At work one night, the falseness of the “work hard and you will succeed” ethic washed over me: the truth was the music world was a two-tiered system, and I was in the second chair.

Many years ago, I had a discussion about the same issue in the world of dance. I was reminded that Smith had said "...they are all very poor people who follow as a trade, what other people pursue as a pastime.".

Classical music, like classical dance, is a positive thing that is being sold in a way that doesn't really accord with its value. Much of Mozart's work was commissioned to entertain small audiences at social events the format of which has more or less disappeared from the world. That's why it was a way to make a living back then and why it isn't now. The contemporary pre-occupation with virtuosity and art for art's sake in certain "classical" (really Romantic era) art forms disguises these arts' social function, and by extension obscures anyway of charging for them.

Although the author strikes a tone of strident unfairness ("This is the way of arts under capitalism..."), at no point do they suggest that there is anything on the other side of the balance sheet -- that musicians provide a certain amount of value to society and should thus be compensated for it. The closest they get is to mention putting in a lot of effort and going into a lot of debt. The tough, late realisation facing these musicians is that most people have to work for a living; that having some unique skills of a rich kid does not make you into one.

Performance is a fairly limited way for society to derive value from the arts. A lot of the value of them is in the effect they have on people as they learn to work together in the context of a performance, and on their friends and family as they attend it. For many of the classical arts there are direct antecedents in folk arts which were as much for the benefit of the performers as for anyone else. The antecedents are particularly easy to discover for music and dance. These folk arts bide their time, ready to have their former positive effect on us, if only we would employ them at a scale and in a context that is fitting to them.

From The Wealth of Nations:

Hunting and fishing, the most important employments of mankind in the rude state of society, become in its advanced state their most agreeable amusements, and they pursue for pleasure what they once followed from necessity. In the advanced state of society, therefore, they are all very poor people who follow as a trade, what other people pursue as a pastime. Fishermen have been so since the time of Theocritus. A poacher is every-where a very poor man in Great Britain. In countries where the rigour of the law suffers no poachers, the licensed hunter is not in a much better condition. The natural taste for those employments makes more people follow them than can live comfortably by them, and the produce of their labour, in proportion to its quantity, comes always too cheap to market to afford any thing but the most scanty subsistence to the labourers.

It is noteworthy that quite a few people make a living teaching hunting marksmanship and tracking techniques, running ballet schools, tuning pianos...

https://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html?chapter_num=...