From the preface to his in-progress history of avant-garde music:

Art Music (or Sound Art) differs from Commercial Music the way a Monet painting differs from IKEA furniture. Although the border is frequently fuzzy, there are obvious differences in the lifestyles and careers of the practitioners. Given that Art Music represents (at best) 3% of all music revenues, the question is why anyone would want to be an art musician at all. It is like asking why anyone would want to be a scientist instead of joining a technology startup. There are pros that are not obvious if one only looks at the macroscopic numbers. To start with, not many commercial musicians benefit from that potentially very lucrative market. In fact, the vast majority live a rather miserable existence. Secondly, commercial music frequently implies a lifestyle of time-consuming gigs in unattractive establishments. But fundamentally being an art musician is a different kind of job, more similar to the job of the scientific laboratory researcher (and of the old-fashioned inventor) than to the job of the popular entertainer. The art musician is pursuing a research program that will be appreciated mainly by his peers and by the “critics” (who function as historians of music), not by the public. The art musician is not a product to be sold in supermarkets but an auteur. The goal of an art musician is, first and foremost, to do what s/he feels is important and, secondly, to secure a place in the history of human civilization. Commercial musicians live to earn a good life. Art musicians live to earn immortality. (Ironically, now that we entered the age of the mass market, a pop star may be more likely to earn immortality than the next Beethoven, but that’s another story). Art music knows no stylistic boundaries: the division in classical, jazz, rock, hip hop and so forth still makes sense for commercial music (it basically identifies the sales channel) but ever less sense for art music whose production, distribution and appreciation methods are roughly the same regardless of whether the musician studied in a Conservatory, practiced in a loft or recorded at home using a laptop.