I can ramble about this for a bit.

Plato wrote a short dialogue called Ion, and music is the theme. The conclusion, as I remember it, is that music is not a skill, but is in fact a result of possession by the muse and is a divine gift. Thus, in a chain resembling (as Plato says) the attraction between magnets, the Muse inspired Homer who inspired the Rhapsodes: these were more or less the "Rock Stars" of the Greek world Our titular Ion is one such a Rhapsode. He has just come from the state of Ephesus, where the games of Asclepius have just taken place, and where he won the first prize. The Olympics are the most famous of the Greek games, but there were a lot of these festivals, and in addition to the 'sports', they had music contests. Depending on the contests, the physical prize was only a crown of laurels or some such vegetable matter, or actual wealth at others, but the fame and glory that came along with such a victory was HUGE. Winners themselves were celebrated in song: we have, for instance, an ode for Midas of Akragas, who won the flute contest at the Pythian games in either 494 or 490 BCE. Unlike the cast majority of Greek literature, these odes by the Theban poet Pindar were important enough to survive to the modern period. Some hundred years after Pindar's death, when Alexander the Great razed Thebes to the ground, he is said to have left one building standing: Pindar's house. This stuff was important.

Many years later, in the first century AD, the Roman emperor Nero would decide he wanted to be a musician and toured Greece to do so, where these sorts of musical contests were apparently still going on. This sort of thing was very scandalous to traditional Roman sensibilities. At least among the aristocratic class, the idea of performing on a stage was not held in high esteem.