The word amateur comes through French from the Latin amator: a lover, admirer, or devotee. That doesn’t mean every amateur throughout history was noble, gifted, or motivated only by pure love. But the word was not originally another way of saying incompetent.

Today it carries both meanings. An amateur can be someone who does something for pleasure rather than as a job. It can also be used dismissively for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Those are two very different things, and we’ve gotten too comfortable confusing them.

The same confusion has happened with professional.

In the ordinary occupational sense, a professional is someone who does an activity as paid work rather than only as a hobby. It is not a ranking of everybody from greatest to worst.

A private teacher with a full studio is a professional musician. So is a church musician, freelancer, studio player, college instructor, or member of a regional orchestra. They don’t stop being professionals because someone else plays in Berlin, Cleveland, or New York.

But the music world increasingly uses professional as though it meant famous, elite, or internationally important. That leaves most working musicians in a strange position. They earn their living through music but are still treated as though they didn’t quite make it.

At the same time, amateurs are treated as failed professionals. As though anybody who became good at music but didn’t make it a career somehow fell short.

That makes no sense.

Music has always depended on people who participate without making it their occupation. They buy instruments and music, take lessons, attend concerts, sing in church choirs, play in community orchestras, and keep music alive in their homes. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, the enormous amateur music market even helped support the growth of the modern professional world of performers, teachers, publishers, administrators, and promoters.

Professionals and amateurs aren’t opposing teams. They need each other.

I’m also not convinced that everything we enjoy needs to become a side hustle. Making money from something you love can be wonderful. But monetizing an activity changes your relationship with it. Now there are clients, auditions, deadlines, numbers, reviews, and expectations. That may be worth it, but it isn’t automatically an improvement.

Some things are worth doing because you love doing them.

There is dignity in being a professional musician without becoming famous. There is also dignity in being an amateur without apologizing for it.

Amateurs are not failed professionals.

And most professionals are not failed celebrities.