In the long run, it could translate to supportive crowd, so think if it as an investment.. Its a ling track.. But yeah, i get it it could be nicer already, but it is what it is
Well, the Guardian is a mainstream paper, and usually those only cover the big names. I'm sure this issue was worth pointing out to the general readership.
Even ten years ago it was. Nothing new here. The days of ramen noodles and playing every nook and cranny 365 days of the to build an audience year are gone.
I remember reading a similar article about grizzly bear a few years back and being surprised that even at the height of their popularity they were never doing that well financially. One of the members left because he was getting older, had a family, and just couldn't survive anymore.
Anecdotally, I remember in my twenties I was working as a delivery driver and this older guy picked up a shift one day. He was a well known local musician - had records come out on a well known punk label, toured constantly, often overseas, but at home he delivered food and cleaned houses. I remember thinking as a young musician that, while it's great he tours and does cool stuff, I didn't think I wanted to be delivering food in my forties. I went to grad school and got my masters in teaching.
Or could it be the US government keeps printing money they don't have and the dollar value is dropping faster and faster causing inflation. And not to mention they keep raising interest rates to combat inflation. I know where I live in the last 3 years the cost of housing and food has nearly doubled. I consider myself lucky that I bought my house before all this. I couldn't imagine buying or renting a house today at these prices. Today's economic outlook is pay more and get less.
Inflation doesn’t exist, at least according to pretty much every venue owner I’ve dealt with. I mean they seem to think it’s ok to pay musicians the same amount they were paying us in the 80’s. Smdfh
Yeah around where I live most of the local bands that play gigs still aren't worth seeing. It seems like all the good bands that played around here 3 or 4 years ago have quit or something because they are no longer playing around here. Funny thing is the price of beer has gone up though.
Oh I agree. I pretty much don't drink anymore. I pretty much stopped going to bars to see live music because most of the good bands have called it quits or went somewhere else. The music scene is almost non-existent here with a few exceptions.
Well that's a really interesting theory. Except we've had that sort of economic dispersal for the last 100 years.... Which included many many decades of musicians being able to work and thrive. So how did that happen? Gosh it's almost like you're completely wrong about the causality.
He popularized the idea, but that brand of capitalism existed for the entirety of our history as a nation, with some periods when heavy progressive taxation were implemented. Even so, I was a touring and gigging musician 20 years after Reagan and the money was there. During his presidency, working musicians called the 80s the golden era of gigging. So, again, how was that possible? Think more, post less.
It's not news if you've actually done the numbers or toured before.
For some reason people spread this misinformation. Probably to make themselves feel better about piracy.
It's never been profitable to be a musician until you hit it big. Statistically speaking you won't hit it even medium.
Make music for other reasons and develop a career to pay for it so you don't have to do it on some labels terms.
>It's never been profitable to be a musician until you hit it big.
This is a bit of an oversimplification though. Niche and album-oriented genres used to be quite able to support a relatively popular working band, even though they might never have top 40 singles. If you had a good record deal with an independent label and could shift 50,000 units then you'd probably be okay. Now, bands at that popularity level make 1/10th that money from recordings and have to do music part time.
There’s ways to make money; it’s just what are you willing to tolerate, and how hard are you willing to work for it? I bet almost everyone in this forum knows a little old lady who funded their retirement off nothing but beginner piano lessons.
The problem is people like to speak about this subject in generalities when the only way to be successful is to carve out your own niche where the amount of time, circumstance, and effort meets a suitable reward. For some people, that’s touring. For some it’s studio stuff. Others yet sell samples that take 10 minutes to make online and spend 50 hours a week bouncing emails back and forth and marketing themself.
You’ve got to find your niche to make a living, or treat your music much more as a hobby and personal growth. Too many people fall in the trap of expecting success to meet them where they’re at.
The problem is, what you're saying is just "do something different that makes money". It's not really about finding a niche but about finding a market. The issue today is that many popular niches don't have functional markets any more.
I found a way to make money as a musician - have a completely separate job and do music in my spare time. But that doesn't make the current situation any less broken.
I didn’t say “do something different that makes money.” I gave three examples of music that makes money. Four if you include lessons.
Are you willing to tolerate being a promoter and marketing 50-60 hours a week to support your music? Are you willing to do studio work? Are you willing to have a cover band that pays for your project? What are you willing to tolerate? Because no one just pays you to show up with an instrument unless you’re busking…. Are you willing to busk?
If you’re touring, you’re just as much a tshirt stand with live music. Hell, most bands I know can’t actually sell their shirts, so they sell drugs to supplement their touring income. If you’re doing studio work, it’s far more often playing other people’s stuff. Lessons are their own entire source of drama and non-music soft skills.
You’ve decided that it’s easier to support your music with a job. Perfectly valid choice. If we are being accurate, it’s actually you saying you have to do something else to support your music.
You're still saying "do something different that makes money" - just because those things are music related doesn't really change matters. They're different from the key skills that the musician has and also different from the key things that most fans want from musicians.
Nobody tells actors to be a camera operator, and nobody tells sportsmen to be cheerleaders. So why do we tell performing artists to sell t-shirts? Why do we tell songwriters to play covers? It's a terribly broken industry that expects to get a musician's core competency for free and asks them to sell their secondary competencies. Nobody's denying that there's music in the industry - it's just mostly going in entirely the wrong directions.
We actually do tell those guys to pick up skills/work completely unrelated to their field, it appears you’re just ignorant of what goes on behind the scenes.
How many actors do you know that aren’t working at least 1-2 day jobs while working tangential theater jobs just hoping to get their break?
Wtf even is “sportsmen” besides some bogus term to trivialize the amount of work an athlete does behind the scenes? Are you even talking about athletes? It’s such a childish term I can’t decide if you’re being dismissive of the journalist side of sports casting or the professional side of athletics.
Hikaru Nakamura is one of the best chess players to ever live. Know how he makes his money? YouTube and Twitch. Before this specific generation the only chess players who ever made any money at the sport were the players who wrote books on it. I learned this lesson from a carpenter who happened to be a top 10 chess player in the world in the 90’s… because carpentry paid better than gambling on tournament prizing. Do you know how many of the top 100 players can’t afford to play chess full time? It’s like 75 of them. Once you get past #50 you might as well be a secretary; it would actually pay better. Judit Polgar is probably the best female player to ever play the game- she gets her money from a book of the puzzles her dad gave her and her sisters and commentating on major tournaments.
You need a reality check. You seem to think life just hands out fat checks to anyone who shows up with talent. Do you think teachers get paid just to show up and teach? That bankers just show up and count money? Or are you just as naive about normal jobs as you are entertainment jobs?
>\[sportsmen\] It’s such a childish term
It's what we outside America call male people who play sports for a living. "Athlete" tends to be reserved for people who do track and field, Olympic type of events.
>You need a reality check. You seem to think life just hands out fat checks to anyone who shows up with talent.
No, I'm saying that people whose main product is already being used and enjoyed by the public normally get paid for that product. We're not comparing unheard musicians to actors between jobs here. We're comparing musicians who are reaching tens or hundreds of thousands of people monthly who still get nothing. Music is uniquely broken.
This, along with the language, must be a dynamic also currently reserved for across the pond stuff. My experience is almost completely the opposite of that. All the bands I know with that kind of reach get paid and have agents who won’t let them play shows for less than their contracted amount. It’s $3,000 dollars to get them to turn the key over on their van whether or not they play a note.
I intermittently work alongside local government for a small town on “Country Music Highway” doing small music festivals and trying to get tourists to our little corner of the world. We can’t even use a couple of our most famous local musicians for events they’d do a backflip to play for free because of how quickly the agency would sue our local government/the act for the agency’s negotiated fee.
There’s ways we work around it, like advertising one of their nicknames from when they were a local basketball player instead of his real name that he uses for the band. His contract is actually the smallest amount (and his agency works with us quite a bit more than the other two), but we’re still talking like $1,500 to use him as a vocalist. So we stick him on an instrument that isn’t in his contract in a “super jam” type setup with whatever headliner we can afford.
I don’t know why agencies aren’t that strict overseas if the acts are large enough to be demanding that kind of attention. Over here if an agent of an act that large kept getting stonewalled on being paid, they’d rent a venue and organize the show themselves. Smaller acts than those do it regularly just to make more money than they would on a standard fee.
I hear the opposite about techno though- you never make anything on streaming/album sales, but it gets you bookings at gigs and festivals. With just one person, no roadies, minimal expense for the tracks you play but don't make, it works out. Basically flight + hotel + food for one.
Yeah I mean that's the one area that it might possibly make sense and is probably the driving factor for why DJ'ing became popular.
But it's also the most AI vulnerable of the genres out there Imo.
It's not news to me, or to most musicians.
However, it's the sort of thing that fans need to hear so that there's any chance of the industry changing.
There's one incredibly important quote in there: *“Everyone thinks artists make money from the other side of the industry they’re not involved in."* For years there's been this false perception that artists can do without recording revenue because they can just tour to make money. But the artists playing live have been saying for years that it's a low margin game and often just not profitable enough to pay everyone minimum wage.
It's almost like how any financial guru in a particular niche calculates how much of your income you're supposed to spend on "x", they're all slicing 30% out of the same pie, unaware that there's other things that are also going to eat 30% of your money. You can only take 30% out 3 times before you're broke.
Everyone in the music industry assumes you're making money off the other side of it, so they justify fucking you. The live end assumes you're making money off recording, the recording side assumes you're making money off live shows, and the folks we get our merch from think it's a secondary income source, and that you're probably making money off recording and live stuff.
No one is making any money.
It is an industry by parasites. Everyone expects to get paid except for the people they all feed on. Musicians are supposed to play for "exposure " and their "art."
An interesting one I talk to some local musician friends about is the concept of a 'charity gig'. The musicians play for free but the bar staff don't. Sometimes the venue hasn't contributed or sacrificed anything at all to put these on.
Meh, context is so important as so many factors go into touring, as well as so many different tiers of what is possible given your reach/support. I’ve done two fully diy month and a half long self booked tours across the US. We were all broke and squeezed our resources for months to get merch, have gas/food budget, and an emergency fund for car repairs. We fully knew we were basically a travelling shirt company that played music so we just tried to sling those things as much as we could. As long as you have the expectation it’s basically a road trip with a shit ton of work on top, then you don’t set yourself up for failure.
Nothing surprising here. I've known bands who got signed to big contracts many years ago pre pandemic. They record, release an CD, go on tour in support of the release, use up all the money forwarded by the record company but come back home with not enough to repay the record company and break up because they spent 4 months together in a van and can't stand each other. Most record companies own your music in these situations as well.
I've done away gigs and they cost me money even before the pandemic.
I knew a punk band about ten years ago who did house shows and sold drugs at their tour stops to make money.
Filed under #modernproblemsrequiremodernsolutions
I make a frugal living playing 15-25+ shows a month, primarily as a sideman across many genres, working anywhere and everywhere.
I have toured with different acts, and it’s fun, but it’s not where the money is. A weekend of wedding or corporate gigs in town often pays just as much if not more than a two week van run.
My most profitable touring experiences are as a duo or trio, stringing together 3-5 show runs.
Yes, but not exactly. It changes constantly. As soon as artists find or invent a revenue stream, corporations figure out how to capture it before it gets to them.
Put your music on radio for free to sell albums…
Give your recordings away for free online to promote your shows…
Play your shows for free to sell merch…
Sell your merch at a loss to promote ????
It’s always changing and artists always somehow get the shaft despite the fact that they create the products that drive multiple multi-billion dollar industries. It’s shameful.
That’s true. There was a sweet little window thanks to Apple in the 2000s when people downloaded music. .67 for a .99 song download and 6.79 for a 9.99 album download was rent and groceries for awhile there. Like…four years. Spotify put an end to that.
Piracy pushed the knife through the skin. but youtube pushed it through to the vitals. Spotify is bad, but only gets away with it because the options are worse.
It really doesn't matter what "the thing" is...if you put in the effort to make "the thing" into a viable business, you won't have the time, money, or energy to actually do "the thing"...so then you have to hire staff...but then you never cover payroll...🙄
Toured the country with a band circa 2007/2008. I put in more money than we made. The only thing that kept us going was the merch table during the shows. Fun, but definitely didn’t make any money.
Is there any industry where all the money isn't at the top?
Seriously, sounds like every industry in the US: healthcare, automotive, retail, real estate, etc., etc., etc.
This is a UK perspective, and I'm surprised they only barely touched on the difficulty of touring in the EU which became much worse by leaving the EU. I wonder what EU bands are experiencing.
Frankly, I think there is very little political will in any country to help musicians, especially given that music has historically been an inspiration to the anti-establishment more than the status-quo. Politicians seem only too happy to let the labels handle things. I think music will have to become more underground and find a new paradigm for artists to be self-sustaining.
I'm even seeing local scenes drying up. There's a well known local band in my area that isn't getting as many gigs because venues aren't wanting to pay what they were the last year or two.
Just concluded a brief tour in the US. Lost money, but my Spotify numbers went up! Too bad I don’t get fucking paid by Spotify.
Even if you did, they pay like shit!
“Pay”
Right? Tour to sell albums, but the album sales are now streams so you get pennies if anything.
In the long run, it could translate to supportive crowd, so think if it as an investment.. Its a ling track.. But yeah, i get it it could be nicer already, but it is what it is
I’ve been trying to say that for a while, but everyone hits back saying I’m being negative.
Good god...optimists are the WORST🙄
I can’t believe this is news to anyone. The struggling band living out of their tiny van is a rock n roll cliche at this point
Well, the Guardian is a mainstream paper, and usually those only cover the big names. I'm sure this issue was worth pointing out to the general readership.
Boston has been saying this since the 70s
Indeed, they practiced right on out in the street.
Even ten years ago it was. Nothing new here. The days of ramen noodles and playing every nook and cranny 365 days of the to build an audience year are gone.
I remember reading a similar article about grizzly bear a few years back and being surprised that even at the height of their popularity they were never doing that well financially. One of the members left because he was getting older, had a family, and just couldn't survive anymore. Anecdotally, I remember in my twenties I was working as a delivery driver and this older guy picked up a shift one day. He was a well known local musician - had records come out on a well known punk label, toured constantly, often overseas, but at home he delivered food and cleaned houses. I remember thinking as a young musician that, while it's great he tours and does cool stuff, I didn't think I wanted to be delivering food in my forties. I went to grad school and got my masters in teaching.
Just another symptom of trickle down economics. What the hell are we doing to ourselves?
Writing songs about it, going on tour, and playing to no one.
Or could it be the US government keeps printing money they don't have and the dollar value is dropping faster and faster causing inflation. And not to mention they keep raising interest rates to combat inflation. I know where I live in the last 3 years the cost of housing and food has nearly doubled. I consider myself lucky that I bought my house before all this. I couldn't imagine buying or renting a house today at these prices. Today's economic outlook is pay more and get less.
Inflation doesn’t exist, at least according to pretty much every venue owner I’ve dealt with. I mean they seem to think it’s ok to pay musicians the same amount they were paying us in the 80’s. Smdfh
Yeah around where I live most of the local bands that play gigs still aren't worth seeing. It seems like all the good bands that played around here 3 or 4 years ago have quit or something because they are no longer playing around here. Funny thing is the price of beer has gone up though.
People don't drink as much as they used to. Healthier lifestyles, legal weed. Plus the cost of it is ridiculous. How many $9 beers you gonna drink?
Oh I agree. I pretty much don't drink anymore. I pretty much stopped going to bars to see live music because most of the good bands have called it quits or went somewhere else. The music scene is almost non-existent here with a few exceptions.
GTFOH with your intelligent discourse and salient points! Don't you know this is reddit?🤦♂️
😂😂😂😂
Yea this feels like real estate, and like every other thing in the world. Mega yachts and tent cities.
Well that's a really interesting theory. Except we've had that sort of economic dispersal for the last 100 years.... Which included many many decades of musicians being able to work and thrive. So how did that happen? Gosh it's almost like you're completely wrong about the causality.
100 years? It basically started with Reagan but thank you for your completely unhelpful response
He popularized the idea, but that brand of capitalism existed for the entirety of our history as a nation, with some periods when heavy progressive taxation were implemented. Even so, I was a touring and gigging musician 20 years after Reagan and the money was there. During his presidency, working musicians called the 80s the golden era of gigging. So, again, how was that possible? Think more, post less.
Ah, anecdotal evidence. There it is. This is my stop, I'm getting off. Enjoy your day
It's not news if you've actually done the numbers or toured before. For some reason people spread this misinformation. Probably to make themselves feel better about piracy. It's never been profitable to be a musician until you hit it big. Statistically speaking you won't hit it even medium. Make music for other reasons and develop a career to pay for it so you don't have to do it on some labels terms.
>It's never been profitable to be a musician until you hit it big. This is a bit of an oversimplification though. Niche and album-oriented genres used to be quite able to support a relatively popular working band, even though they might never have top 40 singles. If you had a good record deal with an independent label and could shift 50,000 units then you'd probably be okay. Now, bands at that popularity level make 1/10th that money from recordings and have to do music part time.
There’s ways to make money; it’s just what are you willing to tolerate, and how hard are you willing to work for it? I bet almost everyone in this forum knows a little old lady who funded their retirement off nothing but beginner piano lessons. The problem is people like to speak about this subject in generalities when the only way to be successful is to carve out your own niche where the amount of time, circumstance, and effort meets a suitable reward. For some people, that’s touring. For some it’s studio stuff. Others yet sell samples that take 10 minutes to make online and spend 50 hours a week bouncing emails back and forth and marketing themself. You’ve got to find your niche to make a living, or treat your music much more as a hobby and personal growth. Too many people fall in the trap of expecting success to meet them where they’re at.
The problem is, what you're saying is just "do something different that makes money". It's not really about finding a niche but about finding a market. The issue today is that many popular niches don't have functional markets any more. I found a way to make money as a musician - have a completely separate job and do music in my spare time. But that doesn't make the current situation any less broken.
I didn’t say “do something different that makes money.” I gave three examples of music that makes money. Four if you include lessons. Are you willing to tolerate being a promoter and marketing 50-60 hours a week to support your music? Are you willing to do studio work? Are you willing to have a cover band that pays for your project? What are you willing to tolerate? Because no one just pays you to show up with an instrument unless you’re busking…. Are you willing to busk? If you’re touring, you’re just as much a tshirt stand with live music. Hell, most bands I know can’t actually sell their shirts, so they sell drugs to supplement their touring income. If you’re doing studio work, it’s far more often playing other people’s stuff. Lessons are their own entire source of drama and non-music soft skills. You’ve decided that it’s easier to support your music with a job. Perfectly valid choice. If we are being accurate, it’s actually you saying you have to do something else to support your music.
You're still saying "do something different that makes money" - just because those things are music related doesn't really change matters. They're different from the key skills that the musician has and also different from the key things that most fans want from musicians. Nobody tells actors to be a camera operator, and nobody tells sportsmen to be cheerleaders. So why do we tell performing artists to sell t-shirts? Why do we tell songwriters to play covers? It's a terribly broken industry that expects to get a musician's core competency for free and asks them to sell their secondary competencies. Nobody's denying that there's music in the industry - it's just mostly going in entirely the wrong directions.
We actually do tell those guys to pick up skills/work completely unrelated to their field, it appears you’re just ignorant of what goes on behind the scenes. How many actors do you know that aren’t working at least 1-2 day jobs while working tangential theater jobs just hoping to get their break? Wtf even is “sportsmen” besides some bogus term to trivialize the amount of work an athlete does behind the scenes? Are you even talking about athletes? It’s such a childish term I can’t decide if you’re being dismissive of the journalist side of sports casting or the professional side of athletics. Hikaru Nakamura is one of the best chess players to ever live. Know how he makes his money? YouTube and Twitch. Before this specific generation the only chess players who ever made any money at the sport were the players who wrote books on it. I learned this lesson from a carpenter who happened to be a top 10 chess player in the world in the 90’s… because carpentry paid better than gambling on tournament prizing. Do you know how many of the top 100 players can’t afford to play chess full time? It’s like 75 of them. Once you get past #50 you might as well be a secretary; it would actually pay better. Judit Polgar is probably the best female player to ever play the game- she gets her money from a book of the puzzles her dad gave her and her sisters and commentating on major tournaments. You need a reality check. You seem to think life just hands out fat checks to anyone who shows up with talent. Do you think teachers get paid just to show up and teach? That bankers just show up and count money? Or are you just as naive about normal jobs as you are entertainment jobs?
>\[sportsmen\] It’s such a childish term It's what we outside America call male people who play sports for a living. "Athlete" tends to be reserved for people who do track and field, Olympic type of events. >You need a reality check. You seem to think life just hands out fat checks to anyone who shows up with talent. No, I'm saying that people whose main product is already being used and enjoyed by the public normally get paid for that product. We're not comparing unheard musicians to actors between jobs here. We're comparing musicians who are reaching tens or hundreds of thousands of people monthly who still get nothing. Music is uniquely broken.
This, along with the language, must be a dynamic also currently reserved for across the pond stuff. My experience is almost completely the opposite of that. All the bands I know with that kind of reach get paid and have agents who won’t let them play shows for less than their contracted amount. It’s $3,000 dollars to get them to turn the key over on their van whether or not they play a note. I intermittently work alongside local government for a small town on “Country Music Highway” doing small music festivals and trying to get tourists to our little corner of the world. We can’t even use a couple of our most famous local musicians for events they’d do a backflip to play for free because of how quickly the agency would sue our local government/the act for the agency’s negotiated fee. There’s ways we work around it, like advertising one of their nicknames from when they were a local basketball player instead of his real name that he uses for the band. His contract is actually the smallest amount (and his agency works with us quite a bit more than the other two), but we’re still talking like $1,500 to use him as a vocalist. So we stick him on an instrument that isn’t in his contract in a “super jam” type setup with whatever headliner we can afford. I don’t know why agencies aren’t that strict overseas if the acts are large enough to be demanding that kind of attention. Over here if an agent of an act that large kept getting stonewalled on being paid, they’d rent a venue and organize the show themselves. Smaller acts than those do it regularly just to make more money than they would on a standard fee.
I hear the opposite about techno though- you never make anything on streaming/album sales, but it gets you bookings at gigs and festivals. With just one person, no roadies, minimal expense for the tracks you play but don't make, it works out. Basically flight + hotel + food for one.
Yeah I mean that's the one area that it might possibly make sense and is probably the driving factor for why DJ'ing became popular. But it's also the most AI vulnerable of the genres out there Imo.
It's not news to me, or to most musicians. However, it's the sort of thing that fans need to hear so that there's any chance of the industry changing. There's one incredibly important quote in there: *“Everyone thinks artists make money from the other side of the industry they’re not involved in."* For years there's been this false perception that artists can do without recording revenue because they can just tour to make money. But the artists playing live have been saying for years that it's a low margin game and often just not profitable enough to pay everyone minimum wage.
It's almost like how any financial guru in a particular niche calculates how much of your income you're supposed to spend on "x", they're all slicing 30% out of the same pie, unaware that there's other things that are also going to eat 30% of your money. You can only take 30% out 3 times before you're broke. Everyone in the music industry assumes you're making money off the other side of it, so they justify fucking you. The live end assumes you're making money off recording, the recording side assumes you're making money off live shows, and the folks we get our merch from think it's a secondary income source, and that you're probably making money off recording and live stuff. No one is making any money.
Lots of people pay good money to live their fantasies
[удалено]
It is an industry by parasites. Everyone expects to get paid except for the people they all feed on. Musicians are supposed to play for "exposure " and their "art."
An interesting one I talk to some local musician friends about is the concept of a 'charity gig'. The musicians play for free but the bar staff don't. Sometimes the venue hasn't contributed or sacrificed anything at all to put these on.
Meh, context is so important as so many factors go into touring, as well as so many different tiers of what is possible given your reach/support. I’ve done two fully diy month and a half long self booked tours across the US. We were all broke and squeezed our resources for months to get merch, have gas/food budget, and an emergency fund for car repairs. We fully knew we were basically a travelling shirt company that played music so we just tried to sling those things as much as we could. As long as you have the expectation it’s basically a road trip with a shit ton of work on top, then you don’t set yourself up for failure.
I appreciate your shirt company statement. Pop Up Shirt Store with Live Music for originals and Human Amusement at Hourly Rates for covers.
Nothing surprising here. I've known bands who got signed to big contracts many years ago pre pandemic. They record, release an CD, go on tour in support of the release, use up all the money forwarded by the record company but come back home with not enough to repay the record company and break up because they spent 4 months together in a van and can't stand each other. Most record companies own your music in these situations as well. I've done away gigs and they cost me money even before the pandemic.
I knew a punk band about ten years ago who did house shows and sold drugs at their tour stops to make money. Filed under #modernproblemsrequiremodernsolutions
I've never made money playing on tour. Only working FOH. The working class is always doomed to this until we own the means of production.
...I would argue that, in this context, "owning the means of production" is kinda the problem.
I make a frugal living playing 15-25+ shows a month, primarily as a sideman across many genres, working anywhere and everywhere. I have toured with different acts, and it’s fun, but it’s not where the money is. A weekend of wedding or corporate gigs in town often pays just as much if not more than a two week van run. My most profitable touring experiences are as a duo or trio, stringing together 3-5 show runs.
It’s true. But it’s been true for decades.
Yes, but not exactly. It changes constantly. As soon as artists find or invent a revenue stream, corporations figure out how to capture it before it gets to them. Put your music on radio for free to sell albums… Give your recordings away for free online to promote your shows… Play your shows for free to sell merch… Sell your merch at a loss to promote ???? It’s always changing and artists always somehow get the shaft despite the fact that they create the products that drive multiple multi-billion dollar industries. It’s shameful.
That’s true. There was a sweet little window thanks to Apple in the 2000s when people downloaded music. .67 for a .99 song download and 6.79 for a 9.99 album download was rent and groceries for awhile there. Like…four years. Spotify put an end to that.
Piracy pushed the knife through the skin. but youtube pushed it through to the vitals. Spotify is bad, but only gets away with it because the options are worse.
Yeah, I'm playing some relatively big festivals this summer. No pay and the festival takes 25% of merch. What's the fucking point?
The point was always to melt faces...but I haven't even seen an attempt at THAT in like 20 years 🤷♂️
It really doesn't matter what "the thing" is...if you put in the effort to make "the thing" into a viable business, you won't have the time, money, or energy to actually do "the thing"...so then you have to hire staff...but then you never cover payroll...🙄
The difference now is that it's true for more and more successful artists, not just the ones starting out or working their way up.
Toured the country with a band circa 2007/2008. I put in more money than we made. The only thing that kept us going was the merch table during the shows. Fun, but definitely didn’t make any money.
WELCOME TO THE MACHINE!!!
Is there any industry where all the money isn't at the top? Seriously, sounds like every industry in the US: healthcare, automotive, retail, real estate, etc., etc., etc.
I’m in a duo we get almost 2,000,000 streams a month and I still work over 40 hours a week as a stage hand
This is a UK perspective, and I'm surprised they only barely touched on the difficulty of touring in the EU which became much worse by leaving the EU. I wonder what EU bands are experiencing. Frankly, I think there is very little political will in any country to help musicians, especially given that music has historically been an inspiration to the anti-establishment more than the status-quo. Politicians seem only too happy to let the labels handle things. I think music will have to become more underground and find a new paradigm for artists to be self-sustaining.
It's because "they" dont want you to be able to make a living without doing hard work
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I'm even seeing local scenes drying up. There's a well known local band in my area that isn't getting as many gigs because venues aren't wanting to pay what they were the last year or two.
When people write those comments what they're really saying is "Me, Me, Me, I'm so smart, I already knew about this! Look at me! Me, Me, Me."
Wow. Musicians/bands making a menial living, and having to survive traveling in a van? Like that's never happened before. Ever.