It really really does. Popular/rock/folk/classical musicians all earn much the same way now: a blend of teaching, occasional performance fees, functions performances like weddings and galas, music-related side-gigs (composition, arrangement and recording for commercial music), and non-music-related side gigs — teaching non-musical things, gardening, painting and decorating, bar work, office temp work, even full time jobs (doctors and lawyers, accountants). I know a couple of classical musicians whose actual money-making music is playing other instruments in funk/rock functions bands.
Even the "best" or most famous musicians, popular or classical, have side gigs. Approximately nobody makes their money only from performing or from recordings; that ended twenty-five or thirty years ago.
Elite soloists, maybe — but that is actually a pretty expensive life to live. I would be surprised if many of them risked a life where they had no other job.
The idea that a "conservatory" system exists that meaningfully supports classical musicians is nonsense almost anywhere in the world, I would think. Even the first-chair musicians and conductors have side gigs.
(ETA: I can't believe this is a workable model for mathematicians, either. Maybe for a couple of dozen the world over. But there is no performance, no regionality, little in the way of public dissemination, little in the way of reflected glory for benefactors. No, the "conservatory" will perhaps be the intelligence agencies, as it was before.)
Today classical music is filled with people who want to pretend to be superior to pop musicians because they keep their repertoire confined to academically acceptable areas.
And then the LARPers that want to make new music make complete and utter arhythmic and atonal trash that demands humans subdue our own aural feelings of beauty.
You'll find classical musicians who complain about this stuff are usually incompetent musicians who really stretch the definition of artist.
Sorry spent almost a decade of my young life in a somewhat competitive music school environment. Lots of the other kids were upset I played what I wanted to and people liked it.
Actual modern composers in the classical tradition (I.e. people alive today who compose music that is similar in feel to older composers) are well compensated because they're often hired to score films, video games, and other capitalist interests that the supposedly 'real' classical musicians would scoff their noses at.
As somebody with classical training and a brother in the industry, it pains me to read this misinformed opinion of yours. Top-tier symphonies world round are doing crossover concerts with pop artists, play pop songs, modern and experimental music, and regularly feature works by living composers.
Down the foodchain, it gets even weirder. The favorite gig I played involved interpretive dance featuring waterboarding, gallons of fake blood, a live chicken race, and more.
Where you certainly will find a subset of afficionados of any genre who scoff at anything but their extremely narrow definition of "good music," if you take the time to rub elbows with mature classical musicians you'll find many to most of them quite open minded.
Your experience with young artists, finding them to be idealistic and purist, does not extend to the whole field.
From what I can tell discussions on what to do about it haven’t really advanced much if at all.
Still the same mix of new jobs will appear, jobs will change and perhaps some talk of UBI.
Pure maths has foreshadowed a lot of physics, and a lot of Computer Science. We should probably keep doing it.
Does the current model (of highly-talented academics at Universities mostly arguing with each other) change because of AI? Does it invalidate human effort, or does it allow humans to push the boundaries further? Is there no point in training or paying for mathematicians because AI will take over the whole role?
Or, as we're finding with so many other areas, does AI do its best work when guided by someone who knows the area and subject well?
I think underappreciated in discourse like this is that of course we will still have "mathematicians" - people whose work is mathematics. The job might change, but at the very least someone has to choose where to spend the compute and the dollars, decide what theorems are worth investing in, what definitions matter. Someone still has to serve as the ambassador reminding people at the relevant points to look over at the field for productivity and correctness reasons, presenting fun riddles for entertainment and education, advocating to political bodies for funding.
Metalworking looks a lot different than it used to, but the end of a man with a hammer and leather bellows bashing out a nail didn't end the career of metal working either. The work sure looks a lot different though, and there are many fewer of them.
Music didn't enter the conservatory so much as the relative interest in various styles have changed over time. I get that the author was implying that by talking about pop music, but what was music doing before Mozart came around?
Every field is having this existential crisis right now, from art to math. Especially in art, the anti-AI hate mostly reduces to arguing that art is the process not the outcome.
The need for research-level math isn't changing (if anything, it may accelerate), but how we do it is. The languages, systems, and process I used to write code has changed a lot since I wrote my first line of BASIC in 1994. Mathematicians, I expect, have not encountered nearly the same amount of disruption in academia. I feel for them.
All that to say, there will be certain jobs that people will want to pay humans to do even if the robots can do those things "better".
turtleyacht•45m ago
hoppyhoppy2•41m ago
turtleyacht•29m ago