can retain ownership of their masters and control their work. But it also requires an entrepreneurial mindset, organizational skills, and financial resources that not every musician has or wants to develop.

Labels, despite all their limits and despite the fact that the general trend seems increasingly driven by quantity rather than quality (I talk about it here), did at least function as a quality filter for many years.

Now that filter has almost disappeared.
Anyone can upload almost anything to streaming platforms: unfinished tracks, stolen tracks, AI slop music, tracks by other people slightly altered and presented as original, songs uploaded under misleading names, and music credited in ways that have nothing to do with authorization or authorship.

I will avoid opening the more delicate question of “bad original music,” because that is a much more complicated subject. Who decides whether a piece of music is bad? Who decides whether it deserves to exist online? I have my own opinions on that, but it is not the subject of this article.

Artificial intelligence adds another layer of complexity.
Production becomes faster and cheaper. Certain kinds of music can now be generated in minutes. This has already displaced musicians, producers, and composers in some areas of the market.

I have felt this shift personally.
Over the years, I created music for several brands. Since the rise of tools like Suno and similar platforms, that flow of work has simply stopped.
Was the AI-generated music better than mine? It depends.

For a brief like a Hans Zimmer-esque “Entry of the Gladiators” theme for a Go-Kart Worldwide Race, as I once had to do, then yes: AI can probably produce something as good as mine, if not better, and the CEO or marketing manager of that brand is unlikely to hear any difference. In fact, I suspect that by now many of them are simply generating the music themselves.

If the brief requires something more specific, personal, strange, precise, or deeply connected to a recognizable voice, that is another story, and this is why I insist so much on the importance of finding your own voice: it is a difficult path, but in the long, long run, it may be the only path that will pay.

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This is only one fragment of a much broader transformation.

Concert revenue, they say, has grown steadily worldwide. And yet large productions have become a huge economic risk, while small and medium-sized productions can barely cope with the rising costs of travel, fuel, hotels, food, insurance, equipment, visas, transport, promotion, and basically everything else.

The musician of the future, which means the musician of today, may end up resembling a skilled craftsperson embedded in a community.

Income may come from proximity, specialization, trust, and sustained connection.
Visibility may narrow, depth of relationship may increase.

I believe it is now necessary for a musician to develop solid preparation in almost every aspect of concert production.

You need to know how to read and draft a contract, a technical rider, and a stage plot.
You need to understand the work of a tour manager: building a road plan, finding reasonable deals on hotels, rental cars, and flights, planning everything with care, and quickly finding solutions to the inevitable problems that happen on the road.

You need to be your own backliner: knowing your gear thoroughly, maintaining it, repairing it, reprogramming it, and always having a Plan B ready.

You need to know how to make posters and flyers, how to edit video, how to produce a record from beginning to end, how to manage every stage of the process.

You need to understand social media… which I do not.

You need to understand marketing, which I am also terrible at, despite the fact that I graduated in Communication Sciences.

You need to know how to write.
And these are only a few examples.

As you can see, I have not even started talking about music yet.

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What I chose to build

Since a structural shift is underway, my role within it is to become as efficient, autonomous, and prepared as possible.

My personal experience is this: in order to honor my goal of finding a unique and recognizable voice, I worked as a semi-professional musician for more than twenty years. That allowed me to keep my music as uncorrupted as possible and to avoid ending up in a tribute band just to pay the bills.

My other job was as Artist Manager, Booking Coordinator, and Production Manager at Blue Note Milan. That experience allowed me to learn a tremendous amount, simply by observing what the best artists did well and by noticing the countless mistakes other people kept making.

Today I have two main projects.

The first is Simple Music for Difficult People, a project with a very distinctive sound, inspired by the world of mechanical automata and built around a rather unusual live and production approach.

The second is the repertoire of Thomas de Hartmann on acoustic archtop guitar, which I have been performing around the world with Bert Lams for twenty years.

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Building a Lighter Machine

We are living through an epochal transformation. Revolutionary tools enter the market almost every day. I can complain that they are taking work away from me, or I can choose to use them to my advantage in a way that remains true to my values.

To bring Simple Music for Difficult People to the stage in a traditional way, I would theoretically need at least seven more guitarists, each with extremely complicated pedalboards, a complex production, and suitable venues.

Instead, I spent years developing a compact system based on a MacBook and a custom setup that allows me to reproduce live exactly the sound I want. It involves complex processing, automatic looping, countless different effects for each string, and, more recently, a visual component that I am now developing as part of the performance.

My entire show fits into a guitar case and a backpack.
I do not use pedalboards, because everything is automated.
I do not need wedges, because I use my own wired in-ear monitors, so I do not have to deal with frequency issues.
I can produce real time visuals in HD on any video format and size.
I only send a left and right channel. The output of every piece I perform has already been EQ’d and leveled in the studio. In many cases, my soundcheck is little more than a line check, and this also makes me particularly suitable as an opening act: in-fact, the last thing a band wants is an opener who wastes time, occupies too much stage space, brings a complicated backline, and then needs twenty minutes to remove everything after the performance.

And what if something goes wrong?

It has never happened to me so far, but with this amount of technology and processing power, of course it can happen.

In that case, knowing how to play solo acoustic guitar is a great advantage. As a last resort, I could play the electric guitar straight into a DI, because by now I can perform around twenty solo guitar pieces in plectrum style.

With Bert Lams, the situation is different. We perform our transcriptions of Thomas de Hartmann’s music. It is chamber music, and the house concert circuit is what we prefer and what suits the repertoire best.

Here too, the setup is minimal: a guitar and a small Yamaha THR10 amplifier (the old model: being without lithium battery, it’s so much lighter).

With situations this light and stripped down to the bone, touring still makes sense.

But in my opinion, it is no longer sustainable in the long run to imagine living only from touring income. Travel is becoming more expensive, more fragile, and in some ways more risky. And one cannot do it for an entire lifetime… unless you turn big for whatever reason, which is something that may still happen, but of course not guaranteed!

Or at least, I believe it is wise and far-sighted to think about another source of income. Actually, sources of income. Plural.

There are other possibilities, from merchandise to sponsorships and beyond, but I will dedicate a separate article to that.

Social media matters too. I know that. But I have a lot of difficulty relating to it, mainly because of what I call “the Ethical Dilemma.”

I wrote about that here

In the next article, I’ll turn to a more exciting and hopefully less depressing topic: how the right equipment, together with an open mind, might help us save money and make things possible.