NEPOTISM OPENS DOORS, IT DOESN’T MAKE THE MUSIC SUCCESSFUL
Money doesn’t guarantee success, so why do we treat it as the main way to judge musicians? Barriers are real, and they matter. But the purity tests that now dominate a lot of these conversations help nobody. They’re a lazy way of sorting people into authentic and inauthentic without ever looking at the work.
I got fed up with the endless attacks on musicians for coming from money, and I want to explain why that thinking is wrong. Money provides an edge, no question; that’s not dishonest. But money doesn’t buy talent or popularity, and the two seem incapable of separating that shit out. So here we are, still stuck with that old problem, and after years of thinking about class dynamics, I realised something.
The issue starts well before a musician ever picks up an instrument. It’s rooted in upbringing, in what class teaches kids to think about each other. Kids from privileged backgrounds might develop a sense of entitlement that leaves them feeling disconnected from others. Not many parents teach their kids to have respect for everyone; unfortunately, it’s usually a case of us against “them”. On the flip side, kids are taught to see anyone better off as a stuck-up prick, sad but true. Neither worldview helps with empathy. One teaches people to look down, the other teaches people to resent. Both make it harder to see the individual in front of you. And the reality is that pretty much everyone wants the same basic things: we want stability, to feel contentment, and have enough money to build a decent life for ourselves and the people we care about.
I grew up on both ends. My mum grew up on a council estate, where hard work was the norm. On my dad’s side, things were much more comfortable; though not millionaire-level, they were well-off. My nan had once been poor and frugal, but became self-made with several successful ventures, including a music agency, travel agency, and diet business. She was determined to pass those values on to me. More important than the wealth was her generosity; helping others was just part of my family’s way of life, and she was always donating to countries oppressed by the West. That experience meant I never learned to size people up by what they earned or owned, which is part of why the current class debates in music feel so off to me. They fixate on background as a kind of moral scoreboard as if knowing someone’s postcode or parents’ income tells you whether they’re authentic, entitled, or worthy of an audience, while ignoring the more ordinary reality that people from very different circumstances can still share the same basic attitudes toward money, work, and other people. My grandmother’s frugality and generosity weren’t unique to one class; they were choices. The debates rarely consider any of this.
The latest Sutton Trust ‘A Class Act’ figures from 2024 found that young people from middle-class backgrounds enter the creative industries at around four times the rate of those from working-class backgrounds, and that really says a lot about privilege and opportunities, not innate ability, if anyone needed to know. Specifically, classical music has massive issues of imbalance, with many prestigious conservatoires accepting majority groups from privileged social classes
Those numbers show a long-standing trend that has continued across generations. Employment trends show that participation in creative roles is declining significantly among people from working-class backgrounds compared to previous generations, whereas those from professional/managerial classes retain strong tendencies toward pursuing creative employment.
Class matters. Opportunities matter. Access matters. Nowhere near as much controversy as it ought to generate, since basic economics tells you that financial means give people access to instruments, tuition, music technology, travel costs, studio time, living wages, safety nets, and the leeway required to navigate uncertain early careers, all of which are valid realities that denying isn’t helpful.
Some people assume class barriers alone dictate outcomes and thereby devalue working-class successes. This attitude baffles me, because Sutton Trust research shows that although only a small proportion of Top 40 album artists between 2019–23 were educated in the private system, most achieved success through the state education system. Privilege exists, but it doesn’t alone explain success. It helps explain access to opportunities. It helps explain who gets through certain doors first. It doesn’t explain the person’s talent, public connection, artistic quality, or longevity.
Privilege gives you opportunities, connections, training, and recording time; I’m not disputing that. It would be nice if the working class got access to even a quarter of all that. Privilege buys the chance to be heard, and that doesn’t buy talent. Not everyone with a financial head start managed to find a following, and similarly plenty of artists with extraordinary potential went without. The numbers prove the existence of class barriers; what the numbers do not prove is that class is synonymous with talent or merit.
The thing that irritates me is this idea that the value of an artist should somehow correlate to financial metrics, sales, ticket prices, gig earnings and even lifestyle choices. As if there’s some objective measure that says whether it makes for good music, whether they can write songs or even bloody well sing. And it means absolutely nothing in terms of how good their actual work is; it’s just markets, timing, networking, and luck. Think of how many celebrated, wealthy artists you know who have died by suicide, or spent their most successful years in profound misery from the effects of fame.
And this is something I think a great deal about… Wealth and success don’t equal automatic prestige, mass appeal, or happiness. Nothing external brings true happiness, but that’s for another day. This is absolutely not intended as a critique of musicians struggling for better infrastructure and resources; not at all. But if you find yourselves comfortably situated enough to consider the question objectively, rating other musicians strictly in terms of money is telling far more about your own limitations as evaluators than anything else. Assuming someone’s upbringing defines everything about their morality, talent, or achievements does fuck-all except reveal an awful amount about ourselves; we need to think about that.
I think I’m at the end of my tether with class wars; if I hear, ” Oh, they’ve got money, they’re so-and-so’s daughter/son”, etc I’ll scream. A good song is a good song. I treat every person I meet the same; I don’t care how famous they are. We’re all just people, and putting them on pedestals doesn’t help them, and it most certainly doesn’t help me. I’ve got a good friend I’ve known for years; she talks like she’s got a silver spoon shoved up her arse (I tell her that; it’s fine). She says I talk like Alex Turner before he went American, and I’ve got a potty mouth. We still hang out. We’re in different financial situations. Is there a barrier? No.
I am not making excuses for privilege here; hell no, privilege exists, and privilege causes damage too. Discuss barriers, confront privilege, challenge inequality when and where it manifests itself. Absolutely essential, and I fully agree, but it’s equally necessary to remember that wealth doesn’t mean a lack of talent, just as poverty doesn’t mean a lack of authenticity. Working-class experiences aren’t necessarily superior just because they’re working-class experiences. Let’s be honest about that too. I have also noticed people in better positions playing it down; you don’t need to do that. I remember working for a label and getting asked to help push a single by a very, very famous artist’s son; he was good-looking, great with instruments, and he didn’t want anyone to know who he was. I mean, it was obvious he was the spitting image of him, but he was so worried about being called a nepo kid that he stopped us from mentioning a thing. I mean, I get it. It’s okay to have money; it’s what most people are striving for. It’s okay to have wealthy, famous parents you didn’t ask to be born. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. If they give you shit, tell them to shove it, do your thing and carve your own path.
One thing that needs doing is making entry into the field accessible for people with natural talent, and we should stop treating people’s achievements as evidence of some moral failing. That means making music education more accessible for people on low incomes, so we have to go down the right tracks for that: push for investing in arts programmes, supporting affordable rehearsal spaces, tackling pay-to-play culture and nipping it in the bud, paying people fairly for their work, and creating more transparent routes into the industry. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Shame it isn’t. At the same time, we should avoid assuming that wealth makes someone untalented or that working-class origins automatically make someone more authentic. The goal isn’t to punish people who have advantages, but to ensure that those without money, connections, or family support still have a fair chance to develop their talent and be heard. The problem is not that some people can open doors more easily, is it? But that too many capable people never reach the door in the first place.
I keep running into posts along the lines of promising their humble beginnings won’t ever leave them, no matter what happens, but I notice very few actually follow through. Fair enough, maybe, but do we not owe the next generation an improvement on what we had? Most wouldn’t give their children a hard life because we had one. I wouldn’t. Of course they wouldn’t get it all handed on a plate either. Most parents want their children to have a better life than they did. That’s human nature, not a moral failing.
The numbers and the lived experience agree: class matters, and so does what you can actually access. Opportunity matters. Access matters. What I’m fed up with is the tendency to turn that reality into a morality play. Working-class struggle versus privileged complacency. Rich kids bad, poor kids authentic. It’s lazy, and I’m sick of hearing it. It ignores a lot of the complexity that actually exists. Talk about the real financial barriers, unpaid labour, pay-to-play culture, the cost of lessons, equipment and rehearsal spaces. Talk about nepotism. Talk about access. Those are real barriers. But don’t pretend somebody’s bank balance or who their parents are tells you everything about them. You have no idea about their work ethic or character.
The truth is, both sides need to stop being so fucking judgmental. Some people with money act like financial success makes them better than everyone else, while some people without it act like their struggle makes them more real and authentic, and that wealth automatically makes someone entitled or talentless. Both attitudes are arrogant. Both rely on stereotypes. And neither tells you a damn thing about the person standing in front of you.
Nepotism can create opportunity; I know that, I’m not stupid, but it cannot manufacture genuine public support. It doesn’t make someone a genius in creativity or artistic ability. Likewise, coming from working-class origins where you were brought up eating beans on toast and getting a bath with your three siblings can create obstacles, but they are not an automatic badge of virtue. If there’s one takeaway from this piece, it’s that both can be true at the same time: structural barriers exist and should be tackled, while human beings remain more complex than their bank balance, postcode or parents’ income. So tackle the barriers and stop using them as a shortcut to judge who someone is.
