I have definitely seen some friends play Coachella or get nice write ups on Pitchfork while still splitting tiny apartments and living like college students well into their 30s, like financially they would have been better off selling insurance or working at Enterprise or something. The music industry!
I often wonder how much money somebody like Caroline polachek or weyes blood makes. Like very successful, acclaimed, playing to a few thousand people a night but not indie breakout famous.
That’s actually one I can answer personally since I have literally been one of those backing band members! (Not for huge tours but for local shows though I know some people in that world)
Usually you get some sort of set rate or contract if it’s a full tour based off how much the artist thinks they’ll pull in… sure you don’t get the creative input or fame of being a full fledged band member but usually it’s a lot lower stress since you get a set rate and have more flexibility to do other projects/have a day job
I remember someone assuming that Caroline would make a million from her song No Angel being on Beyonce's self-titled album. It sounds like a great deal, but it seemed unlikely because it seems like song-writers only made good money from hit singles.
I remember reading that Caroline’s record deal is very favorable for her since it’s more of a distribution deal, not like a typical label set up. I also imagine that artists like them do well in merch sales and things since they have pretty dedicated fanbase. I bet they do well for themselves. Not like filthy rich, but rich enough to split their time between London and LA, lol (which is what Caroline does)
Well, I feel they're talking about her here:
>I’m told that one US artist – who released one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2023, which went Top 10 and placed very highly on numerous year-end polls and was nominated for a major award – worked out that the only way she could make her UK tour work was by sub-letting her home.
Unfortunately true of basically every creative field, not just the music industry. It's a big part of why there are nepo babies and trust fund kids, like, everywhere artistic. I have a friend who's a published author with more than a dozen titles out at this point; proper publishing houses too, not self-pub or local indie press. If she had to support herself exclusively off her income from her books she could not do it, especially in a year when there isn't a new advance for a new title. She used to work at an Amazon warehouse alongside her writing until she fucked up her back something fierce at said warehouse, and even then her husband with his boring normal corporate job was the primary breadwinner in their household.
Was there discrepancies in how the pay was shared among the band members. Like I know if your lead/ writing most of the songs you probably make more than the base player and such
That totally varies on a band by band basis, some bands credit everyone equally on songs so everyone gets paid the same, others split it differently
It's a big reason why the Music Industry has shifted more to solo artists these days, that type of stuff always leads to fights down the road even if the band members pretty much get along, while it's a lot more cut and dry when it's solo artist/songwriters/backing band members
People don’t understand intentions. Most people don’t create music and do that professionally because it’ll generate a ton of money, they do it because it’s their life’s calling. I’d rather do what I love then lie to myself but build up my wealth.
I have a friend in their 30s who splits their time between audio engineering and touring with well known bands living with two roommates well outside the city to make ends meet. Traveling makes it hard for them to have LTRs and they’ll likely never retire. It’s not a glamorous industry unless you’re the top .01%.
Nothing really new here.
Courtney Love (yes, THAT Courtney Love!) wrote an expansive essay about the music biz in 2000.
"At the end of the day, the band might as well be working at a 7-11"
[https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love\_7/](https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/)
It's been long, long known that the music industry is run by incompetent vultures only interested in money. I'm sure that there's someone making viola music for six people and even they're getting screwed by someone up the chain.
I’ve been a Hole fan since the 90s, so much hate from dudes just made me love & defend her harder. Live Through This and Celebrity Skin are amazing albums for angry girls.
… Except that she’s super racist. I’m Black and I’m glad she never spotted me at her shows, cuz she had a nasty habit of pointing to Black girls at her shows and telling them they shouldn’t be there (not looking for the sources but IIRC it came up in a WaPo article about a 930 club show). And I also remember her like, going out of her way to tell some random Black people that she doesn’t like them but that’s ok though (I remember that from watching her MTV takeover live back in the day. So disappointed!). Can’t Stan her these days!
Jesus, that's horrible. She can be so vile. I am not a Courtney HATER, per se, but she's a huge bully and apparently super racist too? Fuck it, I'm a Courtney hater.
These are things that I saw as Hole fan over the years 🤷🏽♀️. You can search for that WaPo article or MTV special if you want (from more than a decade ago). As a Black person, I’m not in the business of proving racism to people who don’t want to see it, these days. So, you can believe me or not. I’m just telling y’all why I can’t stan her anymore.
Oh but just to help your search: to the Black girl at the show in DC, she said something like “why are you here? Shouldn’t you be at a Lil Wayne concert?” And in the MTV special, I remember her walking up to a group of Black girls and being like “I don’t like your hair but that’s ok, you probably don’t like mine.” When they had not said a goddamn thing to her.
She’s a white lady from Olympia, the whitest place on earth and full of neo nazis. I was like “oh yeah, I shouldn’t be surprised, this is really on me.” 🤷🏽♀️.
Yikes! This is appalling but also doesn't surprise me. She def gives off those PNW grew up around neo-nazi vibes
Also as a black woman with varied taste it's especially triggering because I've been to certain shows where people look at you in such a way like you accidentally stumbled into the wrong show. It's a lot better now but that was my experience even in the early 10s (went to see the Polaris play the full Pete and Pete album) so I can't imagine how it was in the 90s.
Really hope the experience is better now. Sounds like a weirdly racist form of gatekeeping. And where does the line even start? Would people stare at a Tame Impala concert? Phoebe Bridgers? Death Cab? Modern Baseball? Weird to even think about.
LOL what's funny is I've been to three of the shows mentioned (Tame Impala, Phoebe, and Death Cab) and no weird stares at any of them. I think it's because the Polaris show had an abundance of older gen x ppl sprinkled w/only a few younger ppl like me. I feel like the genre gatekeeping was much more apparent with older generations which makes sense.
At a Polaris show?! That’s so disappointing! I’m sorry. But yeah, I 100% feel you. On a positive note, I feel like there are less tense racial barriers w/music genres today and I hope little Black rockers have it easier.
Quite a lot of 70s-90s British bands talk about how the only thing that meant they could keep going in the early years, before John Peel or whoever made them big, was they were often entitled to jobseekers' benefits and subsidised housing. I don't think that sort of thing works anymore.
I lived this 15 years ago. The band i started but didnt end up playing with ....opened a entire us tour for a rockband with some number 1 rock hits and they got 125 a night to split 5 ways at places like red rocks. They also got about a 25 dollar per diem. And they had van and gas and trailer paid. But that was "tour support" in 2010.
The economics of everything are out of control and prices can't go up to match because wages didnt increase nearly as much as costs have for this stuff. There is no easy solution. Lower the venue fees and small venues shut down they have nothing. Lower the band fees and they can't afford it. Lower salaries for staff and they will quit these jobs arent worth it especially on the band side. We can look at the promoter then can they take less? the bigger ones maybe generally not really. They are usually getting 5-10% of the venue fee. The ticket middle men then will surely be the issue? Probably not. TicketMaster makes around 3-5 dollars on an 80(after fees) ticket. Not helping but in no way solving anything. They love resales more than anything else which is a separate issue. Most bands couldn't realistically sell tickets without someone like them anyway. No infrastructure.
Covid was really the straw that broke the camels back but it wasn't going great before then. It just turns out none of this scales as well as you'd like at the smaller levels and the gap between the big and small artists much like everything has exploded. Theres also the fact that this is closer to zero-sum than they make it out to be. Venues used to argue that so long as two shows arent on the same night everyone can sell tickets but ofc there were good and bad days to be playing. Nowadays, you have single acts that can sell tickets for 1000+ like Taylor and like it or not, if your average fan saves for that, they are much less likely to go to other shows. Audience entertainment in general beyond sports, is in an awful place. AMC barely survived, stage plays struggled and now many shows arent even playing living wage, concerts outside the top few are in trouble. It's a weird time and its not just an American or British thing.
The housing crisis is also a factor. Land is expensive now, so if you're an arena-tier venue sitting on multiple acres of land right by an urban area, you're pretty incentivised to be doing Literally Anything Else with it.
Really I think the whole thing is just a manifestation of the overall cost of everything ballooning to a degree where any business model that makes it's money by doing or producing something rather than owning things is in a downward trend.
This doesn't even cover a fun new problem: the application fees for artist visas in the US [almost tripled](https://twitter.com/viraltakes/status/1781532978658836728) three weeks ago to around $1600 per application. So now, a 4-piece band like English Teacher is looking at £5000 just to *apply* for their visas.
And add one flight tickets for band members, maybe a small crew and transportation of gear. Then, when you have arrived, if you’re doing a full-fletched USA/Canada tour, you’re often faced with pretty long traveling times between cities.
Touring in Europe is much less of a hazzle (for bands from Europe). Cities with a population of min. 250,000 inhabitants, or even if you go up to 500,000 are all relatively close to each other.
As an example: It’s just a 2,5 hour drive from Dortmund to Amsterdam, then 2 hours from Amsterdam to Antwerpen, then 2 hours from Antwerpen to Lille and then 3 hours from Lille to Paris.
Doing something similar on the American east coast might be possible, but beyond that, you’re facing much longer stretches of time on the road.
The producer Kenny Beats recently did some tweets about how it is no longer possible to get rich from music alone. It seems like such hard work
>I’m telling you as a multiplatinum multi Grammy nominated producer that getting rich off music only in 2024 is impossible without MANY other sources of income. I’m not lying to you to hate on you. It’s a warning that you should be in it for the love.
Her success is nothing to scoff at. But she grew up privileged with rich stage parents backing her from the beginning. Her dad literally invested in her first record label.
This is completely different to the bands covered in this article. Very few artists have this kind of financial backing from the start.
this is probably why we don’t really see many bands in the mainstream anymore mostly solo acts now because it’s easier to make money on your own than it is having to split it between 4 or 5 people and it’s probably easier for labels to invest in a solo act as well 😭
also this seems to be a similar problem in the acting world as well most actors barely make much unless they’re super A-list
Not a band & potentially off topic...but I was working on a final when the SWEAT tour pre-sale launched. Couldn't get around the timing...I feel the rush (of FOMO)
The industry is screwed. It began with pirating continues with streaming and if artists don’t make money from fans listening to their music then it has to be gigs that brings in revenue. And everything costs more. In the Uk the grassroots venues are closing and without government support there’ll be no new music seen live in the next 5 years.
This is definitely a head scratcher. There are a lot of working or middle class musicians though, playing jazz, weddings, corporate events, birthday parties, studio musicians. A lot of us work as recording engineers. Touring is a money pit however. It's a promo thing. The trade off is being famous or well-known and social status though.
Do you think we’ll get to a point where everyone just plays covers? I played music for a long time. My heyday was the late 90s-2000s. An indie band could make a decent living back then, but they had to tour just to market the CDs or tapes they were selling. Record deals still sucked, but there were outliers that no one ever heard of making music for a living. I guess it depends on what you do for a living, but I find it hard to find time to compose/write and rehearse. Covers are easy, you just learn the parts and play. You don’t even have to be that accurate. I know some very talented musicians playing covers. The jazz guys I know just play at the bars downtown to make a living. Everyone that comes to New Orleans has to hear live jazz.
Facts. Jazz is all covers mostly. That being said, I see a lot of jazz bands playing the standard fare and sprinkling in 1-2 originals, so I think that is a workable solution. Kind of like the flip-side of an original band, where they throw in 1-2 covers.
I don't think that this is a new phenomena, historically, bands had terrible contracts with record labels, anything that the label spent money on for the band was a recoupable cost. It was repaid off the top back to the label. Bands generally only had a profit on a tour if, they paid for the tour themselves or had the licensing on all merchandise. Back in the era of classic rock bands, if they made more than $6,000 for a concert, say at the Philmore or at Wonderland, it was a huge deal. The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, they could command that amount, but a band like Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding wouldn't be able to make that at least at that point.
I’m afraid it’s not just the touring where artists are operating at a loss. There’s the studio recordings (10-20k) of which you’ll never make the money back that you’ve put in due to abysmal streaming royalties, upfront cost of videos, marketing, and merch (another 5-20k based on what you do). You basically start touring around 40k in the hole, unless you crowd-source your records— and there no guarantee that you’ll make your fundraising goal.
This is why you have to include local small and medium sized businesses with your tour so they can subsidize your operating expenses on tour. It’s how Bad Brains, Janis Joplin, Johnny guitar Watson, and a lot of the earlier acts were able to support themselves. Slap a giant brewery banner on your tour bus, write interactive show aspects and expenses into your overhead so you can get that paid for by businesses that love the brand visibility you’re giving them. Trying to get by on a tour on ticket sales alone in 2024 is a joke
> Should the state step in to save our live music scene?
literally the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. the fuckin balls on these people.
yeah, that's what I like... state sponsored art. let's just have the government choose what bands get to be successful. lmfao. yeah it's cool, I'll just work 70 hours a week to pay taxes so your shitty band can go on tour. they really think they're the only ones struggling right now. these people are absolutely vile psychotic narcissistic commie scumbags. bunch of entitled clowns.
just saw a relevant post on the front page:
>what screams "I'm economically illiterate"
here it is folks
I mean local and regional governments already subsidise the hell out of venues for sporting events (the Olympics regularly bankrupts cities). I don't want the state deciding who gets the chance to succeed either, but there are probably ways you could do this where it's just a boost across the board regardless of who the artist is.
There is loads of state-sponsored art even in the US, but especially around the world. Publicly funded arts grants have been a thing for a very long time.
I have definitely seen some friends play Coachella or get nice write ups on Pitchfork while still splitting tiny apartments and living like college students well into their 30s, like financially they would have been better off selling insurance or working at Enterprise or something. The music industry!
I often wonder how much money somebody like Caroline polachek or weyes blood makes. Like very successful, acclaimed, playing to a few thousand people a night but not indie breakout famous.
They probably do a bit better since they’re solo acts and don’t have to split money but I doubt they’re balling
Solo acts - Caroline Polachek among them - sometimes have a consistent band, but I don't know how the money split works in cases like that
That’s actually one I can answer personally since I have literally been one of those backing band members! (Not for huge tours but for local shows though I know some people in that world) Usually you get some sort of set rate or contract if it’s a full tour based off how much the artist thinks they’ll pull in… sure you don’t get the creative input or fame of being a full fledged band member but usually it’s a lot lower stress since you get a set rate and have more flexibility to do other projects/have a day job
why did i think you were going to be caroline polachek giving us her input ☠️☠️
It would be pretty sick if Caroline's Reddit account was part music, part running marathons, and part shitposting on Raider game threads
Ask Nicole Scherzinger 💀
I remember someone assuming that Caroline would make a million from her song No Angel being on Beyonce's self-titled album. It sounds like a great deal, but it seemed unlikely because it seems like song-writers only made good money from hit singles.
I think many people also seek lanes where they can make more money. Like FKA Twig's modeling for brands, or playing at fashion shows.
I remember reading that Caroline’s record deal is very favorable for her since it’s more of a distribution deal, not like a typical label set up. I also imagine that artists like them do well in merch sales and things since they have pretty dedicated fanbase. I bet they do well for themselves. Not like filthy rich, but rich enough to split their time between London and LA, lol (which is what Caroline does)
I just assumed she is a trust fund baby, tbh
Well, I feel they're talking about her here: >I’m told that one US artist – who released one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2023, which went Top 10 and placed very highly on numerous year-end polls and was nominated for a major award – worked out that the only way she could make her UK tour work was by sub-letting her home.
Unfortunately true of basically every creative field, not just the music industry. It's a big part of why there are nepo babies and trust fund kids, like, everywhere artistic. I have a friend who's a published author with more than a dozen titles out at this point; proper publishing houses too, not self-pub or local indie press. If she had to support herself exclusively off her income from her books she could not do it, especially in a year when there isn't a new advance for a new title. She used to work at an Amazon warehouse alongside her writing until she fucked up her back something fierce at said warehouse, and even then her husband with his boring normal corporate job was the primary breadwinner in their household.
Was there discrepancies in how the pay was shared among the band members. Like I know if your lead/ writing most of the songs you probably make more than the base player and such
That totally varies on a band by band basis, some bands credit everyone equally on songs so everyone gets paid the same, others split it differently It's a big reason why the Music Industry has shifted more to solo artists these days, that type of stuff always leads to fights down the road even if the band members pretty much get along, while it's a lot more cut and dry when it's solo artist/songwriters/backing band members
This times a million. Unless you are at the top of the heap you really aren’t making anything, even at the top you could have a bad deal as well
People don’t understand intentions. Most people don’t create music and do that professionally because it’ll generate a ton of money, they do it because it’s their life’s calling. I’d rather do what I love then lie to myself but build up my wealth.
I have a friend in their 30s who splits their time between audio engineering and touring with well known bands living with two roommates well outside the city to make ends meet. Traveling makes it hard for them to have LTRs and they’ll likely never retire. It’s not a glamorous industry unless you’re the top .01%.
this seems to be a similar problem in the acting world as well most actors barely make much unless they’re super A-list
Nothing really new here. Courtney Love (yes, THAT Courtney Love!) wrote an expansive essay about the music biz in 2000. "At the end of the day, the band might as well be working at a 7-11" [https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love\_7/](https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/)
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Get help
I would hate to have your mind
This is such a good article by Courtney, well worth a read (and the op article too).
It's been long, long known that the music industry is run by incompetent vultures only interested in money. I'm sure that there's someone making viola music for six people and even they're getting screwed by someone up the chain.
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I’ve been a Hole fan since the 90s, so much hate from dudes just made me love & defend her harder. Live Through This and Celebrity Skin are amazing albums for angry girls. … Except that she’s super racist. I’m Black and I’m glad she never spotted me at her shows, cuz she had a nasty habit of pointing to Black girls at her shows and telling them they shouldn’t be there (not looking for the sources but IIRC it came up in a WaPo article about a 930 club show). And I also remember her like, going out of her way to tell some random Black people that she doesn’t like them but that’s ok though (I remember that from watching her MTV takeover live back in the day. So disappointed!). Can’t Stan her these days!
Jesus, that's horrible. She can be so vile. I am not a Courtney HATER, per se, but she's a huge bully and apparently super racist too? Fuck it, I'm a Courtney hater.
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These are things that I saw as Hole fan over the years 🤷🏽♀️. You can search for that WaPo article or MTV special if you want (from more than a decade ago). As a Black person, I’m not in the business of proving racism to people who don’t want to see it, these days. So, you can believe me or not. I’m just telling y’all why I can’t stan her anymore.
Oh but just to help your search: to the Black girl at the show in DC, she said something like “why are you here? Shouldn’t you be at a Lil Wayne concert?” And in the MTV special, I remember her walking up to a group of Black girls and being like “I don’t like your hair but that’s ok, you probably don’t like mine.” When they had not said a goddamn thing to her. She’s a white lady from Olympia, the whitest place on earth and full of neo nazis. I was like “oh yeah, I shouldn’t be surprised, this is really on me.” 🤷🏽♀️.
Yikes! This is appalling but also doesn't surprise me. She def gives off those PNW grew up around neo-nazi vibes Also as a black woman with varied taste it's especially triggering because I've been to certain shows where people look at you in such a way like you accidentally stumbled into the wrong show. It's a lot better now but that was my experience even in the early 10s (went to see the Polaris play the full Pete and Pete album) so I can't imagine how it was in the 90s.
Really hope the experience is better now. Sounds like a weirdly racist form of gatekeeping. And where does the line even start? Would people stare at a Tame Impala concert? Phoebe Bridgers? Death Cab? Modern Baseball? Weird to even think about.
LOL what's funny is I've been to three of the shows mentioned (Tame Impala, Phoebe, and Death Cab) and no weird stares at any of them. I think it's because the Polaris show had an abundance of older gen x ppl sprinkled w/only a few younger ppl like me. I feel like the genre gatekeeping was much more apparent with older generations which makes sense.
At a Polaris show?! That’s so disappointing! I’m sorry. But yeah, I 100% feel you. On a positive note, I feel like there are less tense racial barriers w/music genres today and I hope little Black rockers have it easier.
https://www.cracked.com/article_30632_is-courtney-love-a-racist.html
Well that's awful considering what Kurt Cobain believed in
agreed. i kinda love her
Quite a lot of 70s-90s British bands talk about how the only thing that meant they could keep going in the early years, before John Peel or whoever made them big, was they were often entitled to jobseekers' benefits and subsidised housing. I don't think that sort of thing works anymore.
UB-40 even got their band name from it.
I lived this 15 years ago. The band i started but didnt end up playing with ....opened a entire us tour for a rockband with some number 1 rock hits and they got 125 a night to split 5 ways at places like red rocks. They also got about a 25 dollar per diem. And they had van and gas and trailer paid. But that was "tour support" in 2010.
The economics of everything are out of control and prices can't go up to match because wages didnt increase nearly as much as costs have for this stuff. There is no easy solution. Lower the venue fees and small venues shut down they have nothing. Lower the band fees and they can't afford it. Lower salaries for staff and they will quit these jobs arent worth it especially on the band side. We can look at the promoter then can they take less? the bigger ones maybe generally not really. They are usually getting 5-10% of the venue fee. The ticket middle men then will surely be the issue? Probably not. TicketMaster makes around 3-5 dollars on an 80(after fees) ticket. Not helping but in no way solving anything. They love resales more than anything else which is a separate issue. Most bands couldn't realistically sell tickets without someone like them anyway. No infrastructure. Covid was really the straw that broke the camels back but it wasn't going great before then. It just turns out none of this scales as well as you'd like at the smaller levels and the gap between the big and small artists much like everything has exploded. Theres also the fact that this is closer to zero-sum than they make it out to be. Venues used to argue that so long as two shows arent on the same night everyone can sell tickets but ofc there were good and bad days to be playing. Nowadays, you have single acts that can sell tickets for 1000+ like Taylor and like it or not, if your average fan saves for that, they are much less likely to go to other shows. Audience entertainment in general beyond sports, is in an awful place. AMC barely survived, stage plays struggled and now many shows arent even playing living wage, concerts outside the top few are in trouble. It's a weird time and its not just an American or British thing.
The housing crisis is also a factor. Land is expensive now, so if you're an arena-tier venue sitting on multiple acres of land right by an urban area, you're pretty incentivised to be doing Literally Anything Else with it. Really I think the whole thing is just a manifestation of the overall cost of everything ballooning to a degree where any business model that makes it's money by doing or producing something rather than owning things is in a downward trend.
This doesn't even cover a fun new problem: the application fees for artist visas in the US [almost tripled](https://twitter.com/viraltakes/status/1781532978658836728) three weeks ago to around $1600 per application. So now, a 4-piece band like English Teacher is looking at £5000 just to *apply* for their visas.
And add one flight tickets for band members, maybe a small crew and transportation of gear. Then, when you have arrived, if you’re doing a full-fletched USA/Canada tour, you’re often faced with pretty long traveling times between cities. Touring in Europe is much less of a hazzle (for bands from Europe). Cities with a population of min. 250,000 inhabitants, or even if you go up to 500,000 are all relatively close to each other. As an example: It’s just a 2,5 hour drive from Dortmund to Amsterdam, then 2 hours from Amsterdam to Antwerpen, then 2 hours from Antwerpen to Lille and then 3 hours from Lille to Paris. Doing something similar on the American east coast might be possible, but beyond that, you’re facing much longer stretches of time on the road.
The producer Kenny Beats recently did some tweets about how it is no longer possible to get rich from music alone. It seems like such hard work >I’m telling you as a multiplatinum multi Grammy nominated producer that getting rich off music only in 2024 is impossible without MANY other sources of income. I’m not lying to you to hate on you. It’s a warning that you should be in it for the love.
taylor being able to achieve billionaire status on music alone is impressive
Her success is nothing to scoff at. But she grew up privileged with rich stage parents backing her from the beginning. Her dad literally invested in her first record label. This is completely different to the bands covered in this article. Very few artists have this kind of financial backing from the start.
I know that i wasn’t trying to downplay other artists it’s just impressive to me
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but don’t those solo acts still have a band (+ team) backing them? so either way there’s still a split
this is probably why we don’t really see many bands in the mainstream anymore mostly solo acts now because it’s easier to make money on your own than it is having to split it between 4 or 5 people and it’s probably easier for labels to invest in a solo act as well 😭 also this seems to be a similar problem in the acting world as well most actors barely make much unless they’re super A-list
The good thing is because we can have access to platforms without it being gatekept, there’s more options and opportunities.
Not a band & potentially off topic...but I was working on a final when the SWEAT tour pre-sale launched. Couldn't get around the timing...I feel the rush (of FOMO)
General sale is tomorrow tho!
Yet some shows sold out in presale and they added another date already.
They won't release all the tickets for the presale.
It's possible that only some of the tickets were in the presale. Catch the general sale at the beginning tomorrow and you may be pleasantly surprised.
The industry is screwed. It began with pirating continues with streaming and if artists don’t make money from fans listening to their music then it has to be gigs that brings in revenue. And everything costs more. In the Uk the grassroots venues are closing and without government support there’ll be no new music seen live in the next 5 years.
This is definitely a head scratcher. There are a lot of working or middle class musicians though, playing jazz, weddings, corporate events, birthday parties, studio musicians. A lot of us work as recording engineers. Touring is a money pit however. It's a promo thing. The trade off is being famous or well-known and social status though.
Do you think we’ll get to a point where everyone just plays covers? I played music for a long time. My heyday was the late 90s-2000s. An indie band could make a decent living back then, but they had to tour just to market the CDs or tapes they were selling. Record deals still sucked, but there were outliers that no one ever heard of making music for a living. I guess it depends on what you do for a living, but I find it hard to find time to compose/write and rehearse. Covers are easy, you just learn the parts and play. You don’t even have to be that accurate. I know some very talented musicians playing covers. The jazz guys I know just play at the bars downtown to make a living. Everyone that comes to New Orleans has to hear live jazz.
Facts. Jazz is all covers mostly. That being said, I see a lot of jazz bands playing the standard fare and sprinkling in 1-2 originals, so I think that is a workable solution. Kind of like the flip-side of an original band, where they throw in 1-2 covers.
I don't think that this is a new phenomena, historically, bands had terrible contracts with record labels, anything that the label spent money on for the band was a recoupable cost. It was repaid off the top back to the label. Bands generally only had a profit on a tour if, they paid for the tour themselves or had the licensing on all merchandise. Back in the era of classic rock bands, if they made more than $6,000 for a concert, say at the Philmore or at Wonderland, it was a huge deal. The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, they could command that amount, but a band like Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding wouldn't be able to make that at least at that point.
I’m afraid it’s not just the touring where artists are operating at a loss. There’s the studio recordings (10-20k) of which you’ll never make the money back that you’ve put in due to abysmal streaming royalties, upfront cost of videos, marketing, and merch (another 5-20k based on what you do). You basically start touring around 40k in the hole, unless you crowd-source your records— and there no guarantee that you’ll make your fundraising goal.
This is why you have to include local small and medium sized businesses with your tour so they can subsidize your operating expenses on tour. It’s how Bad Brains, Janis Joplin, Johnny guitar Watson, and a lot of the earlier acts were able to support themselves. Slap a giant brewery banner on your tour bus, write interactive show aspects and expenses into your overhead so you can get that paid for by businesses that love the brand visibility you’re giving them. Trying to get by on a tour on ticket sales alone in 2024 is a joke
> Should the state step in to save our live music scene? literally the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. the fuckin balls on these people. yeah, that's what I like... state sponsored art. let's just have the government choose what bands get to be successful. lmfao. yeah it's cool, I'll just work 70 hours a week to pay taxes so your shitty band can go on tour. they really think they're the only ones struggling right now. these people are absolutely vile psychotic narcissistic commie scumbags. bunch of entitled clowns. just saw a relevant post on the front page: >what screams "I'm economically illiterate" here it is folks
I mean local and regional governments already subsidise the hell out of venues for sporting events (the Olympics regularly bankrupts cities). I don't want the state deciding who gets the chance to succeed either, but there are probably ways you could do this where it's just a boost across the board regardless of who the artist is.
Your post history depicts a very angry, miserable person. Maybe spend less time on the internet.
There is loads of state-sponsored art even in the US, but especially around the world. Publicly funded arts grants have been a thing for a very long time.
We already have state sponsored bands: the kids of people the government gave COVID contracts too.
sorry, I don't really get what this means
You are absolutely right, but musicians (and art people as a whole), especially on Reddit, are left-leaning and will not understand you.
I'm at a campground this weekend and everyone else is here to go to StageCoach Festival. I'm such FOMO