anyway, together with is much better than instead of.
“Musician” like many terms in language especially English has more than one meaning depending on context.
What the word musician means depends on how and where it is used. Like Doctor or Dr can be used by Dr Dre as his stage name with no consequence because no reasonable person believes he is a medical Doctor but if you open a snake oil stall and call yourself a Doctor telling people you can cure cancer expect legal and financial penalties for the deception.
The same goes for other professions you can even get yourself in trouble calling yourself a “Scientist” depending on context if the expectation is you have formal qualifications.
Musician: anyone who plays/creates something musical
but on the other hand, it could mean; anyone with formal studies in music… depending on context.
and lastly…
ChatGPT is a political puppet. I had high hopes initially but now have none, it is just as corrupt as wikipedia or the YT, google & facebook algos.
I really like this definition (#1)… “electronic folk musician” fits what I do (or am trying to do at least) fairly well, though the unfortunate collision with “Folk” the genre label (at least in American English) means labeling myself that way might cause people to be confused about what they hear…
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I know.
I meant “a” ChatGPT-like music bot that would digest hundred years of recorded music for the purpose of outputting a constant background noise…
I had this basic expectation that it would be a font of knowledge for the sake of advancing knowledge… you can imagine my disappointment 
and to be perfectly honest, everyone on this forum is a musician to some extent whether it be on a hobby amateur level like myself or pro paid level. The key is not to get caught up and have fun! If it is not fun, quit doing it and spending money on it.
So many thing to say here, I was trying to organise my thinking but meeh… a lot of thing have been already said and it’s all in all pretty subjective subject.
I wanted to share something :
I’m an plastician artist, mostly poet, performer and photographer, I consider myself as a poet, for me it is a political gesture to call yourself an artist, a political gesture against life crushing bullshit job etc. wether you live from it or no, success doesn’t define quality of your art, recognition, honesty and humility (for me) define (in part) quality of your work.
Now I’m playing music for a little more than one year now, I don’t feel legitimate to call myself musician because it’s only one year of practice and only a couple of tracks shared.
But I can call myself a writer, drawer or photographer because I’ve been practicing those mediums for 7 years now.
The OP was talking about treshold, I kind of aggree with that.
One funny thing is : I was having incredibly fun time playing music on my own, and now I try to mix my poetry with my music and here comes the dread, feels like I’m not good enough to enhance my text with music etc.
But I try to not really care about it, when you consider some music scene as noise for exemple, I don’t think they care, and the one I know don’t think of themselves as musicians
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Categorization is a very human thing to do in the course of wrapping our limited brains around understand abstract concepts that exist in less bounded form in the natural state.
The question is what metrics/prism you’re using to discriminate between categories and whether they are useful or harmful.
Not mutually exclusive because harmful categories are useful to some, in the case of gatekeeping musician a harsh and reductive dichotomy can be “useful” for some to achieve goals, to justify pre-existing insecurities. That itself may lead into the purposes of narcissism, creating a sense of self-importance based entirely on throwing perfectly legitimate art and creative works and other humans into silly buckets.
Still less confusing to people than “NeoFolk” 
In ye olden days, it was keyboards or “programmer”.
But… techno and dub can involve “playing the studio” as a core component of their musicianship.
If you’re “Playing the DAW” to create music, you are using it as your instrument, you are hosting instruments.
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I don’t know… I don’t think all the pioneers in electronic music set out to be superstars right from the beginning. I bet most of them started as electronic folk musicians but are now considered prolific musicians.
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I literally don’t care one way or the other nor do I consider wikipedia an “informed source” but on a lot of wikipedia pages daw or even specifically protools or other daws, by name, are listed as “instrument”.
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Interesting. I don’t really like the redefining of words this way but they mean what they mean because enough people agree on it irregardless of what I think.
No surprise! The problem with engaging with sophists is their general incuriosity, what is useful and what expertise is respected in reference is exclusively limited to what props up their arbitrary definitions.
Edit: I’m so used to people saying this stuff unironically that I lost the joke
People who need to redefine words to retroactively meet how they feel is unnecessary to the rest of us, that’s the best part!
No adaptation of language is required to discuss non-acoustic musical instruments.
my personal interpretation is the following logic:
To muse over something is to think very deeply and intensivly over something (not so dissimilar from being amused), and so music to me is in its purest form nothing more than thoughts transcended into sound. And so if thats something that someone does quite often, no matter how anyone else judges it to be to their taste or not, would make them a musician in my mind. Anyone who tries to disqualify that qualifacation i would deem to be tyranical and likly not an ego i wish to converse with.
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And i’m feeling very strongly that if the original question was to be asking “what defines a musician as proffesional”, that a lot of of the comments on this thread would resonate with me more than they currently do.
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I hope my take was not perceived as tyrannical. I consider everyone here a musician who considers themselves a musician at minimum. Would the rest of the world consider us musicians? Not sure. Words mean different things to different people and definitions change over time.
Everyone who makes sound for enjoyment is fantastic in my book regardless of labels. 
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No worries! Appreciate the clarification, didn’t come off as knowing snark initially.
The internet has broken my brain.
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My personal story of becoming a musician.
I left school at 16 and went straight to music college on a 2 year course.
I’d started playing guitar seriously about 8 months before I started music college, in fact, I’d been playing guitar for 3 months when I went for the audition as a nervous 15 year old and fumbled through a 12 bar blues, but I managed to get a place on the course.
Around 3 months into the course, we had the first assignment where we had to compose a piece in an AABA structure (using a bunch of compositional techniques we’d learnt) and present the score to the course tutor, one on one, at the piano. It was a nerve racking experience that I can still remember vividly, but, he was full of praise for what I’d done and I got an 85%-90% mark for it.
I left college that day and took a bus home, it was a cold, sunny winters day. I sat upstairs, still beaming from the praise and smoked a cigarette (when you still could…)… at that precise moment, upstairs on that bus, I said to myself ‘wow, I am a musician’. I felt it. I meant it.
That was just over 30 years ago now, and I have felt like a musician ever since that moment, and, I know I’ll never not be a musician at my core regardless of what I’m doing generally in life. I identify as a musician.
So that was my point.
Points I would make in relation to this topic:
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I think to feel legit as a musician, and not have imposter syndrome, you have to pass some point of DOING IT that is significant to you, and powerful enough to give you self-identity as a musician.
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As a long term musician, I have ZERO issue with anyone considering themselves a musician… I’m not precious/protective of it, in fact the opposite, I like to encourage it. And, I tend to view anyone who’s making music as a musician.
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Great story and your view totally matches mine.
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This is my test: if you make music, you’re a musician.
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At any time, really. In fact one can call oneself many things or are we discussing universality of a term or theory of critical mass.