Musicians' concerns with social status, foreign competition, and cultural perceptions were accompanied by the persistent threat of financial hardship. The constant preoccupation with mere subsistence was a grave deterrent to professional aspirations, for it distracted musicians from collective efforts that might have helped them achieve professional autonomy, and it prevented many musicians from attaining even the trappings of middle-class respectability and social status.

The financial insecurities of musicians were not unique. They were shared by most artisans and many of the professions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. These social strata, like the laboring classes, were vulnerable to shifts in market demand and to larger economic forces, such as income levels and fluctuations in currency and prices. After many decades of relative price stability, the cost of consumer goods began to rise gradually but steadily from around 1750; the pattern of gradual change ended with the dramatic inflation of the war years 1790–1815, estimated by some historians as between 65 and 85 percent. After the war, prices fell quickly (25 to 35 percent) for a few years, then more slowly (10 to 20 percent) from the early 1820s until the middle of the century.

Income levels ranged widely among the middle ranks. Although the survey of social structure and income by the mid-eighteenth-century social observer Joseph Massie was perhaps too indebted to Gregory King's comparable study of 1688, it does provide a glimpse of the economic landscape.