Our new paper concludes that the answer is a resounding “It Depends”.

It depends on your answer to the following questions:

1. If you didn’t major in music, would you major in something else, or not finish college?
2. How dead set are you on a career in music?

We found that

1. Music majors earn more than people who didn’t graduate from college, even if they don’t end up working as musicians
2. Among musicians, music majors earn more than other majors
3. But among non-musicians, other majors earn much more than music majors

So on average a music major means higher income if you would be a musician anyway, or if you wouldn’t have gone to college for another major, but lower income than if you majored in something else and worked outside of music. The exact amounts depend on what you control for; this gets complex but this table gives the basic averages before controls:

For better or worse, a music major also means you are much more likely to be a musician- 113 times more likely, in fact (this is just the correlation, we’re not randomizing people into the major). Despite that incredible correlation, only 9.8% music majors report being professional musicians, and only 22.3% of working musicians were music majors.

Sean Smith had the idea for this paper and wrote the first draft in my Economics Senior Capstone class in 2024. After he graduated I joined the paper as a coauthor to get it ready for journals, and it was accepted at SN Social Sciences last week. We share the data and code for the paper here.

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