The table below lists America’s 25 largest metro area job markets for Musicians and Singers. It provides information on the total number of people in that occupation, the mean annual wage, the number of jobs per 1000, and the ‘location quotient’. The location quotient is the ratio of the percentage of jobs in that occupation locally to the percentage nationally. A score above one denotes that more jobs in that occupation are present in the local area compared to the national average, while a score below one indicates fewer jobs in the local area relative to the national average. Click here for more details on the data and methods employed to produce this information

Observations:

• Nashville has a lot of musicians for a city of its size.  Honalulu is also a place where many people work as musicians. It’s musician market is slightly smaller than that of Chicago, even though Chicago’s metro area has five times more people.  I cannot explain Rochester, but the music community is proportionally large there.
• Job markets for professional musicians are very small, particularly in relation to the number of people who receive early training in, and likely harbor aspirations to, a career in musical performance.  In other words, it is challenging to do music professionally.
• Predictably, a large chunk of work is in the country’s three largest markets: New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.  However, there are a few music centers with much larger musician job markets than one might expect, given the population.