Also, FYI, there's a whole other music industry out there built around playing live shows, and almost none of these tired cliches and horror stories apply. There are different cliches and horror stories, but the bands are much more in control of their destinies and the career is (in a sense) more sustainable.
Is there any reasoning behind this observation?
* Attention is scarce. There's lots of competition for it.
* Revenue sources are scarcer. People expect to pay less (or not pay) for recordings than they used to. Part of this is because the industry dropped the ball and let non-blessed outlets set expectations. But that by itself would be manageable -- under a pay-for-recording system with loose digital restrictions, people might be able to get a hold of free music, but they know the difference between being patrons and mooches, and some critical mass that likes what they hear will choose the former. Streaming services make this fuzzier, and buffet streaming services like Spotify could actually outright kill this: they aim not to replace radio but recording collections in general (and replace recording revenue with fractional stream plays that are orders of magnitude smaller). But they make users think they're participating patrons.
* Performance is a risk-heavy, often capital intensive, and non-scaleable way of getting revenue.
* Telling musicians to support themselves with T-shirts and tchochkes is another way of saying they should have a job besides making music (which is fine if you actually believe that, I suppose, but it's another way of saying you don't care if they spend more of their time refining their compositions/performances).
Erm...
Oh, look! I'm needed in the basement!
Not to take away from the quality of his music, which is really good (I have a few on my playlists), but there were also plenty of other very good musicians that tried thing-a-week and didn't break through.
Define "sustainable"...No, you (probably) aren't going to become wealthy JUST creating/performing music. But saying that just because you're not wealthy means you do not have a sustainable way of life is incorrect at best. There are plenty of musicians who make a good living at music. They're not rolling in dough, but it's enough to live in a nice neighborhood and support a wife and children. To me, that's a textbook definition of "sustainable". Personally, if I can make enough money with my music to do that, I'll consider that a success.
Basically the context of the talk was much broader and unless you see it for yourself my interpretation will not do it justice.
There seems to be a disconnect there. Also, maybe his work is out of date, because there are a lot of independent musicians who have achieved massive success outside of the traditional recording studio model in the internet age, largely through selling their own work and through touring.
Please cite some sources. The parent says there aren't and you say there are. I'm leaning towards believing the parent as I haven't seen many and I've seen some large indie bands post figures and they are barely making the average wage.
>a lot of independent musicians who have achieved massive success outside of the traditional recording studio model in the internet age, largely through selling their own work and through touring.
No there aren't. There are very, very few professional musicians working that route, and hardly any of them have achieved 'massive success.' Most of the ones who did already had an old-style label-based career, or at least label+management backing.
Most of the really successful ones don't sell their own work and perform. They write and arrange songs for top performers, or they work as producers - which is what Albini does now, mostly - or they do work-for-hire movie and game soundtracks, or they write commercial music for ads, or they work as sound designers.
Being a famous name performer is a career that works for a tiny handful of (mostly) singers, who are primarily picked for sexiness and (sometimes) charisma, not for musical creativity.
What happened next was that the technology got so cheap that anybody could record. Then came AutoTune, and anyone could sing. Then laptop bands. At one point Myspace had something over 10 million bands registered. A few of them probably didn't suck.
"Being in a band" just isn't a big deal any more. This is a return to the historical norm. Historically, most musicians ranked below bartenders socially. The "rock star" era existed only because, for a few decades, the economics of marketing, stamping out and distributing phonograph records in volume favored bulk sales of a modest number of titles. A limited number of radio stations also created a mass market. That's over.
The people behind AutoTune (http://www.antarestech.com) have a whole range of products now, including automatic sing-along and vocal tract models. It's quite possible that musicianship will go the way of calligraphy.
Stanislaw Lem wrote about this in the '60's. He predicted that "cybernetics" and democracy would allow the number of creators to increase enormously, but posited that the number of actual "geniuses" was small, fixed, and already almost exhausted within the current artistic community. Therefore the signal (great art) would get lost in the noise (junk produced because it could be.)
There are issues with this view--it assumes that great art is an objectively real phenomenon rather than a contingent social creation, amongst other things--but a brief perusal of Amazon's e-book offerings makes it hard to argue that the rate of creation has vastly outpaced the quality of creation. I daresay the same has happened with regard to music.
The great unsolved problem of the new era is criticism. Critics (who may have simply been record company flacs) acted as gatekeepers who allowed only material of a certain quality through. It may not have been the "best" by some standards, but it usually met some basic threshold of technical quality, which is more than can be said for the current era.
I recall reading a claim that during the early rock era, labels where run by old guys that would basically do short runs of singles and see if they sold. If they did they would get hold of the band or solo artist that pitched the demo and make some more.
But then came a generational change, where new execs were hired that believed they knew what good music was. And so there was much more of a filter between hopeful bands and the masses.
Now the filer seems to have gone away, in a massive sense. Now anyone with a computer have theoretically global reach.
One thing that did happen during the Sixties was some music of an unusual or experimental nature did get recorded or did get released. Now look at who the executives were in those companies at those times. Not hip young guys. These were cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product that came and said, ‘I don’t know. Who knows what it is. Record it. Stick it out. If it sells, alright.’ We were better off with those guys than we are now with the supposedly hip young executives who are making the decisions of what people should see and hear in the marketplace. The young guys are more conservative and more dangerous to the art form than the old guys with the cigars ever were. [...]
http://boingboing.net/2012/02/19/frank-zappa-explains-the-de...
major label : publishing company :: soundcloud : wordpress
With content distribution so leveled nowadays, a musician's "being in a band" feels equivalent to a writer's "having a blog".
https://medium.com/@jackconte/pomplamoose-2014-tour-profits-...
"We could have played a duo show instead of hiring six people to tour with us. That would have saved us over $50,000, but it was important at this stage in Pomplamoose’s career to put on a wild and crazy rock show. We wanted to be invited back to every venue, and we wanted our fans to bring their friends next time. The loss was an investment in future tours."
So it seems they suspected that investing less in production would have meant lower ticket sales for that tour and in the future, which is a rational suspicion regardless of how accurate it would have ended up being. Plus, if they had stripped it down, they still couldn't tour twelve months out of the year so it still wouldn't have amounted to a decent yearly income.
At any rate, the point is that Pomplamoose is very well-known and even if they overshot by a few tens of thousands of dollars, it still shows that touring isn't exactly big bucks for even well-known indie bands.
More commentary:
http://www.artistempathy.com/blog/the-pomplamoose-problem-ar...
Success in the live music business comes by staying it long enough, there's no "moonshot".
Note the part where they don't have any management, which supposedly saves them money. Then note the part where they hire bunch of extra crew to "go all out for this tour" and 3 extra band members and then end up putting something like $20k on a credit card to make ends meet on the tour because of all the extra payroll.
This is where the cliche of musicians being terrible at business comes from and where not having a manager - ostensibly to save the 15% of gross - is the ultimate false economy. Anybody here who's in business could tell you that they's lose money on that tour with all that extra payroll.
Now look where they are. They have $20k sitting at credit card APRs to pay off before they can even think of breaking even with anything in the future.
The bands I know that are more successful in smaller rooms are so because they run the numbers beforehand. It's that simple.
Q Do the bands you mention maintain control of their masters? I'm seeing the cliche-bands being burnt again with their record companies either not keeping the master recordings or compromising them. A real problem if they want to re-release in high quality digital format.
A smart banjo player I know summed up every record deal like this --
"It's a 90/10 split, all charges go to the 10".
Unless you play the style of music that labels know how to market to the point that you can actually turn a profit with that kind of deal, what's the point?
Courtney Barnett (Milk records) does exactly that ~ http://www.yenmag.net/music/courtney-barnett/ and http://www.milkrecords.com.au/
I asked this Q because this was one piece of advice David Briggs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Briggs_%28producer%29) gave NY and Crazy horse - "Never give up the master tapes."