I think your view on music is shockingly nihilistic. Thank you for letting me see this perspective (music’s “gritty” backstory).
That's why established bands often have incorporated. They can keep some of the overhead for themselves by doing the work or paying someone a salary, which establishes a healthier power dynamic than "we'll cut you a check with whatever is left over after expenses."
Bands are poor because It's All About the Music means they get fleeced left and right. They don't call it the Music Industry because it's all roses. They call it that because something is being chewed up at one end and spat out the other. The Grist Is Made of People.
As a musician who has toured and recorded, and someone who has worked for multiple concert promoters and streaming services, I think GP frames it extremely well. it's not a nihilistic view, simply a realistic one. If you love music, don't get involved with the music business! At some level it becomes unavoidable, but they are separable things.
Music has always been in partnership with other passions and vices, and since the time cynics and nihilists have been able to capitalize on that relationship, they have.
And as a nitpick, business of music existed long before ragtime and jazz. Both classical music and folk music (all around the world including in Africa) predates modern music. And they were often paid for performances.
Ragtime and jazz are fairly recent.
That's why Taylor Swift has such extensive and stadium sized concerts for example. Assuming she's a normal human being on the road for 9 months straight sounds pretty miserable. The financial return must outweigh it.
Edit: it's also shocking to see how large the song writing teams are for certain artists. I tried counting (across all verticals so songwriters, mixers, mastering engineering's, etc etc) how big the teams publicly acknowledged were for two vanilla pop artists: Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran. Now this is across multiple albums so perhaps overstated, but after a tedious tally I stopped after getting to 200 FTEs. For each. Music might be beautiful but it's borderline impossible to be "big" without a gigantic team behind you.
That's ludicrous. The most successful product people who make music have, by far is selling people the experience of listening to that music, either in person or via recordings.
The merch table is one person (maybe 2-3 for big bands) selling stuff with margins of hundreds of percent.
Did you know that outside of tiny bar level gigs nearly all deals for bands to play live involve a split of the actual ticket sales between artist and promoter? Did you know that above the bar level the venues actually handle, and take a substantial percentage of, the merch sales?
And so on. I don't know what it is about music but for some reason there's like a tradition in online forums of people going on and on about the nuances of the financial deals in the music industry by people who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.
You're referring to large amphitheater and arena shows, for big artists. This isn't (necessarily) true of most touring acts.
I suspect this is 2 factors: 1) music is something people care about, therefore they have opinions on it (whether or not these are justified). And 2) Gell-Mann Amnesia: You're familiar with music, so you quickly spot the bullshit that, in reality, suffuses almost all online discussions.
Where are you getting FTE? The specialties you reference (mixers, engineers) are not full-time employees of the artist. Not by a long shot. They are gig workers, basically.
For reference, she pulled in $100 million in 2018, the year of her last major concert tour. In 2020 she made just $23.8 million, only 10 of which was from streaming [1]. She is consistently one of the top streamed artists in the world, and was ranked as the highest paid musician in both 2018 and 2020.
So yes, touring is a huge revenue generator for music artists, even beyond just merch sales. It's even more important for artists that cannot rely on top tier streaming or physical sales numbers.
> it's also shocking to see how large the song writing teams are for certain artists.
When the songwriting and production credits for a track look like a laundry list of names pulled from a hat, that's good evidence of Song Factory writing with little to no involvement from the performing artist. This is very common in the popular music industry but there are exceptions, such as with Taylor Swift. For her and other artists that emphasize "singer-songwriter", you are likely to see only 1 co-writer, whom also serves as producer, for several tracks.
Besides the character of the music itself, this has consequences for compensation, as there are less people to split the earnings to. Then there is masters ownership. One of the reasons Taylor eeked out the top spot for highest paid musician in 2020, is because she now owns the masters to her recent albums (which are also her most streamed). This entitles her to a significantly bigger cut. Most music artists do not own their own masters (on top of often not writing their own songs).
> it's borderline impossible to be "big" without a gigantic team behind you.
This is certainly still true but maybe less so than in the past. At least, artists can "get big" (be discovered) without much of a team because of the likes of streaming and TikTok. Staying big, and musically relevant, probably still does require a big team. Making a living from your music, much less becoming actually rich (and staying that way unlike the likes of M.C. Hammer and TLC), is some kind of voodoo magic.
1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/taylor-swift-to...