I highly recommend you read the full article at they NY Times like below.
In the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art...
...Their financial fate turns out to be much harder to measure, but I endeavored to try...
...The closest data set we have to a bird’s-eye view of the culture industry can be found in the Occupational Employment Statistics, an enormous compendium of data assembled by the Labor Department that provides employment and income estimates...
...The best approximation of the creative-class group as a whole is Group 27-0000, or Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports and Media Occupations...
...the creative class modestly outperformed the rest of the economy,...
...The problem with the O.E.S. data is that it doesn’t track self-employed workers, who are obviously a large part of the world of creative production. ...
...Could the surge in musicians be accompanied by a parallel expansion in the number of broke musicians? The income data suggests that this just isn’t true. ...
...figures seem to suggest that music, the creative field that has been most threatened by technological change, has become more profitable in the post-Napster era — not for the music industry, of course, but for musicians themselves. Somehow the turbulence of the last 15 years seems to have created an economy in which more people than ever are writing and performing songs for a living...
from "The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t" -nytimes.com