There is a big difference between art and professionalism in the field of music. Everyone can be a professional or can be called a professional. The definition itself is: a professional is a person who is an expert on a certain field and using it as his profession or a job. That definition hit the spot. If you are a professional musician, you play music as your profession, as a job. Who are these professional musicians? The house band in American Idol, the session instrumentalist in Lady Gaga or Usher’s concert, the Jazz band that backs up Crooners in Vegas. A professional does his thing to satisfy the demands made by the employer. Professional musicians are easy to replace, specially by machines and computers. These are the musicians that play under a record labels hands. There’s no such thing as a “Professional Artist”
Artists on the other hand, are these musicians who can’t go on without creating something musically. It’s like a part of their system, they want to make music for the sake of artistry, and they never fail to experiment for the sake of improvement. These are the Da Vinci’s of music, the Thomas Edison’s of guitar playing. If you can see the difference then you are smart enough to understand. Now, the question is, where do you belong?
