Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
In this Discussion
- 1234 October 2011
- curt October 2011
- distant_shoe October 2011
- flossy_log_lady October 2011
- kdawg October 2011
- Leland October 2011
- lml__0_0__lml October 2011
- Loose_Thread October 2011
- Marcus October 2011
- Matthew October 2011
- MirandaJuly October 2011
- RyRy October 2011
- swamp_knobbler_mahan October 2011
- YoursTruly October 2011
How do musicians make money?
My friends at the Future of Music Coalition are doing a big survey to find out.
Take the survey!
This will give them some hard data for when they meet with politicians, etc and advocate for health care and other things for musicians.
Please pass it along to anyone you know who makes a living (or fails to make a living) making music.
Take the survey!
This will give them some hard data for when they meet with politicians, etc and advocate for health care and other things for musicians.
Please pass it along to anyone you know who makes a living (or fails to make a living) making music.
Comments
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jd-samson/i-love-my-job-but-it-made_b_987680.html
I'd like to argue with someone about this Huffington post article please. Thanks in advance.
Plus, I'm a lesbian."
on the other hand, the issues she raises about her financial fears and worries for the future are pretty important. I mean, what she's basically describing is just "being working class" in modern America, which, as we all know, basically means working until you're too old to work and then starving in the street because no one takes care of you and social security isn't enough to live on and you have no health care.
If you take out the whiny "I'm an artist I deserve to be paid by adoring publics" stuff the issues she's dealing with are the same for anyone who can't figure out how to make a ton of money, which is most people. How is some hard-working blue collar dude supposed to pay for kids' college, retirement, nursing home, heart attacks, buying food when you can no longer draw a paycheck? Our country has increasingly made the working class (even middle class, more and more) lifestyle essentially UNLIVABLE, which is dark. What ARE these people (i.e. the vast majority of Americans, not just whiny artists) going to do when they're 80?
It reminds me of shipping containers. Before containers all ships had to be loaded by hand. Remember the pictures of a crane lowering a net of crates into a ship? That's called "break bulk" and it's way more labor intensive than using containers. So, as the world shifted to containers, there were massive layoffs in the ports. The unions fought to keep jobs but it just became unnessacary to have so many people.
Automation and jobs moving overseas. Now what?
Capitalism doesn't like a surplus of labor, but we keep making a lot of babies.
That's really the only reason I would ever consider having a child. Which probably means I should never breed. #selfish
Mike Merrill, 2060: "I'm gonna carve my name on the moooon."
I mean, this is a thing the Baby Boomers are currently dealing with---theirs are the first parents who have, as a rule, begun to Live Too Long. My mom is dealing with this, gnarly nursing home/wiping parents' asses type horror, and she has SO MANY FRIENDS who are too. Is this the new reality, everyone having a demented pants-shitting 90 year old living in their house with them while they're also trying to raise their own kids and work 40 hours a week??
surely a country can be judged by how it cares for its old and infirm, and our country is massively failing at this basic test of compassion and good planning. My grandparents are rich enough to afford a swanky nursing home but what about people who aren't? You just move into a shed in your kid's backyard? That's no way to treat humanity
So I think Samson's points are worth thinking about in this regard as well. What do people do when they are old, if they haven't been able to amass a really astonishing amount of wealth? (My grandparents' nursing home costs $10,000 a year and they're still in the wing that isn't fully assisted living--once you move to that wing your price skyrockets).
Also are we all supposed to just get jobs at shitty banks and hate our lives for 40 years because it's impossible to make a living doing anything we actually care about
Exactly where my Mom is at (with her mom).
Solid call, Truly.
And yeah, Flossy, I think MZ was saying "enough with the babies" meaning QUIT HAVING BABIES, right MZ? Thus you two agree
wait, unless the "biggest problem" you refer to is that there AREN'T ENOUGH babies, in which case WTF
On the plus side, more babies means we will have to develop more high density housing. I like that.
i guess as one of the only actual "full time musicians" here, i will chime the fuck in!
i used to make some money making and selling music recordings, almost enough to live on. nowadays its easier than ever to make "adequate enough" music recordings and share them for free on the internet. its no longer a very special thing to do.
personally, i find this to be very sad, as i have dedicated my life from an early age to making interesting musical recordings and the core values of my life have been almost completely devalued.
on the other hand, as a listener and fan of many musics, it is a time rich with many interesting musical recordings from all walks of life, all around the world. i spend days on the internet absorbing all of the strange "amateur-ish" musical productions being made all over the world. "hipsters" of all sorts in the western world making crazy collage musics. africans on that PC making the crazy auto-tuned anthems of their existence.
we are in a time and place where we can, with so little work, both make shit loads of new recordings and listen to almost any recordings ever made. its simply amazing.
but as a musician, its sad to say, the underbelly of this amazing time is pretty fucked.
there are so many "articles" written about this. they are all boring. for the most part, its a bunch of parlor chat. an interesting thing to think about while surfing the net. not a lot of substantial input by the people being affected by it all. probably because the whole industry is in a panic. and by that i don't just mean the major labels, but EVERYONE who has ever made money on any part of music as a commodity, from the venue worker to the dude running the indie label to the promoters to the actual people who actually make the actual sounds we all enjoy. the whole thing is bleeding to death.
people often offer the idea that "musicians need to make money playing live"
this is a stupid argument which conflates recorded music and live music playing, which are two very separate artforms and takes for granted the huge cultural and economic factors over the last 50 to 100 years that have made recorded music the highly developed, technologically advanced and completely amazing artform it is today. the beatles stopped playing live in the 1960s to make crazy recordings. simply put, we, with our free copy of garage band and cheap used gear, stand on the shoulders of generations of humans that dedicated their lives and billions of dollars to making amazing recorded music.
the money made from live music performance and the money made from recorded music are two very different streams that take two very different skill sets.
at any rate, for both the performing and recording musician, "the long tale" is very very long these days
much like there are huge, almost invisible socio-economic factors keeping much of the lower and middle class of the western world in a huge pile of fucked, including but not limited to the tenants of corporate capitalism, crooked lending and third world exploitation, factors that are only recently being figured out and protested against at large now etc etc,
the paradigm shift in people's mind-set about the value of recorded music, along with movies, videos, tv shows and all forms of entertainment, based mostly on the fact that it can all be easily got digitally through the net tubes, has had a devastating impact on the entire industry
im real tired of the general "bootstraps" attitude of both 99% deniers and people who think musicians should "just deal" with their new economy
like those that say "if you're out of a job its yr own damn fault!" and those who say "hey music cry baby, stop crying about yr dumb industry collapse! its yr own damn fault for not getting with the times"
like, yeah. we know. people in the food stamp line know. musicians like me, who were never gonna be pop stars in the first place, but found ways to eek out enough money to live a meager life of pizza and recording gear: we know.
bootstraps. we got it.
i read something somewhere relating to the occupy movement that went something along the lines of
"money is like cake, those who say it doesn't matter generally have had a few slices"
which i think applies pretty well to many paradigms. which is to say - people who are not trying to make a living as musicians telling musicians that they are cry babies have had a few slices already, so why should they really care, and how could they ever understand the hunger
i feel JD's frustration, even if she sounds indignant at times with the whole "they don't know about the people i've kept from suicide" bit.
you look around and you are surrounded by people who enjoy your art but without knowing it they are making it very hard for you to continue doing it. in a multitude of subtle ways. they have regular jobs. jobs you can't get any more because right now, over-qualified people will take shitty jobs and not go on tour, not show up sloppy because of a late night gig or recording session. not have a "secret other life" of trying to make music.
employers and land lords will always take the music fan over the musician. at no other time in my life has this been the case more than now, with the economy in the shitter and everyone looking for a hint of security.
its not just new york. i've lived within the fringes of portland for two decades. i moved here because it was a place you could -with hard work and dedication - eek out a little cottage existence doing your weird art r music, while doing some part time odd jobs. that's what made portland a special place. maybe eventually quit the odd jobs. go full time on your own thang. and i'm finding it very hard to survive here now. its a gradual and almost invisible shift. i don't want to believe it is happening, but it is. its a complex issue with many variables and no real ill will.
i know a lot of weird artists who simply can't survive here any more, or, if they can get it, are receiving aid from the government in order to EAT.
"bootstraps"
anyway, fuggit. i gotta go to the studio.
Clearly there are musicians who are "making it." If I named some small artists living off their work it would all be people no one here respects as musicians. Musicians who appeal to nerds. Cause nerds are sort of the ruling cultural class right now.
So you compromise to make work more commercial, or you supplement your income with other work. Just because there is no money in the music biz doesn't mean music doesn't have a future.
http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd120/hipsterrunoff/20090323-6frk1dk87we8qcwe9fjgnbd67.jpg
from the classic essay http://www.hipsterrunoff.com/2009/03/memefication-your-band.html
written 2 and a half years ago...
This is supposed to point out the inauthenticity inherent in being a "successful band"?
I just read about how there is a bill coming up that would make it a felony to sing songs of other people's music and post a video online (like Bieber). Maybe YouTube/Google is the new church?
My poorly developed understanding is that this is the world DIY created. Everyone does it and that means there is a lot more that is not as good. No more gatekeepers.
(Am I coming off as purely argumentative? I don't mean it that way!)
GIRL SCOUTS OF AMERICA OFFICIAL REACTION TO SOMETHING:
JD's article made me feel fucking gross. Not to get all postmod-moralistic/ well maybe that's what I'm actually going to do/ I happen to be close to several tender-hearted soft-loving women that JD has left chewed up in her romantic wake, over the years. I mean, can I make a totally generalized spiritual connection between the karma of treating people with respect and expecting to be well-taken care of by your world, in return?
*Karma isn't real Ryann, don't be like that!*
*Sure, Ryann, go for it, looks like you're gonna do it anyways!*
She is a real bad dude to her girlfriends, People. They are left "moon-blinked", shredded, baby raccoon-roadkill by her romantic-antics. Ok, ok, I know there are many people who treat people like shit and then make lots of $$$, there is no direct causal relationship, "karmically", duh, but it seems pretty bullshit that a person who casually rolls through souls like she does, also wants to have a no-worries cushion of money like her rich compatriots. Dude, most of the people I love are artists who have to hustle. Big deal. At least they are, for the most part, not fucking sweet-hearts over left and right. Trying to keep up with your Australian pop-star girlfriend would be challenging, if you do in fact not have enough money to rent out your own sweet pad in Williamsburg, but then again, most normal people living in NYC have to have at least one roommate to "make it work", perhaps she should look into the Craigslist, like everybody else. I feel so gross about this article, by JD Samson. What a dumb dude. This reaction does not mean I overlook the real financial plight of the musician, I would like to official remark for the record. I just think that JD is doing more harm than good, for her stated cause. GROSS.
P.S. Being in Home-School Choir singing almost exclusive Handel for 3 years (with the rare exception of The Star Spangled Banner) is what taught me how to sing R Kelly, Linda Ronstadt, Katy Perry and Jackson Brown (among other favorite artists') songs with what people have told me is a real nice technical grasp. Church songs can be terribly beneficial to being a grown-up who "knows how to sing". It's fun to go to church when you're a kid! You can make up alternative "dirty" lyrics to the hymns, have elbow wars with your sibs, drink too much of the wine at communion, flirt with the boy in the pew behind you, etc.