Musicians and singers
In brief
In May 2025, BLS counted 36,180 US musicians and singers. Median pay was an estimated $48,180 a year in 2010. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the highest was 38,350, in May 2024. The last full technology era for musicians and singers: AIVA + Amper + Jukedeck, 2016 to 2023. First-generation AI composition tools primarily affected the production-music and library-music market: a segment that had already employed many session musicians to record generic background tracks.
What the sources say
Official outlook
BLS projects little or no change in employment from 2025 to 2035 (+0.3%).
AI exposure studies
- 13.3% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
- 0.074 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013
Since the 2013 prediction
In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.074. BLS counted 39,260 of these jobs in May 2013 and 36,180 in May 2025. The count moved sharply in one step, May 2020 to May 2021, when BLS changed how it estimates these counts, so no change is derived here.
Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.
Last updated .
Cite this page
Future History. (2026, October 11). Musicians and singers: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/27-2042
Future History. "Musicians and singers: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/27-2042.
@misc{futurehistory_27_2042, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Musicians and singers: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/27-2042}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }
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≈ $69,310 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)
October 19, 1896: The American Federation of Musicians is founded in Cincinnati with 3,000 initial members, under first president Owen Miller. It is the successor to the National League of Musicians (formed 1886), which had been dominated by elite eastern locals. The AFM's founding statement: "The only object of AFM is to bring order out of chaos." Within a decade the AFM had organized 424 locals and 45,000 members across the US and Canada, establishing minimum wage scales for orchestral performance, theater work, and dance engagements. It is the oldest continuously operating entertainment union in the United States.
October 6, 1927: Warner Bros.' The Jazz Singer premieres using Vitaphone synchronized-sound technology. Within three years, the "talkie revolution" eliminates approximately 22,000 theater pit musician jobs as silent-film houses convert to sound. Theater organists place ads in trade publications noting "Reason for leaving due to Vitaphone." This is the first mass technological displacement in the profession's history, and the proximate cause of AFM president James Petrillo's lifelong war against recorded and broadcast music in the workplace.
August 1, 1942: AFM president James Caesar Petrillo calls a recording ban, prohibiting union members from recording for commercial labels. The ban lasts until 1944 for most labels (1948 for Decca, Columbia, and RCA Victor in a second ban). The result is the Music Performance Trust Fund (established 1948), funded by a royalty on record sales, which at its peak became "the largest single employer of live musicians in the world", sponsoring free public concerts across North America. The Fund remains active today, funding tens of thousands of free live music events annually.
June 21, 1948: Columbia Records introduces the 12-inch LP at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Each side plays approximately 25 minutes, replacing the five-minute 78-rpm single as the dominant album format. By 1958, LPs represent 58% of dollar sales in US recording. The LP era creates the modern studio session musician as a distinct professional category: players specializing in high-quality rapid recording rather than live performance, employed full-time by major-label recording operations in Los Angeles, Nashville, and New York.
August 1, 1981: MTV launches at 12:01 a.m. with "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles, a choice that proved prophetic beyond its makers' intentions. Music television transformed pop music from a purely audio medium into a combined audio-visual product, creating new performance and choreography employment while concentrating audience attention on visual presentation. By the late 1980s, music video budgets had reached millions of dollars per clip; directors like David Fincher and Spike Jonze launched careers from music video work. The channel would later abandon music entirely, removing "Music Television" from its logo in 2010.
June 1, 1999: Napster launches, enabling free peer-to-peer music file sharing. Within two years it has 80 million registered users. US recording industry revenue falls from $14.6 billion (1999) to $6.3 billion (2009): a 57% collapse in ten years. Recording advances dry up, label rosters shrink, and studio session work contracts dramatically. The AFM would later describe this decade as the most economically devastating for working musicians since the Vitaphone displacement of 1927-1930.
February 2016: AIVA (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist) is founded and becomes the world's first virtual composer recognized by a performing rights society (SACEM, the French equivalent of ASCAP or BMI) granting it legal composer status for royalty purposes. AIVA's recognition by SACEM is not merely symbolic: it establishes a legal and regulatory precedent that AI can be attributed as a creator of music, a question that US performing rights law had not yet addressed. The Recording Academy's Grammy Awards would later rule in 2023 that AI-generated music cannot be nominated for Grammy awards unless a human is the primary creative force.
March 21, 2024: Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signs the ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act) into law, effective July 1, 2024. It is the first state law in the United States specifically designed to protect musicians from the unauthorized use of their voices through AI technologies. The bill passed unanimously in both chambers (93-0 House; 30-0 Senate). The law prohibits using AI to clone an artist's voice without consent and establishes criminal penalties at the Class A misdemeanor level. Tennessee chose the name deliberately, Elvis Presley's likeness had been a subject of protections since 1984, and the law builds on that foundation to address the entirely new threat of AI voice synthesis.
June 2024: The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), representing Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group, files copyright infringement lawsuits against Suno and Udio in federal court. The suits allege that both companies trained their AI music generation systems on commercially released recordings without license or compensation, seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work. The number of works allegedly infringed could place total damages in the billions. By October-November 2025, both companies reached licensing settlements: Udio with Universal Music Group and Suno with Warner Music Group ($500 million), establishing a licensed-training model for future AI music generation but not compensating the performers on the original recordings used in training.
Will AI replace musicians and singers? What the research says
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.
What's changing day to day for musicians and singers
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is sitting alongside you herePerform before live audiences in concerts, recitals, educational presentations, and other social gatherings.
Perform before live audiences in concerts, recitals, educational presentations, and other social gatherings.[2]
AI is sitting alongside you hereSpecialize in playing a specific family of instruments or a particular type of music.
Specialize in playing a specific family of instruments or a particular type of music.[2]
AI is sitting alongside you herePlay musical instruments as soloists, or as members or guest artists of musical groups such as orchestras, ensembles, or bands.
Play musical instruments as soloists, or as members or guest artists of musical groups such as orchestras, ensembles, or bands.[2]
How has the work of musicians and singers changed since 1865?
The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Acoustic instruments only: the purely live era
Before any recording technology existed, musicians could only be heard in person. Every performance was a live event; no sound could be preserved or reproduced. This created massive employment for musicians in every context where entertainment or ceremonial music was expected: theaters, churches, hotels, saloons, dancehalls, civic celebrations, and private parlors. The city of Chicago in the 1870s employed hundreds of musicians in its concert halls, beer gardens, and opera houses: all of whom would later be disrupted by the phonograph and then again by talking pictures.
Effect on the workThe absence of recording technology meant geographic and temporal scarcity was absolute: you had to be present when the musician performed. This scarcity was the economic foundation of live performance, and its eventual erosion by recording technology would prove the defining challenge of the twentieth century for the profession.
Phonograph (Edison, 1877) and disc record: first era of recorded music
Thomas Edison invented the phonograph on November 21, 1877. The commercial disc record (Berliner, 1890s) made mass reproduction viable. By 1910, Victor Talking Machine Company and Columbia Records were selling millions of records. The first wave of recording created studio work (musicians had to perform into recording horns repeatedly, take after take) but simultaneously introduced the first existential threat to live performance income. Why pay for a live performance when a recording could be played indefinitely? The AFM viewed early phonographs with deep suspicion. Petrillo would later call records "mechanical scabs."
Effect on the workThe phonograph did not immediately displace musicians; acoustic recording quality was too poor to substitute for live performance in most settings. Theater pit orchestras, church musicians, hotel ensembles, and dance band players all maintained full employment through the 1920s. The phonograph expanded the musician's audience to people who had never seen live performance, and created studio session work as a new category of employment.
Sound film (Vitaphone/The Jazz Singer, 1927) and radio: the first mass displacement
On October 6, 1927, The Jazz Singer premiered using Vitaphone synchronized-sound technology. The talkie revolution hit theater musicians immediately: by 1928, displaced theater organists were placing classified ads in trade publications with the phrase "Reason for leaving due to Vitaphone." Across the United States, tens of thousands of theater pit musicians lost their jobs within three years as silent film houses converted to sound. Radio simultaneously created new studio employment, networks like NBC and CBS maintained large staff orchestras, but the net effect on total musician employment was strongly negative. AFM president James Petrillo would spend the next fifteen years trying to recover what recorded and broadcast music had taken.
Effect on the workThe talking-picture displacement of theater musicians is one of the most rapid and complete occupational disruptions in US labor history: tens of thousands of jobs eliminated within years. Radio provided partial recovery, NBC and CBS each maintained orchestras of many musicians on salary through the 1930s and 1940s, but the net displacement of the 1927-1934 period was irreversible for the theater-pit specialization.
LP record (Columbia, 1948) + multitrack recording: the album era
Columbia Records unveiled the long-playing LP format on June 21, 1948, at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Each side played far longer: revolutionary compared to the five-minute limit of the 78-rpm disc. By 1958, LPs represented 58% of dollar sales in the US recording industry. The extended format enabled concept albums and sustained artistic statements; musicians could now develop coherent works rather than isolated singles. Simultaneously, Les Paul's multitrack recording techniques (pioneered in the late 1940s) gave studios the ability to overdub instruments and build recordings in layers, creating the modern studio session musician as a professional specialization separate from live performance.
Effect on the workThe LP and multitrack era created enormous new employment for studio session musicians who specialized in rapid, high-quality recording rather than performance. By the 1960s-70s, the "Wrecking Crew" in Los Angeles and the "Funk Brothers" in Detroit (Motown's house band) were full-time session players recording dozens of albums per year. These musicians were invisible on the album credits but economically central to the pop industry.
MTV (August 1, 1981) + MIDI synthesizer: the music video and electronic instrument era
MTV launched at 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981, with The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star." Within three years it had transformed the pop-music industry: visual presentation was now as important as musical performance, and music video production became a new employment category for musicians, directors, and choreographers. Simultaneously, the MIDI protocol (standardized 1983) allowed synthesizers to replace orchestral sections in many recording contexts. A single keyboard player with a synthesizer could approximate a string section, a brass section, or a full rhythm section, eliminating studio session work that had previously required multiple musicians.
Effect on the workMIDI-capable synthesizers displaced much of the studio session work that had sustained the professional musician class since the LP era. Film and TV scores that previously required 50-piece orchestras could be produced with a composer at a keyboard and digital samples. The American Federation of Musicians fought this shift in the "video game" recording negotiations of the 1980s-90s, seeking residuals for electronic performances, but the structural employment loss in session work was largely irreversible.
Napster (1999) + Pro Tools + iTunes (2003): the digital piracy and download era
Napster launched June 1, 1999, and within two years had 80 million registered users sharing music files for free. US recording industry revenue collapsed from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009: a decline in a decade. The impact on musicians was catastrophic: recording advances dried up, label staff shrank, and the session musician market contracted as budgets fell. Pro Tools digital audio workstations (widely adopted in home studios by the mid-2000s) further reduced the barrier to recording, flooding the market with independently produced music.
Effect on the workThe 2000s decade eliminated much of the professional recording infrastructure that had sustained session musicians since the 1950s. Major labels reduced their rosters dramatically; many independent recording studios closed as artists moved production into project studios and home setups. The live performance economy became increasingly critical as the recorded-music revenue base collapsed, touring revenue surpassed recorded-music revenue for many artists by the mid-2000s.
Spotify (2008 EU / 2011 US) + streaming platforms: the era of near-zero per-play income
Spotify launched in Europe in 2008 and entered the United States in July 2011. In 2024, Spotify implemented a minimum-streams threshold: tracks must receive more than a thousand listens per year to receive any royalties at all. The platform distributes approximately 70% of revenue to rights holders, who then extract label and management fees before any payment reaches the performer. For independent artists and session musicians without back-catalog ownership, streaming income is functionally negligible.
Effect on the workStreaming did not create new musician employment; it created a royalty revenue stream that concentrated enormously at the top (established artists with millions of streams) while yielding almost nothing for the median professional musician. The "attention economy" of streaming playlists created new demand for certain kinds of instrumental background music (lo-fi study beats, ambient wellness music) which has been partially captured by AI generation tools since 2020. Live performance income, which streaming cannot replicate, became the economic foundation for the majority of working musicians.
AIVA (2016) + Amper + Jukedeck: first-generation AI composition tools
AIVA (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist) was founded in February 2016 and became the world's first virtual composer to be officially recognized by a performing rights society (SACEM, France's equivalent of ASCAP) granting it the legal status of a composer for royalty purposes. AIVA used deep learning and reinforcement learning to analyze classical compositions and generate original orchestral works. Jukedeck (founded 2015, acquired by TikTok parent ByteDance in 2019) offered AI-generated background music for video creators. Amper Music (founded 2014, acquired by Shutterstock in 2020) provided royalty-free AI music for commercial use. These first-generation tools were limited to narrow genres and functional background music, they could not credibly substitute for the full range of musical performance, but they established that AI music generation was commercially viable for the lowest tier of the music market: production libraries, video backgrounds, and ambient soundscapes.
Effect on the workFirst-generation AI composition tools primarily affected the production-music and library-music market: a segment that had already employed many session musicians to record generic background tracks. Shutterstock's acquisition of Amper signaled that stock-music libraries would increasingly source AI-generated content rather than commissioning human musicians. This was not a large absolute employment loss, but it was a leading indicator of where AI music was headed.
Suno (Dec 2023) + Udio (Apr 2024): mass-market generative AI music
Suno became widely available on December 20, 2023, following a partnership with Microsoft. For the first time, a consumer-facing AI system could generate a complete song (including vocals, instrumentation, lyrics, and production) from a text prompt, in any genre, in seconds. Users could generate unlimited songs for free or at minimal cost. Both platforms were sued by the RIAA, representing Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group, in June 2024, alleging mass copyright infringement in training on commercially released recordings without license or payment. In October-November 2025, both platforms reached licensing settlements: Udio with Universal Music Group, and Suno with Warner Music Group ($500M), establishing a licensed-training model for future AI music generation. For professional musicians, the implications divide sharply by market segment. Background, production, and stock music, the functional end of the market, face near-total substitution. High-profile recording artists with established brands and audiences are relatively insulated, as fans seek the specific performer, not a generic musical output. The middle tier of professional session musicians, production composers, and working touring musicians without star-level audience relationships faces the most direct displacement pressure.
Effect on the workAFM filed formal regulatory comments in 2023-2024 calling for AI music training data licensing requirements and performer compensation. The Tennessee ELVIS Act (signed March 21, 2024) was the first state law in the US specifically protecting musicians from unauthorized AI voice cloning: a legislative response to the ability of tools like Suno and Udio to generate songs in the style of, or impersonating the voice of, any existing artist. As of mid-2025, no federal law specifically protects performers from AI voice or musical style replication.
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Browse all rolesMusicians and Singers employment and pay by year
View all 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
| Year | US employment | Annual pay (median unless marked) | Source | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1900 | 84,000 | n/a | Decennial Census 1900 Researched context | Report |
| 1930 | 165,000 | n/a | Decennial Census 1930 Researched context | Report |
| 1960 | 148,000 | n/a | Est., BLS Monthly Labor Review Researched context | Report |
| 1996 | n/a | $18,720 | Est., BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook Researched context | Report |
| 2000 | 139,000 | n/a | Est., BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook Researched context | Report |
| 2003 | 50,600 | $37,380 | BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic | Report |
| 2004 | 52,000 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic | Report |
| 2005 | 50,410 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic | Report |
| 2006 | 46,600 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic | Report |
| 2007 | 47,520 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic | Report |
| 2008 | 47,030 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic | Report |
| 2009 | 47,260 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic | Report |
| 2010 | 43,350 | $48,180 | BLS OEWS May 2010 (employment) Official statisticEst., BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook (pay) Researched context | Report |
| 2011 | 42,530 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic | Report |
| 2012 | 42,100 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic | Report |
| 2013 | 39,260 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic | Report |
| 2014 | 38,900 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic | Report |
| 2015 | 37,090 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic | Report |
| 2016 | 40,110 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic | Report |
| 2017 | 40,170 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic | Report |
| 2018 | 41,680 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic | Report |
| 2019 | 41,130 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic | Report |
| 2020 | 34,770 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic | Report |
| 2021 | 24,080 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic | Report |
| 2022 | 31,750 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic | Report |
| 2023 | 35,520 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic | Report |
| 2024 | 38,350 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic | Report |
| 2025 | 36,180 | n/a | BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic | Report |