A notes and bolts followup to that last piece might be useful.

Ok, when you start out a musician, you run into "covers or originals." If you play cover songs, it's a little easier to get to the hundred dollar a night stage. I speak here of pop/rock/country/etc. Jazz is a little different, but the basic structure is similar up to a point.

Originals is a different bag, and a rougher road. Many music venue owners would rather pay the songwriter royalties for cover bands than put up with the raw stages of beginning originals acts.

But the venues that do host original acts are gold.

Now, cover bands get to a little better money, sooner, but there's a cap on what they can make. Originals don't have that cap, assuming they can keep working to larger venues, get label attention, or best of all a combination. And these days, break their own audience and pass the labels by entirely.

That's the economics of it in a nutshell. The songwriting part of it is the interesting part. You write with the ones you're rehearsing with. If you hear a band in their breakout period, or an individual who's scratched their way to that level, you're hearing the songs that they wrote in that blood and beer and bruises stage. All for one and one for all.

And that's the part that's the hardest to keep going. Because at a certain point, they're no longer writing as a team. In many cases, they don't even see each other until soundcheck.

The frictions start to magnify, and that magic team effort tends to come apart under the new stresses. It's a rough way to run a business.

Individual performers have a little different path, then. Some ways easier, because their process doesn't have the dependence on others. But at the same time, they still have to learn to listen to a voice that's changed.