You know that feeling you get when you see, say, CSI "building a GUI interface in Visual Basic to track the killers?" That's how I feel whenever a post about music hits the front page of HN.
Save for a few genuinely educated and empathetic comments (thankfully towards the top for once), these comments (such is tradition) are a sea of Dunning-Kruger effects in full swing.
I'd like to respond to a few confident-and-wrong assertions I'm seeing rear their heads again:
No, "most musicians" don't make most of their money from gigs. That one band you know is not indicative of an entire diverse industry, nor is it a proper sample size. Those are amateur musicians, not pros. A pro musician who makes the bulk of their cash from gigs is doing it wrong. And not all musicians are instrumentalists: some are primarily writers, some are producers, or audio engineers, or synthesists, or whatever. There's so much diversity in this world that you're not aware of. If your idea of a "musician" is "someone carrying an instrument," that's a good sign that you know as much about this world as your family member who says "you're a software developer, why can't you fix my TV" as if knowing about computers means you know about hardware and electronics -- it just betrays a huge amount of ignorance on your part.
No, streaming does not pay people better than album sales. This is just...I don't even know where to start with how wrong this is, so if you believe this just know that you're dead wrong and I'll leave it at that. Look into my previous comments for more info if you'd like.
No, streaming is not supposed to be "exposure." It is a replacement of both album sales and radio plays. Artists and musicians constantly have to defend against the moving of goalposts -- first it was album sales nearly going away, then gigs becoming "exposure" for their albums, then their album sales becoming "exposure" for their gigs, then album sales became totally replaced by streaming and still being seen as "exposure" for their gigs/merch. It's a constant chipping away of previously-decent-income-streams that we're then told to be grateful for because they can apparently "expose" us for better payment. Which takes the form of...what? The only truly reliable thing left is licensing/royalties, which is also very heavily under attack.
Just -- people, please understand that you just probably don't understand very much about the complexities of a market with which you have zero experience. Your armchair analysis that makes sense only within the context of near-total ignorance isn't helping. HN tends to be full of smarter-than-usual people, so at least be smart enough to know when you don't know what you're talking about, and try approaching these topics with more empathy and humility.