There's a lot of waiting tables, and if lucky, teaching gigs. Paid performance gigs are rarer and not that rosy either, eg, boring wedding music or sporadic & low-paid pop-ified club gigs. In COVID... yikes.
Prestige includes a lot of 'when will you get a real job?'
Even for the rare folks who 'make it', there's often a lot of weirdness, especially around the one-hit wonder commercial music circuit. Unlikely and hard to get there, and often ugly if you do.
Sound rough? Even worse in visual areas because even less money. Gallery scene is basically charity from upper crust and whatever small grants, if you're lucky. More likely, still waiting tables or some other day job. There are commercial gigs, but rarely related to your art: an artist's exploration of abstract oil painting is far from say musclebound video game characters for adolescents. Even if someone likes your aesthetic style, commercial versions for say a big hotel/ commercial/product are dead/generic for accessibility reasons.
I was around a lot of this in my early 20's. The entertainment industry is at odds with art. Happy to be away from it, and empathy for artists pushing through it.
There's a lot of waiting tables, and if lucky, teaching gigs. Paid performance gigs are rarer and not that rosy either, eg, boring wedding music or sporadic & low-paid pop-ified club gigs. In COVID... yikes.
Prestige includes a lot of 'when will you get a real job?'
Even for the rare folks who 'make it', there's often a lot of weirdness, especially around the one-hit wonder commercial music circuit. Unlikely and hard to get there, and often ugly if you do.
Sound rough? Even worse in visual areas because even less money. Gallery scene is basically charity from upper crust and whatever small grants, if you're lucky. More likely, still waiting tables or some other day job. There are commercial gigs, but rarely related to your art: an artist's exploration of abstract oil painting is far from say musclebound video game characters for adolescents. Even if someone likes your aesthetic style, commercial versions for say a big hotel/ commercial/product are dead/generic for accessibility reasons.
I was around a lot of this in my early 20's. The entertainment industry is at odds with art. Happy to be away from it, and empathy for artists pushing through it.