Is a Career in Music Worth It? On Disappointment, Course Correction, and Protecting the Joy
- Gökçe Kutsal
- Jun 15
- 12 min read
Updated: Jun 16
* Where I describe clients in my blog posts, I've changed names, instruments, and other identifying details to protect their privacy. Sometimes I'm describing one person, sometimes a pattern I've seen across several. The essence of the experience and what we worked on together remain true.
Most musicians I work with chose music for one reason, underneath all the other reasons...
They loved it.
(It's never I thought it would be a stable career or I did the cost-benefit analysis... for obvious reasons.)
They simply loved it... the sound, the feeling, the way a phrase could open something in them that nothing else could reach...
They were children or teenagers when this happened, and the love was total. So naturally, it became part of who they were. I am a musician settled in next to I am kind and I am curious as one of the load-bearing facts of their identity.
And then, somewhere down the line, the thing they got into for love started costing them the love.
This is the conversation I want to have in this post.
Because I can't give you the answer to is a career in music worth it, that's a question only you can answer for your own life...
But I can share my experience, along with many clients:
What happens when the path you took for love stops feeling like love, why that happens, why it is almost certainly not your fault, and what you can actually do about it that isn't just quit and isn't just push through.
I should say where I'm standing as I write this. I'm at a slightly strange midpoint in my own life... older than many of the musicians I coach, younger than many others. So I've watched this from both sides: The musicians still in the thick of the disappointment, and the ones who came out the other side of it into something that worked.
For the ones who are younger than me, who are in the early, disorienting part of this, I think some of what I've learned might be useful.
So let's give this a try, shall we?
The Disappointment Is Real, and It's Not in Your Head
There is no easy way to say this, so let me start with the hard part:
If you're already feeling disappointment, it is fully justified.
The career genuinely is harder, narrower, and less financially viable than what most musicians were led to expect when they committed to it.
If you were wondering whether this is about your perception or pessimism (or both)... it's a documented structural reality.
Look at what's happened to the pipeline:
In England, the number of students taking A-level music has fallen by almost 45% since 2010. For the third year running, fewer than 5,000 pupils across the entire country are studying music at that level. The subject is contracting at the base, in schools, before a single one of those students ever considers it as a career.
That's quite telling already... young people aren't even considering a music career.
Now look at what waits for the ones who do pursue it: The UK Musicians' Census found that the average annual income from music work is £20,700. 43% of professional musicians earn less than £14,000 a year from music. Even the musicians who earn all of their income from music average around £30,000, which is below the UK median income of £33,280 and well below the £38,500 average for a working-age person with a degree.
And the portfolio career, the thing that was once the exception, is now widespread in the field. 53% of musicians sustain their careers with income from outside music. Of those, three-quarters report that they only do that outside work for financial reasons. They'd rather not, but they do it because the music alone doesn't pay enough to live.
This pattern isn't unique to the UK. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics describes the same in its own data: Musicians frequently work part-time, on variable schedules, piecing together income from performing, teaching, and other sources. The portfolio career is the international norm, not a local anomaly.
So when you feel disappointed, when you look at the gap between the life you imagined at eighteen and the life that's actually available right now... you are responding accurately to real information.
The dream you were sold (the orchestral tenure, the soloist career, the stable position doing the thing you love full-time) was always going to be available to only a small fraction of the people trained for it.
And it has gotten more scarce, not less, over the span of your training. You inherited a picture of the profession that the profession stopped being able to deliver.
(This also connects to something I've written about elsewhere, in the post on what music school taught you about worth. The training pipeline tends to present the narrow dream as the only legitimate destination, and everything else as a kind of failure. That framing was questionable even when the dream was more available. Now that it's vanishingly rare, I believe it's actively setting people up for failure.)
Two Kinds of Pain
I want to introduce a distinction that I find more useful than almost anything else when a musician is sitting in this disappointment. It comes from ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Training) and it separates two things that usually arrive tangled together.
Clean pain is the pain that's a genuine, unavoidable part of a hard experience. When the career reality turns out to be narrower than you hoped, the sadness you feel about that is clean pain. The grief for the life you imagined. The frustration at the conditions. The disappointment that something you love this much doesn't reward you the way you were told it would. Clean pain is real, it's legitimate, and it's allowed. You don't have to talk yourself out of it. Something genuinely disappointing happened. Grieving it is the appropriate response.
Dirty pain is the second layer — the suffering we add through what we make the clean pain mean. It's not this is disappointing; it's this is disappointing and it means I failed. Everyone else made it and I didn't. I wasn't good enough. I wasn't talented enough. If I were a real musician this would have worked out. Something is wrong with me.
Let me give you the example I use with clients:
Imagine you're walking down the street and you trip and fall and scrape your knee. The scrape hurts. That's clean pain — a real injury, real nerve endings, maybe some blood... genuine pain.
Now imagine what some of us do next:
Why does this always happen to me? Why can't I just walk down a street like a normal person? Everyone else manages to stay upright. There's clearly something wrong with me. These things always happen to me and never to other people.
The knee still hurts the same amount... but now there's a second, larger pain stacked on top of it — and that second pain isn't about the knee at all. It's about what you've decided the fall says about you.
The disappointment of a music career is the scrape. The and therefore I'm not good enough is the spiral on top.
Unfortunately, the dirty pain is so much heavier in music than in most fields precisely because the love and the livelihood and the identity are all fused into one thing. If music is your income AND your identity AND your source of joy AND your sense of worth, then a professional disappointment isn't a professional disappointment. It's a total-self catastrophe. There's nowhere to stand outside it.
A missed audition becomes a verdict on your right to exist.
The Wrong Bus
So here's how I've come to think about the way out of this:
You got on a bus. You got on it because you loved music, and the bus was labeled the music career — the full-time, do-the-thing-you-love-for-a-living dream. You boarded it out of love.
(Please know that I'm 100% with you on that, this was the RIGHT reason to board.)
But somewhere along the route, you started to notice that the bus was costing you the very thing you got on it for. The financial pressure of needing music to pay the bills meant every gig carried existential weight. Every audition became a referendum. Every project got measured by whether it advanced the career. And under all that weight, the love — the actual reason you boarded — started to get crushed. The thing you got on the bus for was being destroyed by where the bus was going.
Now. The sunk-cost instinct at this point is brutal. I've come this far. I've spent fifteen years and a fortune in training and my entire identity on this bus. I can't get off now.
So people stay on the bus, all the way to a destination they don't actually want to reach, because getting off feels like admitting the whole journey was wasted...
But think about what you'd actually do if you got on a literal bus, sat down, and realized after a few stops that it wasn't going where you wanted. You wouldn't say well, I've already been riding for twenty minutes, I'd better stay on until the end. That would be absurd. You'd get off at the next stop.
Then you'd take out a map, figure out where you actually are and where you actually want to go, and find the right vehicle to get there.
The sunk cost is real, yes, but it's irrelevant to the decision. The fifteen years already happened. They're not coming back whether you stay on the wrong bus or get off it. The only question worth asking is where do I actually want to go, and what gets me there.
Side note: Getting off the bus is not leaving music. The bus was never music. The bus was the particular arrangement where music has to carry the entire weight of your income and identity and be the source of joy all at once.
You can get off that bus and keep the music. In fact, getting off that bus might be the only way to keep the music, because that arrangement was the thing killing it.
What Getting Off Actually Looks Like
When you separate the love of music from the livelihood of music, two things happen.
The first is that music no longer has to earn all your income. You can let some other work carry part of the financial load, which takes the existential pressure off the music. The gig you do for love stops having to also be the gig that pays your rent. And freed from that pressure, the music can become joyful again — because it's no longer being asked to do an impossible job.
The second is deeper, and it's the one that addresses the dirty pain directly. When music isn't carrying your entire economic and emotional and identity weight, then a professional disappointment stops being a total-self catastrophe. If music is one important strand of a life that also contains other strands, then not getting the orchestral job is a professional disappointment — a real one, worth some clean pain — but it is no longer a verdict on whether you deserve to exist. You've given the dirty pain less to grip onto. The fusion was what made every setback catastrophic. De-fusing the strands is what makes them survivable.
This is why I think the portfolio career, chosen deliberately, can be one of the healthiest things a musician does — even though most people currently fall into it by financial necessity rather than choosing it.
There's a real difference between I do wedding photography because I failed at music and I do wedding photography so that music never has to become something I resent.
The first is the dirty-pain version. The second is a sophisticated, deliberate decision to protect the thing you love from the thing that was crushing it.
And the truth is that most musicians have far more options here than they realize, because the skills that make someone a good musician travel widely. The musicians I work with are disproportionately talented in adjacent areas — visual design, photography, writing, teaching, technology, project management, communication... The discipline, the pattern-recognition, the years of refined attention to detail, the ability to perform under pressure are also highly valuable far outside music.
The point isn't settle for a day job. The point is that you have genuine capacity in more than one direction, and you're allowed to build a life that uses several of them.
The disappointment isn't only about income. There's also a version of this feeling that has nothing to do with money at all... plenty of musicians who are financially fine still feel it — I chose this out of love, and the reality crushed the love, and that must mean I failed.
So in this case, protecting the love sometimes means changing what music has to be for you: Letting it be a source of play and fun again rather than an arena where your worth gets decided.
(I touched on a version of this in the post on whether orchestral musicians actually like classical music... because clearly, the love and the professional reality can drift apart.)
A Map You Can Only See Part Of
I told you I'd offer my own story as an observation rather than advice, so here it is:
When the opera department I was planning to audition for closed (the one I mentioned in this post), I switched to interior architecture. My reasoning was that I'm a creative, design-minded person, so it made sense to me. And I was good at it.
But the picture in my head when I chose it, at eighteen, was a fantasy of the visual, beautiful side... a creative life, something slightly different every day, playing with colors and textures and fabrics.
As I got closer to graduating, I discovered how far that was from the reality. Most interior designers, early in their careers, don't get much say in the design at all. They produce technical drawings (like plan, section and detail drawings) sitting in front of a computer all day doing what they're told. To get to the creative, design-leading version I'd imagined, I'd have to spend years grinding through barely-paid internships and junior technical roles first.
And I knew myself well enough, even then, to know I couldn't do that. Not for years. Not for weeks, honestly. It just wasn't possible for me.
So I said no, I'm not doing this.
What I did instead was specialize in architectural acoustics, because acoustics is about sound, and voice, and music. You get to design concert halls and auditoriums. It connected to the interior architecture training I already had, and it ran back toward the music I'd loved in the first place. It was, for me, the best of both worlds... and a far better decision than chasing the interior-designer dream I'd constructed at eighteen with no real information about what the job entailed.
Looking back, I now have perspective I didn't have back then: I couldn't have planned my way to acoustics from the starting line. I didn't have enough information at eighteen to see it. I had to walk in the direction I thought I wanted, get close enough to the reality to actually see it, realize it wasn't what I wanted, and once I had enough information, adjust accordingly.
It's like a strategy game where the map starts covered in fog (I'm looking at you, Civilization!).
You can't see the whole board from where you start. You can only see a small circle around yourself. To see more, you have to actually walk to the edge of the visible area — and only then does the next part of the map reveal itself. You couldn't have known what was there until you moved.
Life works exactly the same way. You don't get to see the whole map before you choose. You take a few steps toward what you think you want. The fog clears a little. You see more than you could before.
And if what you see tells you this isn't the right direction, you don't berate yourself for having walked the wrong way — you couldn't have known until you walked it.
So you just reorient and go a different direction, now with information you didn't have before.
The steps that look like detours are how you can read the map.
So, Is a Career in Music Worth It?
Well, I can't answer that for you :)
But I can tell you that it's the wrong question if it's also secretly asking am I a failure for not reaching the dream.
The better questions are the ones you ask with the map and compass in hand, once you've put down the dirty pain long enough to think clearly:
What do I actually value? Beyond what was I told to want, what do I actually care about? The love of making music is probably still in there. What else is?
What's actually true about where I am? Not the catastrophized version, and not the fantasy version — the real terrain. What's available, what isn't, what I'm genuinely good at, what I'd genuinely tolerate.
Where do I actually want to go? A life where I still love music? That's usually the real destination, underneath the inherited one about tenure and prestige and full-time-or-failure.
What vehicle gets me there? Maybe it's the obscure, avant-garde projects you love, funded partly by administrative work or teaching. Maybe it's a teaching life with performing on the side. Maybe it's something that doesn't have a name yet because you can't see it from where you're standing... and you'll only see it once you've walked a little further into the fog.
Notice how none of those answers is settling. None of them is failure.
Each of them can be a real, rich, joyful musical life — sometimes a more joyful one than the dream you grieved, because the love has been protected instead of crushed.
If any of this is sounding a bit too close to your experience, and you'd like to look at it with someone to sort the clean pain from the dirty pain, and to think honestly about your own map... private coaching is where we can do it together.
About
I'm Gökçe Kutsal, a music performance coach for professional orchestra musicians and opera singers, with an MA in Voice Pedagogy, plus coaching and teaching experience since 2017. I work with orchestral musicians, soloists, and audition candidates across Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia — and I write about performance anxiety, audition preparation, and the craft of practice for musicians who already have the technique and are trying to work out why it doesn't always hold up under pressure.
Research cited & further sources
Incorporated Society of Musicians / Joint Council for Qualifications (2025). A-level music entry statistics. (A-level music entries in England down 44.8% since 2010)
Help Musicians / UK Musicians' Census (2023). Findings on musicians' income and portfolio careers.
US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Outlook Handbook: Musicians and Singers.
Harris, R. (2007). The Happiness Trap. (Clean pain / dirty pain analogy and the "struggle switch" in ACT)
