13 ms·

The decline of the working musician

168 points by tintinnabula 2y ago

volandovengo 2y ago
Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/HQAtf https://archive.is/HQAtf
gonzo41 2y ago
The article doesn't mention Patreon once. What a gig is, has changed.
- HappyRobot 2y ago
  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.
  - tartoran 2y ago
    I equally want to support but I have a problem with recurring payments. Aside from strictly necessary bills I want to have no recurring payments at all.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. Hua Hsu isn't going to talk about a media company where many thrive. A category completely opposed to what the New Yorker and its habitat are. "New York doesn't matter." That's the fucking story. The decline of the working musician: look in the mirror guys.
actusual 2y ago
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/6JU0jmz537a6r2xrTvCcmn?si=eg4c1RPSRL6mFOrMr3c5ew https://open.spotify.com/album/6JU0jmz537a6r2xrTvCcmn?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 2y ago
  >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.
BillSaysThis 2y ago
Lefsetz, Let the Clubs Close https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2024/11/04/let-the-clubs-close/ https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2024/11/04/let-the-clubs-close...
- rawTruthHurts 2y ago
  Going by that letter, the guy is a textbook example of the fruits of capitalism.
  - BJones12 2y ago
    Bob Lefsetz [0] is certainly a man who understands the industry, but seems to also care about the art. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lefsetz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lefsetz
debacle 2y ago
"You used to be able to make a living playing in a band." Yes, but not a good living.
- lebuffon 2y ago
  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.
  - onlypassingthru 2y ago
    Sometimes not even a rehearsal. Chuck Berry was famous for just showing up minutes before he was supposed to go on and using whatever musicians happened to be around. Apparently, lots of not-yet-famous musicians were in Chuck's backup band at one time or another, Springsteen among them. https://boundarystones.weta.org/2017/03/21/when-chuck-berry-had-boss-his-backup-band https://boundarystones.weta.org/2017/03/21/when-chuck-berry-...
    - WorkerBee28474 2y ago
      That is true, but he was not famous for sounding good live.
- kjs3 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >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.
jmyeet 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    People have a drive to work on beautiful and important things. This is easy to exploit, so it is widely exploited.
    - argentinian 2y ago
      What do you think about the model of supply and demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand in relation to low paid beautiful and important jobs?
      - schmidtleonard 2y ago
        More people than jobs, which is why they are so easy to exploit.
        2y ago
Animats 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - ysofunny 2y ago
    it seems to me the problem you're pointing to, and scoping to music it's actually much more persvasibe and happening to pretty much all culture I refer to the siloing of our tastes; or rather to how we can now develop rarer tastes by means of massively increased connectivity so it's not just pop music, but all of what it means to be "mainstream culture" that's weirdly getting siloed and more rarified
    - xanderlewis 2y ago
      True. It’s not just in music. There is almost no such thing as mainstream culture anymore — it’s exciting for individuals, but also quite worrying, especially when it comes to politics and description of factual events. No wonder democracy seems to be steadily going down the pan.
  - 2y ago
singingfish 2y ago
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.
- nickd2001 2y ago
  What location lets you play "lots of gigs on the streets" ? This would be wonderful, I think a lot of people would have much happier lives, if this were to happen all over the world, but lots of local gov'ts prevent it due to noise complaints, risk assessments etc..
  - mauvehaus 2y ago
    Not the person you're asking, but I found out about The Loose Handle Band[0] when they were rehearsing with a temporary bassist out by the boathouse on Jamaica Pond in Boston. I was entranced, and caught them that night at the show they played and two or three more shows before they quit playing. There was also a guy who played blues guitar in Downtown Crossing, presumably as a busker with a permit. I waited a couple extra trains more than one evening to enjoy the music. [0] Bandcamp: https://theloosehandleband.bandcamp.com/album/the-loose-handle-band-ep https://theloosehandleband.bandcamp.com/album/the-loose-hand... Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheLooseHandleBand https://www.youtube.com/@TheLooseHandleBand
  - singingfish 2y ago
    I' a fully paid up member of the cult of Honk! festivals :D There's a few local bands. Most notably to my mind, we have a periodic jam band that appears with varying configurations at one of the beachside changing rooms around here. There was this time when it was busy at summer tie, we had a decent sized group, and a couple of very well credentialed jazz musicians there. One of the nearby South Pacific Islanders came up to us and asked if he could sing with us. Between him and the band, we did this joyfully insane version of Kenny Rogers The Gambler. People were videoing it, but I've never seen any of the footage.
jaco6 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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?
  - jemmyw 2y ago
    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.
    - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
      In the small towns around me the town halls are not for profit and nobody is doing the events to make money/earn an income but as labours of love.
BrandoElFollito 2y ago
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 2y ago
  >"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 2y ago
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. £350 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.
tomphoolery 2y ago
Most people who make a living as a musician these days do so by being a "renaissance man" of sorts, where they make their money doing a multitude of different things. This includes playing live, but some other examples live sound, stage tech, lighting, promoting/booking events, instrument trade shows, and composing music. You can think of this as being "T-Shaped" in the software industry, except the difference is in the music industry, you need to be "T-Shaped" just to survive, not simply to excel. The "long part of the T" is what you generally want to do most of the time, and it's usually how people identify their job when asked. But really, most of us do a combination of many different things to get by, almost none of these jobs pay enough or are regular enough to do it on their own. This was, and still is, a HUGE shift in the way I live my life after moving careers from software development into music composition... Even as a film scorer, who has jobs that last for a long time and include many personal conversations with the film makers, you're not guaranteed to get back-to-back gigs, so when you're done with one score, what's next? It's not like there's always someone handing you jobs if you're doing this by yourself. But that's my preferred angle, because the jobs do last longer and there's a more regular (and higher) payout. It just takes a lot of back and forth with the people making the film, in order to get the vibes just right.
- tessierashpool 2y ago
  everything in film is like that, though. it’s an industry built on gig work which nonetheless has strong unions. a seeming paradox but it works.
hammock 2y ago
Is there data to support "the decline" or just anecdotes? There are half a dozen venues within a mile of me that have 3 bands a night five days a week. I also work with musicians that have full schedules of church gigs, weddings, etc on top of symphony and opera appointments. This is in a city smaller than NYC. I cant imagine NYC is any worse?
- duderific 2y ago
  I believe your example is also anecdotal? I can say that in the SF Bay Area, since 2000, probably three out of four small venues that used to host live music either have shut down completely, or no longer have live music. Maybe in lower COL areas it's easier to keep these venues going.
  - hammock 2y ago
    It is, I was making the point that it's easy to prove an anecdote wrong and hoping there was more data
  - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    Yeah I agree, maybe that's because young people that aren't shutin programmers for dotbombs are priced out of SF. The rise of cost of living in urban environments has outpaced inflation quite substantially (certainly the real estate prices have) for quite a while. The colloquial gentrification cycle of gays -> artists -> college kids -> yuppies -> rich people requires a poor neighborhood as a starting point (usually a white one)... there's seemingly none of those starter neighborhoods anywhere in major cities, so the art and music has left the major cities.
pessimizer 2y ago
Can't it be enough? Do we have to endlessly repeat everything that worked once? Hasn't enough pop been made? I feel the same way about actors and movies: if actors or set designers never work again because of AI, shouldn't we just mourn them (or watch the millions of hours of film we already have) and move on? Recorded music killed people playing music to entertain the rest of the family. You used to teach your kids how to play instruments so they could entertain your guests or have a good time during a boring day. We can still do that, playing music alone is fun, and playing music together can be transcendent. Singing in harmony or in unison is intimate. There's an athletic element. I'll always want to see somebody, in person, playing music live. It's like watching a juggler. What we've done is isolated music to these horrible alienating mass consumption venues, rather than it coming out of every bar, and every other restaurant, and from the street, and in people's homes. It's a debasing and commoditization of music, helped by the introduction of artistically unintelligible lyrics in the 60's, and draconian, authoritarian intellectual property laws that demand that you never play any song that you hear, you have to create new product. And as above, this goes for movie entertainment, too. People will always want to watch plays, they're assemblages of memorization, vocalization, and coordination of movement. They astound. You can do it yourself: you can memorize a poem and bring it to a party, or you can come up with a skit. This is how people entertained themselves before being colonized by the tyranny of mass-produced recordings. I don't know if it's clear from the above, but I hope AI completely devalues recorded music, and ends the celebrity worship industry that is built up around it. Generated music will be everywhere, and it will feel like slop. Watching someone in front of you, showing you what they can do, will never be devalued. Joining in because you know the song will bring back the feeling of the Irish and English broadsides that we derived this pop stuff from, through the blues, and that we enjoyed together for centuries. Going to a concert in an arena and sitting half a kilometer from a band to listen to them play is dystopian. People who lived through a time where the production of music was commonplace and pervasive, not just its consumption, if they were teleported to this era, with its paid streams through earbuds, would be depressed. edit: was a professional touring musician for a number of years a long time ago.
- lmm 2y ago
  > Going to a concert in an arena and sitting half a kilometer from a band to listen to them play is dystopian. I agree with some of what you said, but no. People love being part of a huge crowd all doing the same thing, like it or not; a mass gathering has a power all of its own, the bigger the better. Unfortunately - or maybe not - that means winner-takes-all dynamics are inevitable.
GoofballJones 2y ago
I don't know. I still have gigs every weekend. It's still a major part of my income. I fill-in a lot for other people too. Guitar, Bass, Percussion. Can I survive only on weekend gigs? No. But then again, I can't go without them either. Most of the time I look at it as a part-time job.
keeptrying 2y ago
Is always striking when I see a really good musician perform live. It hits you like a ton of bricks. This is a local Bay Area band and all 3 members are exquisitely skilled in more than one instrument. https://www.howelldevine.com/ https://www.howelldevine.com/
- Woodi 2y ago
  > Is always striking when I see a really good musician perform live. > It hits you like a ton of bricks. This. Such an effect... And looks like it's not only about music but more general thing - when something of quality materializes...
nickd2001 2y ago
As an amusing ironic counter-example, I know someone who had the talent to be a pro musician in the 80s, observed many starving would-be rockers and thought "nice idea but no thanks" so pursued medical career, and drove his son's band to gigs. His son's band recently got signed by a major label, given money to live on so they don't have to have other jobs, they've hit the big time. Neither of them ever saw this coming !
- makz 2y ago
  Band's name?
  - nickd2001 2y ago
    Sorry I can't tell you cos its a personal story, but, they're already well known, and you'll hear of them I promise :)
    - makz 2y ago
      At least which genre and country
Anthony-G 2y ago
In Ireland most musicians I know play as a hobby or side-gig and make their money from a non-related day job. The ones who earn enough money from music are those who perform in wedding bands and for those who find that to be too soul-destroying: teaching
kristianbrigman 2y ago
where are good places to find live venues/shows, especially when traveling? i recently discovered bandsintown which has been really useful, but doesn't cover everything.
etwigg 2y ago
"The Working Songwriter" is a fantastic podcast, each week they interview a singer-songwriter about their career. A lot of the talk is about compounding their audience, expanding their market outside their hometown, forming and dissolving bands, marketing strategies, etc. Stories of friends who were on the same path but didn't make it to "cruising speed", etc. If you pull a guest up on Spotify, most have their top songs with < 1M listens, but some will have a single big hit that you've heard before with say 20M listens, and a deep catalog of 10k listens behind that. https://theworkingsongwriter.com/ https://theworkingsongwriter.com/
jtotheh 2y ago
remember, before there was recorded music all music that could be heard was performed live. The technology has evolved over time. Once people were buying and using recorded music, there was a tendency for less creative participation. Some things have emerged in the face of this. For instance, karaoke, where people can participate live with the music. Also, things that DJs did. Scratching literally turns a record, the embodiment of mass media music, into a musical instrument being wielded by someone, often in a small group setting. When the raw material is traditional instruments, people can express themselves in certain ways. DJs remix, add breaks to, scratch over, rap over, and otherwise express themselves with the records and turntables as the raw material.
bradley13 2y ago
Honestly, I find this a good thing. Painting, music, theater - they are all great hobbies. I personally really enjoy amateur performances, and seeing people enjoying their craft. Turning a hobby into a profession? Very, very few people can do that. Of those that do, many find that it ruins their enjoyment of the activity. tl;dr: Fewer professionals is a good thing.
2cynykyl 2y ago
I sometimes wonder if the problem is at least partly because people don't think someone should get paid to have fun. Musicians, artists, writers, etc are basically asking to be paid to pursue their hobbies full time, and 9-5 office workers are like "good one, lol".
amanaplanacanal 2y ago
My experience in a small West Coast US city (or maybe a large town) is that COVID really hurt. Pre-covid there were several venues in my city that regularly had live music, at least on the weekends, and most of them stopped during COVID and never returned.

168 points by tintinnabula 2y ago

volandovengo 2y ago

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/HQAtf https://archive.is/HQAtf

gonzo41 2y ago

The article doesn't mention Patreon once. What a gig is, has changed.

HappyRobot 2y ago
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.
- tartoran 2y ago
  I equally want to support but I have a problem with recurring payments. Aside from strictly necessary bills I want to have no recurring payments at all.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. Hua Hsu isn't going to talk about a media company where many thrive. A category completely opposed to what the New Yorker and its habitat are. "New York doesn't matter." That's the fucking story. The decline of the working musician: look in the mirror guys.

actusual 2y ago

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/6JU0jmz537a6r2xrTvCcmn?si=eg4c1RPSRL6mFOrMr3c5ew https://open.spotify.com/album/6JU0jmz537a6r2xrTvCcmn?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 2y ago
>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.

BillSaysThis 2y ago

Lefsetz, Let the Clubs Close https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2024/11/04/let-the-clubs-close/ https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2024/11/04/let-the-clubs-close...

rawTruthHurts 2y ago
Going by that letter, the guy is a textbook example of the fruits of capitalism.
- BJones12 2y ago
  Bob Lefsetz [0] is certainly a man who understands the industry, but seems to also care about the art. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lefsetz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lefsetz

debacle 2y ago

"You used to be able to make a living playing in a band." Yes, but not a good living.

lebuffon 2y ago
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.
- onlypassingthru 2y ago
  Sometimes not even a rehearsal. Chuck Berry was famous for just showing up minutes before he was supposed to go on and using whatever musicians happened to be around. Apparently, lots of not-yet-famous musicians were in Chuck's backup band at one time or another, Springsteen among them. https://boundarystones.weta.org/2017/03/21/when-chuck-berry-had-boss-his-backup-band https://boundarystones.weta.org/2017/03/21/when-chuck-berry-...
  - WorkerBee28474 2y ago
    That is true, but he was not famous for sounding good live.
kjs3 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
johnnyanmac 2y ago
>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.

jmyeet 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  People have a drive to work on beautiful and important things. This is easy to exploit, so it is widely exploited.
  - argentinian 2y ago
    What do you think about the model of supply and demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand in relation to low paid beautiful and important jobs?
    - schmidtleonard 2y ago
      More people than jobs, which is why they are so easy to exploit.
      - 2y ago

Animats 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
- ysofunny 2y ago
  it seems to me the problem you're pointing to, and scoping to music it's actually much more persvasibe and happening to pretty much all culture I refer to the siloing of our tastes; or rather to how we can now develop rarer tastes by means of massively increased connectivity so it's not just pop music, but all of what it means to be "mainstream culture" that's weirdly getting siloed and more rarified
  - xanderlewis 2y ago
    True. It’s not just in music. There is almost no such thing as mainstream culture anymore — it’s exciting for individuals, but also quite worrying, especially when it comes to politics and description of factual events. No wonder democracy seems to be steadily going down the pan.
- 2y ago

singingfish 2y ago

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.

nickd2001 2y ago
What location lets you play "lots of gigs on the streets" ? This would be wonderful, I think a lot of people would have much happier lives, if this were to happen all over the world, but lots of local gov'ts prevent it due to noise complaints, risk assessments etc..
- mauvehaus 2y ago
  Not the person you're asking, but I found out about The Loose Handle Band[0] when they were rehearsing with a temporary bassist out by the boathouse on Jamaica Pond in Boston. I was entranced, and caught them that night at the show they played and two or three more shows before they quit playing. There was also a guy who played blues guitar in Downtown Crossing, presumably as a busker with a permit. I waited a couple extra trains more than one evening to enjoy the music. [0] Bandcamp: https://theloosehandleband.bandcamp.com/album/the-loose-handle-band-ep https://theloosehandleband.bandcamp.com/album/the-loose-hand... Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheLooseHandleBand https://www.youtube.com/@TheLooseHandleBand
- singingfish 2y ago
  I' a fully paid up member of the cult of Honk! festivals :D There's a few local bands. Most notably to my mind, we have a periodic jam band that appears with varying configurations at one of the beachside changing rooms around here. There was this time when it was busy at summer tie, we had a decent sized group, and a couple of very well credentialed jazz musicians there. One of the nearby South Pacific Islanders came up to us and asked if he could sing with us. Between him and the band, we did this joyfully insane version of Kenny Rogers The Gambler. People were videoing it, but I've never seen any of the footage.

jaco6 2y ago

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 2y ago
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?
- jemmyw 2y ago
  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.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    In the small towns around me the town halls are not for profit and nobody is doing the events to make money/earn an income but as labours of love.

BrandoElFollito 2y ago

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 2y ago
>"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 2y ago

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. £350 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.

tomphoolery 2y ago

Most people who make a living as a musician these days do so by being a "renaissance man" of sorts, where they make their money doing a multitude of different things. This includes playing live, but some other examples live sound, stage tech, lighting, promoting/booking events, instrument trade shows, and composing music. You can think of this as being "T-Shaped" in the software industry, except the difference is in the music industry, you need to be "T-Shaped" just to survive, not simply to excel. The "long part of the T" is what you generally want to do most of the time, and it's usually how people identify their job when asked. But really, most of us do a combination of many different things to get by, almost none of these jobs pay enough or are regular enough to do it on their own. This was, and still is, a HUGE shift in the way I live my life after moving careers from software development into music composition... Even as a film scorer, who has jobs that last for a long time and include many personal conversations with the film makers, you're not guaranteed to get back-to-back gigs, so when you're done with one score, what's next? It's not like there's always someone handing you jobs if you're doing this by yourself. But that's my preferred angle, because the jobs do last longer and there's a more regular (and higher) payout. It just takes a lot of back and forth with the people making the film, in order to get the vibes just right.

tessierashpool 2y ago
everything in film is like that, though. it’s an industry built on gig work which nonetheless has strong unions. a seeming paradox but it works.

hammock 2y ago

Is there data to support "the decline" or just anecdotes? There are half a dozen venues within a mile of me that have 3 bands a night five days a week. I also work with musicians that have full schedules of church gigs, weddings, etc on top of symphony and opera appointments. This is in a city smaller than NYC. I cant imagine NYC is any worse?

duderific 2y ago
I believe your example is also anecdotal? I can say that in the SF Bay Area, since 2000, probably three out of four small venues that used to host live music either have shut down completely, or no longer have live music. Maybe in lower COL areas it's easier to keep these venues going.
- hammock 2y ago
  It is, I was making the point that it's easy to prove an anecdote wrong and hoping there was more data
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  Yeah I agree, maybe that's because young people that aren't shutin programmers for dotbombs are priced out of SF. The rise of cost of living in urban environments has outpaced inflation quite substantially (certainly the real estate prices have) for quite a while. The colloquial gentrification cycle of gays -> artists -> college kids -> yuppies -> rich people requires a poor neighborhood as a starting point (usually a white one)... there's seemingly none of those starter neighborhoods anywhere in major cities, so the art and music has left the major cities.

pessimizer 2y ago

Can't it be enough? Do we have to endlessly repeat everything that worked once? Hasn't enough pop been made? I feel the same way about actors and movies: if actors or set designers never work again because of AI, shouldn't we just mourn them (or watch the millions of hours of film we already have) and move on? Recorded music killed people playing music to entertain the rest of the family. You used to teach your kids how to play instruments so they could entertain your guests or have a good time during a boring day. We can still do that, playing music alone is fun, and playing music together can be transcendent. Singing in harmony or in unison is intimate. There's an athletic element. I'll always want to see somebody, in person, playing music live. It's like watching a juggler. What we've done is isolated music to these horrible alienating mass consumption venues, rather than it coming out of every bar, and every other restaurant, and from the street, and in people's homes. It's a debasing and commoditization of music, helped by the introduction of artistically unintelligible lyrics in the 60's, and draconian, authoritarian intellectual property laws that demand that you never play any song that you hear, you have to create new product. And as above, this goes for movie entertainment, too. People will always want to watch plays, they're assemblages of memorization, vocalization, and coordination of movement. They astound. You can do it yourself: you can memorize a poem and bring it to a party, or you can come up with a skit. This is how people entertained themselves before being colonized by the tyranny of mass-produced recordings. I don't know if it's clear from the above, but I hope AI completely devalues recorded music, and ends the celebrity worship industry that is built up around it. Generated music will be everywhere, and it will feel like slop. Watching someone in front of you, showing you what they can do, will never be devalued. Joining in because you know the song will bring back the feeling of the Irish and English broadsides that we derived this pop stuff from, through the blues, and that we enjoyed together for centuries. Going to a concert in an arena and sitting half a kilometer from a band to listen to them play is dystopian. People who lived through a time where the production of music was commonplace and pervasive, not just its consumption, if they were teleported to this era, with its paid streams through earbuds, would be depressed. edit: was a professional touring musician for a number of years a long time ago.

lmm 2y ago
> Going to a concert in an arena and sitting half a kilometer from a band to listen to them play is dystopian. I agree with some of what you said, but no. People love being part of a huge crowd all doing the same thing, like it or not; a mass gathering has a power all of its own, the bigger the better. Unfortunately - or maybe not - that means winner-takes-all dynamics are inevitable.

GoofballJones 2y ago

I don't know. I still have gigs every weekend. It's still a major part of my income. I fill-in a lot for other people too. Guitar, Bass, Percussion. Can I survive only on weekend gigs? No. But then again, I can't go without them either. Most of the time I look at it as a part-time job.

keeptrying 2y ago

Is always striking when I see a really good musician perform live. It hits you like a ton of bricks. This is a local Bay Area band and all 3 members are exquisitely skilled in more than one instrument. https://www.howelldevine.com/ https://www.howelldevine.com/

Woodi 2y ago
> Is always striking when I see a really good musician perform live. > It hits you like a ton of bricks. This. Such an effect... And looks like it's not only about music but more general thing - when something of quality materializes...

nickd2001 2y ago

As an amusing ironic counter-example, I know someone who had the talent to be a pro musician in the 80s, observed many starving would-be rockers and thought "nice idea but no thanks" so pursued medical career, and drove his son's band to gigs. His son's band recently got signed by a major label, given money to live on so they don't have to have other jobs, they've hit the big time. Neither of them ever saw this coming !

makz 2y ago
Band's name?
- nickd2001 2y ago
  Sorry I can't tell you cos its a personal story, but, they're already well known, and you'll hear of them I promise :)
  - makz 2y ago
    At least which genre and country

Anthony-G 2y ago

In Ireland most musicians I know play as a hobby or side-gig and make their money from a non-related day job. The ones who earn enough money from music are those who perform in wedding bands and for those who find that to be too soul-destroying: teaching

kristianbrigman 2y ago

where are good places to find live venues/shows, especially when traveling? i recently discovered bandsintown which has been really useful, but doesn't cover everything.

etwigg 2y ago

"The Working Songwriter" is a fantastic podcast, each week they interview a singer-songwriter about their career. A lot of the talk is about compounding their audience, expanding their market outside their hometown, forming and dissolving bands, marketing strategies, etc. Stories of friends who were on the same path but didn't make it to "cruising speed", etc. If you pull a guest up on Spotify, most have their top songs with < 1M listens, but some will have a single big hit that you've heard before with say 20M listens, and a deep catalog of 10k listens behind that. https://theworkingsongwriter.com/ https://theworkingsongwriter.com/

jtotheh 2y ago

remember, before there was recorded music all music that could be heard was performed live. The technology has evolved over time. Once people were buying and using recorded music, there was a tendency for less creative participation. Some things have emerged in the face of this. For instance, karaoke, where people can participate live with the music. Also, things that DJs did. Scratching literally turns a record, the embodiment of mass media music, into a musical instrument being wielded by someone, often in a small group setting. When the raw material is traditional instruments, people can express themselves in certain ways. DJs remix, add breaks to, scratch over, rap over, and otherwise express themselves with the records and turntables as the raw material.

bradley13 2y ago

Honestly, I find this a good thing. Painting, music, theater - they are all great hobbies. I personally really enjoy amateur performances, and seeing people enjoying their craft. Turning a hobby into a profession? Very, very few people can do that. Of those that do, many find that it ruins their enjoyment of the activity. tl;dr: Fewer professionals is a good thing.

2cynykyl 2y ago

I sometimes wonder if the problem is at least partly because people don't think someone should get paid to have fun. Musicians, artists, writers, etc are basically asking to be paid to pursue their hobbies full time, and 9-5 office workers are like "good one, lol".

amanaplanacanal 2y ago

My experience in a small West Coast US city (or maybe a large town) is that COVID really hurt. Pre-covid there were several venues in my city that regularly had live music, at least on the weekends, and most of them stopped during COVID and never returned.