How much money? Enough for personal private jets or enough to make a living? If the bar is to simply pay the rent then I still think that musicians can do what they want.
Really? Do you have any stats to back that up?
I'm not familiar with many musicians paying the rent with their music and it seems to me that you either make it big, or keep your day job.
I don't think this subthread is any use when you're just speaking of "musicians" at large being able to pay their rent.
You can't put Rammstein in the same league as my friend who would like to make a living in music but realizes that it's unlikely he'll ever make pay-the-rent kind of money from that, simply due to the sheer volume of competition and luck involved (while their music is as good as any song I've heard in the genre, it's a combination of reaching the right people and stumbling upon better ideas than your competition, which both have a significant luck factor). The former can do what they want and still get that private jet, the latter has to "spend their time riding a perpetual wave that they have to continually feed" and likely still couldn't pay the rent. That spectrum is way too broad to generalize into "musicians".
Unrelated to the topic at hand, but I've always been curious how much it costs Rammstein to do their shows. Their most recent tour took ~60 hours per stop to set up the stage and equipment brought in by a convoy of 18 wheelers. Then they have a bunch of complicated pyrotechnics, crazy amounts of lights, costumes, props, gigantic screens, and they perform in the largest venues available. The amount of resources and people it requires is staggering to me.
They were the only ones where I was reasonably sure they are popular enough that shows are hard to get tickets for. Other mainstream bands that come to mind, I would have no idea if I know the name because they had 1 popular song five summers ago or if they are really big.
I'm not even that big a fan of Rammstein, just a few of their songs I like :)
This should give some perspective: https://www.vulture.com/2012/09/grizzly-bear-shields.html - you'd think that the members of a band like Grizzly Bear, while not outright rich, should be able to live comfortable without too many financial struggles. You'd be wrong.
And that was 2012 - I'm sure things haven't improved since then.
Without trying to sound too harsh, 50k monthly listeners really isn't all that much. You can argue that spotify's discoverability (or lack thereof) has a large influence on those numbers, but there are no shortage artists with many times that many that aren't all that widely known.
They can, but only as long as they don't care about money. But musicians also need to pay rent.