They Want You To Be Poor
As I think about the outlook for musicians and our relentless quest for fame and celebrity, it strikes me that the music industry establishment has both an explicit vested interest and an unspoken tacit encouragement in having artists be poor and without resources.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing, I suppose, because poverty is perhaps slightly the wrong descriptor.
What the industry wants is what any industry wants: for the people searching for success in a specific field to be absolutely committed to it. And that commitment means that you have to be willing to get on the road and tour and play to empty coffee houses and relentlessly promote yourself and scrounge and look for any opportunity to flog your wares and your persona. And the practical implication of requiring that dedication is that the industry and the music press are encouraging a reckless and impractical notion of artistry that would impair any reasonable person’s ability to save for their future, to develop other types of skills they might sell into a growing market (as opposed to the music industry which is shrinking), and to put themselves in some kind of position where, if things don’t work out, they have something against which to fall back upon.
George Clooney has a great line where, when his father encouraged him to develop a fall-back skill, he said, “Pop, if I have something to fall back on, I’ll fall back.”
And, of course, this is written from someone that’s coming at it from the other perspective. That is, I have a fall-back career. And I like it. And I am not interested in throwing everything away for music. Or for art. Whether that makes me a less perfect artist, or whether that means the art I create is not “great” or whether I haven’t met another person’s definition, or whether it’s all a manifestation of my own insecurity, who can say.
And I understand that for a management company or a booking agency or for any kind of capital to be invested, you want to know that your investment is fully focused on achieving the goals that are set forth. So having a starving artist that absolutely must make it or they can’t pay their rent. That’s probably the right motivation and the right incentive for someone making an investment.
But, based on personal experience, I find that I don’t do so well with desperation. And that kind of tension and anxiety isn’t the most productive or motivating emotion against which I found energy relative to the dozens of other motivating energies and emotions that comprise my psyche.
At any rate, it’s something I think about on occasion. Touring is not profitable. I don’t care who says that it is. It’s not. For 90% of bands, it’s simply not profitable. Also, please, please, please. Please. Please. Please do not give me any bullshit or try to sell me a line that, (delivered in some kind of smug, sophisticated, I-read-this-in-an-article-recently tone of voice) “selling merch is where people make all their money on the road.” Because they don’t. Big and medium bands make money selling merch when people know who they are. Small bands end up selling nothing night after night.
But the best way to get people to know who you are is not to tour but to use the Internet and your website and social media to build a fanbase. But you have a much greater chance of getting good press and getting even bigger exposure if you tour. Not for the act of touring. And not for the people that you meet on the road. But because the music press and the establishment will see your road-dog nature as evidence that you’re committed to your craft and that you’re willing to make sacrifices and that will make them more amenable to giving you a break in some other way. Which again, basically, means that you have to show you’re willing to be poor and desperate in order to get a break.
And the problem is that the industry has become smaller, and there’s even less money floating around than there used to be, and, as a result, that desperation is even more desperate, more reckless and more full of fear and angst.
