re: Here's how Taylor Swift prepared for her tour

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surprising number of musicians fail because they fail to realize that being a successful professional musician takes a lot of work.

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A lot of them simply can’t hold up to the demands of long nightly stage performances. People often forget that many of the “great ones” like The Beatles and Van Halen started off as cover bands playing multiple gigs a day for 6-8 hours. It was a straight JOB. They had to play that well to get skilled enough as individuals and tight enough as a unit to become the prolific original artists they went on to be.

The great catch 22 of being an artist in the current era is that in order to get good enough to really make it, you have to treat it as a job, but the lower levels of music don’t pay enough to survive, so you need a day job to sustain you. But that day job takes too much time away so you can’t really get enough music work in. It’s extremely difficult to make a decent living as a musician, even as a cover band warrior, these days. The expenses are great, the barriers to entry to recording are low, but getting serious play regionally or nationally is extremely difficult. There’s zero money in streaming, and the pay for performances is often the same it was 40 years ago while the costs are 50% higher than they were just 4 years ago.

I would never recommend people pursue music as a career. But it’s a passion, an obsession, and a compulsion of mine.