Who would be a professional musician in this day and age? A Musicians’ Census, published in association with the Musicians’ Union and the charity Help Musicians this week, reported some depressing statistics, which are sure to be prohibitive in rearing the next generation of talent.

The stark main point is that musicians are paid very poorly. A canvas of nearly 6,000 practitioners found that the average salary is £20,700 – roughly equivalent to the minimum wage – while a staggering 43 per cent earn less than £14,000. The musicians I know are a resilient and entrepreneurial bunch, always adept at adopting a patchwork lifestyle that takes in teaching and other alternative employment to help boost their meagre earnings (this was revealed to be particularly the case outside the classical music world). What’s more, the census actually found that 81 per cent thought they would still be working in the industry in five years’ time – a sign, perhaps, that music is still seen as a vocation.

But isn’t this level of income insulting? The majority of those in the industry are educated to degree level, and have an expertise that should command a decent wage. Also, many of them possess more talent in their little finger than I have in my entire body. Surely that talent is worth something: it is, for instance, in the field of elite athletics, where you can earn anywhere between £50,000 and £100,000 a year.

Yet we have to face the fact that there is, in general, very little money in the arts. Whereas sports sponsorships seem plentiful, there’s only a finite number of philanthropists in the UK. In America, where the arts have to pay for themselves, it is very different. Just today, I read that the New York Philharmonic has been awarded $40 million (£32 million)by its co-chair Oscar L Tang and his wife Agnes. Hence the fact that the average US salary for a musician is significantly more than in the UK ($52,700) – although a recent ruckus at the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra regarding pay shows that it isn’t plain sailing there, either.

Elsewhere, state subsidies help to cushion the blows. In Germany, where music is inured in the culture, performers are often employed in a full-time capacity, thus the need to work in the perilous gig economy isn’t as great. And again, the average salary is much healthier, estimated at about €51,000 (£44,000).