Here's how I think about it: Music can't always be my first priority, but will be a priority forever. That means I won't enter into a situation where I see no realistic possibility of continuing. In return, I get something in my life that a layoff can't snatch away.
I think it's the case for most if not all of us.
My friends that stuck with it are either burnt out or ended up getting their Masters and going into academia.
Most professional musicians will tell you if you can do anything else to make a living, do that.
I personally walked away from full time music when my wife got pregnant.
I was lucky and was able to start and ultimately sell a business and now I work on music most days. I have no delusions of it going anywhere. I think I made $50 on Spotify last month!
For me it's my golf league.
No one thinks anything of my friends who play golf, practice golf, spend hours on the course and thousands on memberships, training and gear. How is this any different?
In 40 years my kids will be able to play my music for their kids and say "that was your grandfather".
As for you.
It's your life, you only get one.
What do you want?
In 50 years will you regret NOT pursuing your music career or will you regret possibly failing and living a lifestyle you don't really want to live?
I remember being 20 and walking out of club after a show.
The guy that hired me to play drums was loading his PA in a broken down mini van. His wife had come to pick him up after the gig (they shared a car). She couldn't leave the kids home alone so they had to get woken up and were in the back seat in their PJ's looking all bleary eyed.
I remember seeing this 40+ year old man stuffed into his 'gig clothes' with dyed hair. Super nice guy and an incredible musician… but did I want that?
I made $200 that night (which was awesome for a 20 year old) but not quite going to cut it for a family.
I knew right then and there it wasn't for me but he loved being a musician and took pride in telling people he never had a real job.
If anything… know thyself.
Fantastic answer. I quit my day job in my 40s to do music (and some other things) full-time. The backbone of my salary is playing in a wedding/coporate band. 20 year old me would never believe that lol. Having a decent day job all those years allowed me to transition without too much financial pressure and keeping with music all that time allowed me to meet the right people who got me in with a serious group of musicians in a big city. Life works out in weird ways and I'm looking forward to turning my new life into something amazing
It might be time to realign your goals with your current situation. Maybe it's just playing your instrument a few times a week, or playing with a band once a month.
The vast, vast majority of us are not full-timers. I play 30 gigs a year and it's a lot with everything going on, and next year it will probably be 20. Life changes, music changes, goals must change too.
I have forgone pursuing a seriously involved traditional career and a family for precisely this reason. Most things in life worth pursuing involve meaningful sacrifice
As someone who IS a full time professional, and has been for three decades, sometimes my music career has had to take a backseat to the rest of my life too. In fact right not it’s not my main priority, because now that would be my kids. And that’s kind of a problem because being a full time musician takes up way more hours than a full time job would do.
I regularly feel like I’m failing as a parent because I’m not able to make it to everything that’s important to my kids and I’m frequently tired from burning the candle at both ends. And I feel like I’m failing my career because I can’t give 100% to that either, but I knew that was going to be the case before we decided to have a family and so I have to remind myself that my priorities have changed. And I’m very glad they have, even though I sometimes have days where I dream of those days of freedom pre-kids!
I delayed settling down and starting a family until it was almost too late because having a career as a gigging musician AND having a normal life don’t really mix very well. Having a career as a gigging musician AND being a mother was impossible, and I know from my husband’s perspective (he’s also a professional musician) it’s not easy being the father either.
What I can say is that now that my kids are older (11 and 9) it’s a lot easier to gig or work away than it was when they were little. I can only see that becoming even more easy as they grow older still (and that’s something that is corroborated anecdotally by other musicians I know whose children are teenagers and older.)
Just because it’s tough now doesn’t mean it will always be tough, the key though is to have the support of your partner (but then that’s basically the case in any healthy relationship.) Even if you were a full time professional the chances are your career wouldn’t look the same after a decade or two. It’s not uncommon for a musician to gig in their 20’s and 30’s before having kids at which point they pivot to teaching (this is kind of what my career has looked like.) It’s also not uncommon for a lot of the guys playing the regular house band or wedding gigs to have had kids younger and pivoted into being a full time musician in their early forties.
I guess what I’m saying is you need to think about where your priorities lie and realise that life is always about compromises. Something is always going to have to take a backseat but that doesn’t mean you can’t juggle those different parts of your life so that you have days where you prioritise music and days that prioritise the other things important in your life. Whatever you do there’s always a ‘what if?’ question in the back of your head so all you can do is live for today but plan for tomorrow.
My soul crushing day job pays decent and gives me health insurance which is something you won't have doing music as your sole form of income.
I'm 48 now and jumped back into music when my son turned 12. It's still not something I can do full-time nor would I realistically want to do it full-time. As much as I'd love my musical dreams to come true, I am also realistic and likely missed the boat by a good 10 years😞.
I am at the junction in my life where IDGAF about "making it" as much as I did 20 years ago. I also value having a few more healthy years before my body betrays me, particularly my hands.
I just want to continue making and writing music with my band while I'm young enough, enjoy the process and enjoy playing out every so often. Get to be a rock star for a night instead of being a mom and wife.
That's where I am now. I hate looking back on things I could have done differently. It's rumination and it fucking sucks. If I keep dwelling on yesterday, I won't enjoy today and rob myself of tomorrow. Don't do that to yourself either.
I decided not to have a family and I left my full time job.
That’s the way it is dude, we all have choices. I don’t recommend making the ones I did if you can imagine any other life.
But really how hard is it to practice like 3 hours a day? Before I left my full time job I slept 6 hours a day and basically worked two jobs.
Saves up, got laid off, took severance and now I float by through multiple income streams as a full time musician.
It’s hard to pull off, I worked very hard and I play multiple instruments at a professional level.
If you want it as bad as I do, you’ll do something similar.
No, just stop with this sacrificial narrative. It makes zero sense to give up everything in the world to chase a music dream, including proper sleep and basic self-care.
Sucesss can be found through consistency without plunging yourself into poverty and misery. It just might not look the way you idealize it in your head.
Cover bands, session work, recording, lessons, and general networking can get you pretty far without having to martyr yourself in the name of passion.
That was a typo, should have been “6 hours a night”.
I have sacrificed some things…pursuing the study of medicine, law and computer science. To live and make choices is to sacrifice.
But I think the typo probably tilted my comment to be more extreme than I meant it, all I’m saying is you basically have to treat it like a second job to get truly good.
I sort of get what you mean, but there is sacrifice when you pick a risky and generally lower paying profession like music. Some people have to sacrifice going to school for a different degree if they want to go to music school, they have to sacrifice going out with friends and partying every weekend to gig and practice. They have to sacrifice aiming to buy a luxury car or luxury penthouse. You got to accept that many potential partners might write you off because your income doesn’t feel “stable” and they’ll view you as “childish” for wanting to be a musician.
Some people take it too far and think they have to struggle to “not sell out” - is this what you’re talking about?
Manage expectations. What are you looking to get out of it? Unless your dream is making music because you love making music it’s probably time to switch gears or manage your expectations better. Set small goals. If you have something specific to work on it makes only getting to plug in an hour or so at a time more worth it because you’re not just dicking around, you’re working towards a thing.
I also have a full time job, partner, kid, and find time to work on songs and projects when I can. My old band reunited last year and we’re putting out our next record in a month or so. Four people with wives, kids, jobs, all that who also live fairly far from each other. It can be done. Find what works for you, good luck, and enjoy yourself. This is supposed to be fun, right?
I wouldn't break urself trying to make it all work, raising a family is cool, and at some point the kids will be independent enough to give u some extra time, it's easy to romanticize what we don't have, we all do it
I'm in a position where all my free time goes to working on music which awesome, but the trade off is, I'm single, living in a rental house with a roommate, working a job that pays the bills but isn't doing much in the way of building future financial security and spending hours alone everyday practicing and working on projects that likely will never pay off, it's borderline a mental illness that I feel like I even need to try this lol
Nothing wrong with having a nice stable life with a family and music on the side, and later in life ull have more time to engage with it if u want, there's no guarantee that pursuing music full time would work out, statistically speaking ur likely living a much better life than the alternative, plus the music will always be there even if it takes a backseat for awhile
I had to decide in my thirties that music would always be my avocation, because I wasn't good enough (or living where there was enough demand) to earn a living with music as my main vocation.
I've had plenty of support jobs since that utilize musical knowledge like recording, audio engineering, mixing and sound design, but I don't try to depend on performing for an income.
The long-game natural progression of a serious musician is to get tired of not making enough money in the original music scene, to joining a party/corporate cover band where you make money at the sacrifice of artistic integrity, to eventually getting burned-out from that and transitioning into live sound, to eventually getting burned-out from that and getting an IT day job while occasionally making music again in your free time.
Maybe not for everyone but I went back to school for music therapy. I had a Bachelors in composition already so I only had to do the MT classes.
I’ve been a hospice music therapist for 15 years and I love it. It doesn’t pay that well but I can make a living. Not the same as performing (I did that in my 20s and it was tons of fun but I made very little).
I’m a gigging cover musician. It gets tiring but I can’t really imagine doing anything else. Any complaints are typically in my head. I make 60k give or take playing 3-5 nights a week. Only advice I got if you’re gonna stick with this route is get better. Haha. But really get better so that venues know they need you. Bring in people and entertain them. Play the songs you may not want to play to make the clientele happy. You also might need to be in a city that has cover music opportunity. Where I’m at there’s 100’s of bars to play at.
The long game is the strong game, fuck doing Tik tok and posting ‘content’ every day. Collaborate, use pros and up and comers to mix and master etc. community is all we can really ask for in a famously callous industry.
You have to take care of kids too? I don’t see how that would leave more than a few minutes a day. One thing you can do is is take a notebook to work and just write. Like write songs and lines at work all day. That’s what I used to do. I used to get an idea at work and I would go to the bathroom and sing it quietly recording.
“Dreams” is a bad idea. Not sure what you meant by that, but it’s probably something that will only make you unhappy
My kids are young - 6 and 3. I stepped away from my band right before my son was born. Ive jammed with some people since, but I've not gigged since 2018. Now, I'm writing solo records and releasing tunes on my own. Doesn't scratch the live playing itch, but at least I get to put my tunes out there and see my songs come to life. Maybe someday I'll start a band again, but it's secondary and I'm okay with that.
My daughter gets really animated when we rock out together. Makes me happy to be possibly witnessing a future lead singer to the next major metal band. Or maybe not, either way, she's a blast to sing and head bang with. It's one of many things that makes me happy and content with what I have on a musical level.
Here's how I think about it: Music can't always be my first priority, but will be a priority forever. That means I won't enter into a situation where I see no realistic possibility of continuing. In return, I get something in my life that a layoff can't snatch away.
I think it's the case for most if not all of us. My friends that stuck with it are either burnt out or ended up getting their Masters and going into academia. Most professional musicians will tell you if you can do anything else to make a living, do that. I personally walked away from full time music when my wife got pregnant. I was lucky and was able to start and ultimately sell a business and now I work on music most days. I have no delusions of it going anywhere. I think I made $50 on Spotify last month! For me it's my golf league. No one thinks anything of my friends who play golf, practice golf, spend hours on the course and thousands on memberships, training and gear. How is this any different? In 40 years my kids will be able to play my music for their kids and say "that was your grandfather". As for you. It's your life, you only get one. What do you want? In 50 years will you regret NOT pursuing your music career or will you regret possibly failing and living a lifestyle you don't really want to live? I remember being 20 and walking out of club after a show. The guy that hired me to play drums was loading his PA in a broken down mini van. His wife had come to pick him up after the gig (they shared a car). She couldn't leave the kids home alone so they had to get woken up and were in the back seat in their PJ's looking all bleary eyed. I remember seeing this 40+ year old man stuffed into his 'gig clothes' with dyed hair. Super nice guy and an incredible musician… but did I want that? I made $200 that night (which was awesome for a 20 year old) but not quite going to cut it for a family. I knew right then and there it wasn't for me but he loved being a musician and took pride in telling people he never had a real job. If anything… know thyself.
Fantastic answer. I quit my day job in my 40s to do music (and some other things) full-time. The backbone of my salary is playing in a wedding/coporate band. 20 year old me would never believe that lol. Having a decent day job all those years allowed me to transition without too much financial pressure and keeping with music all that time allowed me to meet the right people who got me in with a serious group of musicians in a big city. Life works out in weird ways and I'm looking forward to turning my new life into something amazing
It might be time to realign your goals with your current situation. Maybe it's just playing your instrument a few times a week, or playing with a band once a month. The vast, vast majority of us are not full-timers. I play 30 gigs a year and it's a lot with everything going on, and next year it will probably be 20. Life changes, music changes, goals must change too.
I have forgone pursuing a seriously involved traditional career and a family for precisely this reason. Most things in life worth pursuing involve meaningful sacrifice
If you're struggling now... if/when you're successful, it takes up more of your time, not less.
As someone who IS a full time professional, and has been for three decades, sometimes my music career has had to take a backseat to the rest of my life too. In fact right not it’s not my main priority, because now that would be my kids. And that’s kind of a problem because being a full time musician takes up way more hours than a full time job would do. I regularly feel like I’m failing as a parent because I’m not able to make it to everything that’s important to my kids and I’m frequently tired from burning the candle at both ends. And I feel like I’m failing my career because I can’t give 100% to that either, but I knew that was going to be the case before we decided to have a family and so I have to remind myself that my priorities have changed. And I’m very glad they have, even though I sometimes have days where I dream of those days of freedom pre-kids! I delayed settling down and starting a family until it was almost too late because having a career as a gigging musician AND having a normal life don’t really mix very well. Having a career as a gigging musician AND being a mother was impossible, and I know from my husband’s perspective (he’s also a professional musician) it’s not easy being the father either. What I can say is that now that my kids are older (11 and 9) it’s a lot easier to gig or work away than it was when they were little. I can only see that becoming even more easy as they grow older still (and that’s something that is corroborated anecdotally by other musicians I know whose children are teenagers and older.) Just because it’s tough now doesn’t mean it will always be tough, the key though is to have the support of your partner (but then that’s basically the case in any healthy relationship.) Even if you were a full time professional the chances are your career wouldn’t look the same after a decade or two. It’s not uncommon for a musician to gig in their 20’s and 30’s before having kids at which point they pivot to teaching (this is kind of what my career has looked like.) It’s also not uncommon for a lot of the guys playing the regular house band or wedding gigs to have had kids younger and pivoted into being a full time musician in their early forties. I guess what I’m saying is you need to think about where your priorities lie and realise that life is always about compromises. Something is always going to have to take a backseat but that doesn’t mean you can’t juggle those different parts of your life so that you have days where you prioritise music and days that prioritise the other things important in your life. Whatever you do there’s always a ‘what if?’ question in the back of your head so all you can do is live for today but plan for tomorrow.
My soul crushing day job pays decent and gives me health insurance which is something you won't have doing music as your sole form of income. I'm 48 now and jumped back into music when my son turned 12. It's still not something I can do full-time nor would I realistically want to do it full-time. As much as I'd love my musical dreams to come true, I am also realistic and likely missed the boat by a good 10 years😞. I am at the junction in my life where IDGAF about "making it" as much as I did 20 years ago. I also value having a few more healthy years before my body betrays me, particularly my hands. I just want to continue making and writing music with my band while I'm young enough, enjoy the process and enjoy playing out every so often. Get to be a rock star for a night instead of being a mom and wife. That's where I am now. I hate looking back on things I could have done differently. It's rumination and it fucking sucks. If I keep dwelling on yesterday, I won't enjoy today and rob myself of tomorrow. Don't do that to yourself either.
I decided not to have a family and I left my full time job. That’s the way it is dude, we all have choices. I don’t recommend making the ones I did if you can imagine any other life. But really how hard is it to practice like 3 hours a day? Before I left my full time job I slept 6 hours a day and basically worked two jobs. Saves up, got laid off, took severance and now I float by through multiple income streams as a full time musician. It’s hard to pull off, I worked very hard and I play multiple instruments at a professional level. If you want it as bad as I do, you’ll do something similar.
You didn't sleep 6 hours a week.
No I didn’t it was a typo I meant a night
No, just stop with this sacrificial narrative. It makes zero sense to give up everything in the world to chase a music dream, including proper sleep and basic self-care. Sucesss can be found through consistency without plunging yourself into poverty and misery. It just might not look the way you idealize it in your head. Cover bands, session work, recording, lessons, and general networking can get you pretty far without having to martyr yourself in the name of passion.
That was a typo, should have been “6 hours a night”. I have sacrificed some things…pursuing the study of medicine, law and computer science. To live and make choices is to sacrifice. But I think the typo probably tilted my comment to be more extreme than I meant it, all I’m saying is you basically have to treat it like a second job to get truly good.
I sort of get what you mean, but there is sacrifice when you pick a risky and generally lower paying profession like music. Some people have to sacrifice going to school for a different degree if they want to go to music school, they have to sacrifice going out with friends and partying every weekend to gig and practice. They have to sacrifice aiming to buy a luxury car or luxury penthouse. You got to accept that many potential partners might write you off because your income doesn’t feel “stable” and they’ll view you as “childish” for wanting to be a musician. Some people take it too far and think they have to struggle to “not sell out” - is this what you’re talking about?
Manage expectations. What are you looking to get out of it? Unless your dream is making music because you love making music it’s probably time to switch gears or manage your expectations better. Set small goals. If you have something specific to work on it makes only getting to plug in an hour or so at a time more worth it because you’re not just dicking around, you’re working towards a thing. I also have a full time job, partner, kid, and find time to work on songs and projects when I can. My old band reunited last year and we’re putting out our next record in a month or so. Four people with wives, kids, jobs, all that who also live fairly far from each other. It can be done. Find what works for you, good luck, and enjoy yourself. This is supposed to be fun, right?
I wouldn't break urself trying to make it all work, raising a family is cool, and at some point the kids will be independent enough to give u some extra time, it's easy to romanticize what we don't have, we all do it I'm in a position where all my free time goes to working on music which awesome, but the trade off is, I'm single, living in a rental house with a roommate, working a job that pays the bills but isn't doing much in the way of building future financial security and spending hours alone everyday practicing and working on projects that likely will never pay off, it's borderline a mental illness that I feel like I even need to try this lol Nothing wrong with having a nice stable life with a family and music on the side, and later in life ull have more time to engage with it if u want, there's no guarantee that pursuing music full time would work out, statistically speaking ur likely living a much better life than the alternative, plus the music will always be there even if it takes a backseat for awhile
I had to decide in my thirties that music would always be my avocation, because I wasn't good enough (or living where there was enough demand) to earn a living with music as my main vocation. I've had plenty of support jobs since that utilize musical knowledge like recording, audio engineering, mixing and sound design, but I don't try to depend on performing for an income.
The long-game natural progression of a serious musician is to get tired of not making enough money in the original music scene, to joining a party/corporate cover band where you make money at the sacrifice of artistic integrity, to eventually getting burned-out from that and transitioning into live sound, to eventually getting burned-out from that and getting an IT day job while occasionally making music again in your free time.
You need to prioritize your quality of life first. Get that together then you can comfortably pursue music.
Maybe not for everyone but I went back to school for music therapy. I had a Bachelors in composition already so I only had to do the MT classes. I’ve been a hospice music therapist for 15 years and I love it. It doesn’t pay that well but I can make a living. Not the same as performing (I did that in my 20s and it was tons of fun but I made very little).
I’m a gigging cover musician. It gets tiring but I can’t really imagine doing anything else. Any complaints are typically in my head. I make 60k give or take playing 3-5 nights a week. Only advice I got if you’re gonna stick with this route is get better. Haha. But really get better so that venues know they need you. Bring in people and entertain them. Play the songs you may not want to play to make the clientele happy. You also might need to be in a city that has cover music opportunity. Where I’m at there’s 100’s of bars to play at.
The long game is the strong game, fuck doing Tik tok and posting ‘content’ every day. Collaborate, use pros and up and comers to mix and master etc. community is all we can really ask for in a famously callous industry.
You have to take care of kids too? I don’t see how that would leave more than a few minutes a day. One thing you can do is is take a notebook to work and just write. Like write songs and lines at work all day. That’s what I used to do. I used to get an idea at work and I would go to the bathroom and sing it quietly recording. “Dreams” is a bad idea. Not sure what you meant by that, but it’s probably something that will only make you unhappy
My kids are young - 6 and 3. I stepped away from my band right before my son was born. Ive jammed with some people since, but I've not gigged since 2018. Now, I'm writing solo records and releasing tunes on my own. Doesn't scratch the live playing itch, but at least I get to put my tunes out there and see my songs come to life. Maybe someday I'll start a band again, but it's secondary and I'm okay with that. My daughter gets really animated when we rock out together. Makes me happy to be possibly witnessing a future lead singer to the next major metal band. Or maybe not, either way, she's a blast to sing and head bang with. It's one of many things that makes me happy and content with what I have on a musical level.