It's an interesting Q. It's a business full of sharp-elbowed people relentlessly promoting themselves, encircled by people who have no talent themselves but know damn well how to exploit those who do by making money off them.
A good example of this is the link below on how Live Nation rips off just about everybody to make money from concert ticket sales via secret kickbacks to business partners.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/expl ... dium=email
Now having said all this some people DO manage to make money out of the music business without resorting to exploitation and fraud. But most of the time this comes down to a LOT of touring around to small town gigs and sleeping in the back of the van and working very, very hard to get noticed.
And if you're not just doing covers, then your original material had better be pretty good and you need to be pretty good at playing it - it's a high bar to clear. Have a listen to Zervas and Pepper covering Joni Mitchell, these are very difficult songs to tackle and they do an amazing job, but the quality of their musicianship is exceptional. Can you match that talent? - be honest with yourself, it's better to be realistic now then be disappointed later.
[they also write their own stuff, but haven't really hit the big time yet. Their Joni tribute show though, did pretty well for them I think, they toured a bunch of the provincial theatres and got pretty good houses because there were quite a lot of people who wanted very much to hear what they were offering. I could see them possibly moving into the tribute band market as Ms Mitchell ain't getting any younger - bless her, what a fantastic talent and she's still performing after being pretty unwell too]
Of course there are other paths. Library music - but again this is a pretty crowded market and unfortunately I can see AI decimating this one in the next few years.
Being a truly great tribute band is another - the top-level tribute bands do well, but they have the talent and the gear to put on a show that often is on a par with what the original bands they cover would have done. And they go to a LOT of trouble - the top Beatles tribute band has a right-handed bass player who re-learned to play bass left-handed because Paul McCartney is left-handed.
You could be a songwriter like Carole King who certainly did ok as a performer, but also wrote some songs that got covered by a LOT of other folks.
You could also teach others - there's an endless demand for classes in creativity where the participants are looking at you to inspire them - do you have the charisma for that?.
Or music therapy. You do have to train for years for this but you could change the lives of children who are often autistic and find expression through guided music therapy.
Or scoring for film - this is definitely an area in my opinion with the most possibility for creative musical people because so many young film producers will be desperate for an original soundtrack and they sure can't afford to license anything. You won't earn much money (or indeed probably any money) for a while but as a path to getting known, this certainly is worth considering.
[have a listen to some of the amazing work that got done by pretty much unknown people e.g the soundtrack to Liquid Sky, which I *think* is still on Netflix]
