depents on what you want to achieve with music.
for example its way harder to find a job in game design as a musician then as a char scorer.

thats why i focus myself on the charts. and game music comes by as a hobby, who knows maybe that will become something. just charts for now :) since there is alot more possibilty (but also alot more competition)

Quote: Original post by Lily
Is it common for musicians to have a second job? Alternatively, how about having a primary job, with music sitting on the sidelines? Is the actual percentage of composers who earn a living from music alone quite low?

I've never met a professional musician. I have met probably over a hundred performing and recording musicians however. Does that answer the question? In fairness, it's not entirely bleak; one of them does work as a music technology teacher, so that ups the employment rate to about 1%.

If you'll forgive me for being philosophical, as with anything in life, there are 2 ways you can form an opinion, inductively and deductively. Inductively, you can gather some evidence for yourself - how often do you see music-related jobs advertised? Do you know any musicians personally that do it professionally? Look on industry employment agency sites to get an idea, if you're unsure. Deductively, think about how much demand there must be for a musician. On a 12 month game project, a programmer or artist is likely to have more than 12 months worth of work to do. Yet how much time might you expect it to take a musician to write enough music for just a single game? Not twelve months. And how many musicians does it take for one game, compared to programmers or artists? Look also at film credits - count the musicians compared to the actors, cameramen, lighting technicians, caterers, etc. What proportion of the overall work do you think goes to musicians?

The prospects are bleak, to be frank. You'll vastly improve your usefulness if you can do general game and/or film audio in addition to music, but you're still looking at a field that many want to be in but which actually has relatively little work for anybody to do. As much as I like music, I could never recommend that anybody pins their whole education upon it.

Quote: Perhaps this isn't the best place to ask, but what are the prospects like for musicology?

Can you think of a single job except 'teacher' that would require such a skill? If so, how many people do you know that do that job, or how often do you see such positions advertised?

Bleak as the prospects may be, I thank you once again for the detailed response. I realize that a career music may be insanely difficult to achieve, but I suppose the main question I'm pondering at this stage is whether it's wise to attempt to enter a university music course. I doubt I'll be traversing that path, however, as I don't believe that my style is completely compatible with the experimental "art music"-style genre, which the only credible composition course in my state seems to focus on.

After much consideration, yes, music as a serious hobby seems like something I can accept.

Thanks for the replies, everyone!