[HN Gopher] The decline of the working musician
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The decline of the working musician
Author : tintinnabula
Score : 65 points
Date : 2024-11-01 17:14 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| gonzo41 wrote:
| The article doesn't mention Patreon once. What a gig is, has
| changed.
| HappyRobot wrote:
| Are musicians/bands seeing success on Patreon? Are they
| releasing music monthly or just using it to communicate and
| receive recurring support?
|
| I try to support bands I follow as much as possible (buying
| merch, streaming their music, and going to shows). However the
| jump to a recurring subscription is a hurdle. Bands seem to
| still be in the record -> tour -> hiatus cycle and I imagine
| that needs to change if they're releasing music over the year.
| actusual wrote:
| I've played music my entire life (picked up a guitar at 6 years
| old and just never put it down). I actually just released a new
| record last Friday (https://open.spotify.com/album/6JU0jmz537a6r2
| xrTvCcmn?si=eg4...). I joined a band when I was 15 (~2004), and
| we had some long tail success. We were able to tour, play huge
| shows (the Gorge in Washington, sell out the Showbox in downtown
| Seattle, an arena here or there). After high school I went to
| school for audio production, and even then I knew it was going to
| be tough to make a living. I ended up pivoting, studying math,
| now I'm in machine learning.
|
| Music is the thing I love more than anything. I love writing it,
| releasing records, playing shows, and connecting with people on
| an emotional level. Never once have I considered it possible to
| have a fruitful career as a musician, despite seeing more success
| as a musician than most can ever dream of. Additionally, the
| industry (like many others) has changed dramatically over the
| past 25 years. In many ways, it has put much more power back into
| the hands of artists: you don't need a huge studio/record
| label/promotion to release a record. You can just release
| records, and promote them yourself. The flip side of that is
| there are SO many more people releasing music these days, which
| makes it really difficult to cut through the noise if your music
| is halfway decent.
|
| Finally, recommendation algorithms have truly transformed the
| landscape of content creation, likely irreversibly. I get
| messages _daily_ from people who have "hacked" the TikTok
| algorithm, and can get my bands plays. There is an entire cottage
| industry of algorithm "hackers", some of them actually have
| results too.
|
| One odd anecdote: I love Alex G. I've been listening to him for
| over a decade, and have flown out to see him play in places like
| New york/Austin TX. A few years ago he played in Seattle, and the
| entire demographic of the audience seem to've changed overnight.
| Way younger, more "mainstream" looking kids, filled the Showbox
| in Seattle. The strangest part was that no one seemed to know the
| words to his songs anymore. I did some digging, and he'd gone
| viral on TikTok. A few of his songs went absolutely bananas on
| there, and it completely transformed his fanbase. They knew the
| words to those songs, but not his entire set. Is this bad? I have
| no idea, but the trimming down of content into bite sized morsels
| _feels_ bad to me, and I believe it will dramatically alter this
| next generation's baseline attention span. Again, not a moral
| judgement, just a factual claim.
| frmersdog wrote:
| >The flip side of that is there are SO many more people
| releasing music these days, which makes it really difficult to
| cut through the noise if your music is halfway decent.
|
| I think one thing important to consider here is that part of
| the experience of enjoying music is not necessarily how good
| the song is, but how much, and how many, other people are
| enjoying it. People often listen to (mediocre) music simply to
| have a shared emotional experience with others.
| whythre wrote:
| For some reason this just sounds depressing.
|
| Imagine bonding over gruel, because everyone else is eating
| it and you can't connect with them unless you are able to
| discuss the consistency and mouthfeel of the gruel.
| bowsamic wrote:
| As Charles Cohen said, the path of a progressive musician
| is a lonely one. Some level of loneliness is just something
| you have to accept
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Relatable. Some of my best friends were made in the heat of
| struggle, not in a fancy establishment. When you're happy
| and comfortable, people are a dime a dozen. When you're
| down on situation, any human contact is a luxury, and the
| experience embeds itself in your mind.
| bitwize wrote:
| "Cliches like this are beautiful, because they reflect us
| and we are beautiful. Take, for example, this chord
| progression. It only became taboo because it was too
| powerful -- that's why you won't forget it." --Porter
| Robinson
|
| Pop music isn't gruel. A lot of it may be slop, but it's
| deeply appealing. Somebody somewhere solved for what
| "works", and a million copycats cloned it with minimal
| effort because it works.
|
| So don't think gruel. It's more along the line of...
| McDonald's. Bad food, but it's appealing. And people do
| bond over it, or at least they used to before people
| stopped caring and fast food places became utter
| hellscapes. You still see kids bonding over McD's in Japan.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > They knew the words to those songs, but not his entire set.
|
| This has always been true for recorded music. Originally people
| would buy mostly singles after hearing a song on the radio,
| then maybe listen to the B-side too.
|
| Listening to complete albums was only popular for a short while
| before streaming brought single songs back to prominence as the
| main way people consume music.
| actusual wrote:
| Don't disagree. I'm merely commenting on the dramatic change
| in his audience, which IMO opinion was driven by TikTok
| virality. Going from a crowd of people who were singing along
| to people standing around waiting for the "TikTok hits" was
| really strange.
| dingnuts wrote:
| I had a similar experience when I went to see James Blake;
| the audience was bimodal in age and there was a younger
| crowd that only knew a few of his singles that had gotten
| real big (collabs w/ Travis Scott and Rosalia)
|
| So maybe this is normal as we get older? I didn't know this
| had happened with Alex G but I'm happy to hear about his
| success -- to me that's the main thing that matters,
| however an artist finds their audience.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Was there a time when it was common to have just one song on
| the media you bought?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| The entire 45rpm era, from the 1950s to the early 1970s!
| It's why they're called "singles"! And also iTunes, so from
| about 2005 to 2010.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Not for alex g. He has had a cult following as the best
| songwriter in rock music for a decade plus. Up until he took
| off on tiktok everyone at his shows knew almost all his
| songs. I guess really the complaint here is just that he went
| from cult musician to a having more pop appeal.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Man the tiktokification of alex g absolutely blows. Same with
| mitski, unbearable live shows now. It is a bit difficult for me
| to be mad about it though because at the end of the day the
| complaint just boils down to being mad that these artists have
| become more popular, pop sets have always been like this. More
| popular = more money for them which cheers me up a bit
| mutagen wrote:
| Hey thanks for posting your music, had a listen, enjoyed it.
| BillSaysThis wrote:
| Lefsetz, Let the Clubs Close
| https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2024/11/04/let-the-clubs-close...
| debacle wrote:
| "You used to be able to make a living playing in a band."
|
| Yes, but not a good living.
| lebuffon wrote:
| Depends how far back you want to go. I worked with guys a
| generation older than me. One clarinet/sax player worked in the
| "house band" at the Elmwood Hotel in Windsor Ont. Canada, in
| the 1950s. He had a wife and kids and a mortgage. He worked 6
| nights a week and name acts like Ella Fitzgerald and Benny
| Goodman came through the town on their tours across N. America.
|
| That's when professional musicians were musically "literate",
| so many acts showed up with just their soloists and boxes with
| their "charts". One rehearsal and the show was ready to go.
| kjs3 wrote:
| My best friend (son of a session musician) tells the joke
| "what's the difference between a session musician and a
| pepperoni pizza...the pizza can feed a family of 4".
| ofalkaed wrote:
| From what I have seen as an occasional musician and running sound
| is that these days most musicians are not willing to make the
| sacrifices and put in the time, they will not take that poorly
| paying weekly gig and spend a year or two refining their
| performance and learning to read the audience which is a major
| part of making it in music.
|
| I know a good number a professional musicians who have made it to
| the point where they can live off of music without constantly
| working, every single one of them started out the same way,
| playing every single show they could regardless of pay or
| location. This started to change around 2010, the venue I used to
| do sound for primarily targeted musicians who were starting out
| either on the local scene or national scene (just starting to
| tour and trying to make a name out of their home town), by 2015
| music was mostly done there because the 19 year olds who had only
| played a few shows were not happy with $25 and a meal to sit on
| stage with their guitar for an hour, they wanted $100 and
| expected to play to a full room.
|
| The boom in home recording also probably played a role, the
| starting out musicians are often resistant to it because they see
| it as pedestrian and not for serious musicians, musicians record
| in studios, not at home. Record on anything anyway you can and
| bring a few dozen copies to sell at those poorly paying gigs.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yeah definitely. I'm a musician but I don't have an interest in
| being heard, but I've noticed that those who do want to be
| heard don't want to put in the effort to be heard.
| benji-york wrote:
| Interesting take. I wonder if all the new ways of being heard
| (social media, mainly) have made the "cost" of being heard
| via music relatively higher.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >they will not take that poorly paying weekly gig and spend a
| year or two refining their performance and learning to read the
| audience which is a major part of making it in music.
|
| they literally cannot afford to do such things unless they are
| already homeless. It could have been an okay side hustle as
| recent as a decade ago. But today you're not gonna do much more
| than grab grocery money without being in a very specific scene.
| That meal you mention can easily cost as much as what they were
| paid for the gig.
|
| It's been declining for decades, no doubt. But when the economy
| starts getting hard, "passion projects" dry up. being paid $100
| a week is much closer to a passion project than a side hustle
| at this point.
| sneed_chucker wrote:
| > they literally cannot afford to do such things unless they
| are already homeless.
|
| Or already rich
| jmyeet wrote:
| the endless need for ever-increasing profits is what kills any
| creative profession.
|
| You see this in Hollywood with the stremaers now underpaying the
| people that make TV shows and movies possible, offshoring to save
| a few dollars, reducing the number of writes on staff and so on.
|
| I'm not surprised to see the same forces at play for session
| musicians and so forth.
|
| This is a systemic problem. Companies will happily kill an
| industry to increase short-term profits.
|
| What holds this system together is that too many people believe
| that they will ultimately benefit from the exploitation built
| into the system plus people who love the creative skills they've
| spent years honing willing to work for pennies to stay in that
| industry. You see the same dynamic in the video game industry.
| argentinian wrote:
| Why do you think that are so many willing to work for pennies,
| instead of changing profession? Or so many willing to pick a
| profession that is known beforehand to usually have low wages?
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| People have a drive to work on beautiful and important
| things. This is easy to exploit, so it is widely exploited.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| well at least you can make very comfortable money in games.
| Maybe less than half of what you get at google, but half of
| $300k is still far past what most people can ever hope to
| aspire from. Games are still tech after all.
|
| On the indie side, I'd much rather take my hopes to transfer
| that talent to makig the next hollow knight than the equivalent
| in music to be the next Bieber. I'm not going to call it a
| meritocracy, but games (for now) still have a reasonable
| monetization model. I hope by the time I can make my own game
| that that's still somewhat the case.
| Animats wrote:
| There was a brief period in history when Being In A Band was a
| big deal. That's bracketed by, perhaps, the British Invasion and
| Myspace Music. Before that, musicians were low-paid background
| music systems. After that, anybody could do it at garage-band
| level. In between was the brief era of the Rock Star. The
| nostalgia here is for that era.
|
| Not a new observation.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Yeah. There seems to also be the implicit assumption that
| (recorded) pop music, whilst only a relatively recent
| phenomenon, is here to stay. It isn't. It had a golden age
| after recording and reproduction technology became cheap enough
| to own and before streaming services came along, gave us too
| much choice and siloed our tastes. I don't think I'd change
| much -- I mainly listen to 'weird' stuff that probably wouldn't
| have existed, let alone be discoverable, without such services
| -- but the pop era does seem to be over. No one cares about
| 'the charts' anymore. In my parents' day it was a primary
| cultural reference point that seemingly everyone followed; now
| almost no one I know would be able to tell me what's in the top
| ten at the moment.
| singingfish wrote:
| I have no aspirations to ever get paid gigs as a musician. To the
| point where if anyone ever does try to pay me, I'm not sure how
| I'd deal with it.
|
| But I play lots of gigs on the streets and similar. My favourite
| is the rehearsal in a public space that accidentally turns into a
| gig. Life-changingly wonderful stuff.
|
| Tough life being an actual pro musician, although there's an OK
| living to be made in teaching for the right people.
| jaco6 wrote:
| This is a technology problem. Media technology (radio,
| recordings, television, and movies) has essentially killed live
| performance of all kind compared to what it was once like. Bars
| and hotels that used to rely on gig musicians can now play a
| Spotify playlist over the speakers. Repertory theatres once
| existed in every small and medium sized city in the country, each
| supporting several actors earning salaries sufficient to raise a
| family--all wiped out by television.
|
| It would have once been unthinkable for even a small city of
| <=100,000 people to lack multiple live entertainment options 7
| days a week. No more--we're all at home, watching our particular
| chosen thing, listening to our particular chosen album, playing
| our own chosen game.
|
| Some will claim this has been an advancement. "How lame," they
| say, "it must have been to have to go to the Local Entertainment
| Venue and just listen to whatever act was on that night. Nowadays
| I can listen to Acid Techno Super Hop, my particular chosen
| favorite, as much as I want." But the losses in communal behavior
| have been significant. Most critical is the disappearance of
| dance. Dance is a fundamental human behavior, stretching back to
| Paleolithic times. It is nowhere to be seen in many cities today,
| because no one has any occasion to do it except weddings, at
| which it is very common now to stand around awkwardly after the
| bride and groom have fumbled through some rehearsed step.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Having lived in NYC, Broadway, off broadway, off off broadway
| etc. look like they are thriving. I don't think recorded media
| comes even close to the novelty and spectacle a theatre
| production is. Have small towns really lost all their theatres?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I think it's more accurate to say it became a "premium". I
| could probably find some live music at a rinky dink mom-and-
| pop cafe in a far out suburb even as late as the 90's if I
| tried.
|
| By now, that prestige of a live music seems to only really
| come from a bigger joint, or as more of a passion project
| than as an expected way to get customers in.
|
| >Have small towns really lost all their theatres?
|
| It's mostly a thing regulated to colleges. So it will depend
| on that. I haven't seen a smaller town without a college that
| still has traditional theatre around, personally. Though I
| have seen forums where that scene would obviously have hosted
| such events, abandoned.
| jemmyw wrote:
| The town I live in has 6000 people and there's a play or live
| music event in the town hall every couple of weeks, maybe
| more often in summer. I don't go to many, one or two a year,
| but presumably enough people turn out.
| jaco6 wrote:
| New York City is the greatest concentration of wealth on the
| planet. The continuation of theatre there should come as no
| surprise.
|
| I am speaking of the cultural shift in entertainment, from a
| variety of local live options on most days of the week to
| just television in most places across the country.
|
| I should also emphasize that the persistence of community
| theatres that mostly recycle the classics (endless
| Shakespeare, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and The Crucible) is not a
| substitute for actual thriving local entertainment, but a
| shadow and a memory of what once was.
| epolanski wrote:
| One of the most culturally developed and wealthiest places on
| earth has lots of live spectacles..
|
| Color me shocked.
|
| On the other hand, I my 150k people city in southern Poland
| there was no shortage of entertainment, theaters, dance halls
| and parties 50 years ago under the communist regime.
|
| My grandparents partied all of the time, their pictures are
| an endless collection of parties, literally people bringing a
| sausage, a potato salad, few vodkas to some elementary school
| or industry plant warehouse and having fun from 6 pm to late
| at night. They went to see live boxing, soccer games,
| theater, concerts, movies.
|
| I'm 37 none of my friends lives like that, none. There are
| many more restaurants, probably 20 times as many.
|
| I'm strongly convinced that people used to have more fun
| once.
|
| My grandma thinks 100% the same. She constantly wonders why
| are people much better now under any measurable metric like
| education or wealth, yet they seem to really do nothing in
| their life.
| ta_1138 wrote:
| It's not that they lost all of them, but that they make far
| less money, while the top performers in NYC do well.
|
| It's not unlike what happened to soccer as television got
| cheaper and cheaper: You can go watch your town's third
| division team, or you can watch Real Madrid play on TV. In
| 3rd division nobody can be professional, in 2nd division you
| make less money accounting for inflation than 30 years ago,
| but the top players in the top teams are even bigger stars,
| now that the entire world can watch them play every game.
|
| And on theater, let's not forget that many parts of the
| spectacle are almost impossible to take on the road. You
| aren't going to feed a production of Phantom of the Opera in
| a small town for 3 months: National tours rely on 2 weeks per
| large-ish metro. And when you are only going to stay there
| for 2 weeks, there are things you just can't get away with,
| economically speaking. The equity Hadestown tour would need
| to remodel way too much to accoout for the lift on broadway.
| The non-equity tour, which plays even shorter windows, can't
| even rely on the turntable on the floor. The car in Back to
| the future isn't going to fly over the audience, do half as
| much movement, or get fire effects on the scenario.
|
| And even if you look in Broadway itself, many don't recoup
| their own costs. For every Hamilton or Lion king there are
| many shows that don't last 6 months.
| Affric wrote:
| 100%
|
| There are some great recordings of music out there but
| fundamentally their sum is worthless up against a society where
| there is music and dance being performed all the time.
|
| Maybe modern medicine and food abundance is worth it but the
| imitation of art is a poor substitute.
| tarr11 wrote:
| > Most critical is the disappearance of dance.
|
| Have you looked at TikTok? It is full of young people
| performing incredibly complex dance moves.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Some teen dancing on a streaming service is very different
| from a venue charging admission and beverages for a couple
| hundred people spending an evening out.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I have a group of friends I know since middle school. They
| created a band when we were ~15 and did not stop. When we were 30
| or so they were having regular gigs in bars and auditoria.
|
| When I was discussing with the owners of the bars, I always asked
| "why us?". They would often say that we were the only ones that
| did not look desperate to get a gig.
|
| And that was true: we all had high paying jobs, they even self
| produced a few CDs for fun (and Christmas presents). The band was
| always for fun because nobody relied on it for their life.
|
| When I read many comments here I realize how lucky we were.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >"What's the best way to make a million dollars as a concert
| pianist? have 2 million dollars"
|
| I cannot for the life of me find where the heck that was said,
| but the sentiment makes sense when you see how competitive that
| side of the industry is. And that those kinds of positions are
| one of prestige, from people who can afford to practice all
| their lives and be in a certain scene to be considered. But you
| aren't making money from it.
|
| I can imagine a similar sentiment even with small time bands
| like this.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I live in a small town in a rural area near the centre of the UK.
|
| I was recently told by a guitar shop owner that he sold more PAs
| than anything. Why, I asked, is hard to get gigs now?
|
| "I'm playing 3 nights a week", he said, "1 with my Beatles cover
| band, 2 general covers". His band was a twosome with backing
| tracks. PS350 a night, split 2 ways. I was suprised you could do
| that well in such a remote area, but it would be a good start
| towards a living.
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