A Moment to Rethink How We Support Music

Microphone on empty stage with smoke
Fund-raisers, grants, and governmental relief are all helping to keep musical artists afloat. Yet the industry may already be showing signs of permanent damage.Photograph by Matt Cowan / Getty

Last week, amid the demoralizing numbers that have told the story of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, there was one figure worth celebrating. The music platform Bandcamp announced that it had sold $4.3 million worth of music and merchandise in a COVID-19 fund-raiser for its artists. As social-distancing rules have been put into place around the globe, a special kind of chaos has ensued for musicians, and for the performing arts in general. Almost overnight, the income from tours, festivals, and live performances has vaporized, which, in the age of streaming, means that a vital portion of the average musician’s yearly income has also disappeared. The social-media accounts of the large number of musicians who were set to release albums and tour this spring and winter have grown sober. That’s why the Bandcamp fund-raiser was a small but tangible moment of collective action in the face of dire circumstances. “For many artists, a single day of boosted sales can mean the difference between being able to pay rent or not,” Bandcamp’s C.E.O., Ethan Diamond, wrote before the campaign. “It may sound simple, but the best way to help artists is with your direct financial support.”

The platform’s fund-raiser was one of many efforts unfolding across the country. A patchwork of emergency-relief funds, artists’ grants, and GoFundMe pages has emerged on behalf of musicians. The all-hands approach feels like an uncoördinated improvisation, especially as tour and festival postponements and cancellations have begun to stretch further into the summer months. Ad-hoc efforts, such as directing merchandise sales toward sidelined road crews, are just one arm of an emergency response that stretches to Capitol Hill, where some of the music industry’s largest professional associations spent the week lobbying members of Congress to include self-employed musicians and gig workers in the Senate’s two-trillion-dollar stimulus bill.

Those efforts succeeded, meaning that untold musicians who are normally considered to be independent contractors will qualify for expanded unemployment benefits through the end of July, in addition to being eligible for Medicaid. There is a sense within the industry that the bill’s passage has forestalled a greater disaster. Rolling Stone claimed the relief bill would give musicians a “fighting chance.” A statement from the Recording Academy, which represents more than twenty thousand professional musicians, said the relief package would put music creators in a “better position for immediate and long-term relief.” There is no doubt that this federal aid will be readily welcomed by the working-class segment of the music industry—from touring bands and producers to backline technicians and soundmen, venue owners, booking agencies, and small studios. Had it not been for the concerted effort between musicians and industry associations, or the influx of almost twenty thousand letters urging Congress to support this creative class, the damage would have been severe—an immediate catastrophe for thousands of these gig workers.

Yet it’s far from certain that the industry isn’t already showing signs of permanent damage. With monthly rents no doubt looming, and no national effort to suspend rent under way, many musicians will be staring down the usual bills long before the stimulus money reaches their bank accounts. In New York, the State Assembly is currently considering a ninety-day rent-suspension measure, S08125, which would immediately alleviate a throbbing source of pressure for musicians in the city. There is little indication, at the moment, that Governor Andrew Cuomo would sign such a bill, should it pass. Even before the current crisis, ours was a nation where an estimated nearly forty per cent of Americans can’t manage a four-hundred-dollar emergency without having to borrow money or sell possessions. And where money can’t be borrowed or work can’t be found, most working musicians have capital socked away in their gear, the tools of their trade. Across the country, one commonly defined “essential” business is the pawn shop.

Like the smell of infection that indicates gangrene, the recent spate of furloughs and layoffs by booking agencies and ticket-process companies points to a long-term contraction in live music as a source of revenue. This past Wednesday, the ticketing company Stubhub furloughed more than sixty per cent of its staff. A week prior, one of the largest talent agencies in the country, Paradigm, let go more than a hundred staff to adjust to the decline in live-music revenue. Even when social-distancing efforts are suspended, the idea that musicians can instantly return to the road in an attempt to make up for lost time and revenue ignores that a cash crunch is most likely going to alter the landscape of the tour circuit for years to come. Booking a tour of any level is a complicated feat of scheduling and geography, and fiercely competitive in normal circumstances. In addition, many independent clubs won’t likely survive multiple months of total revenue loss, leaving many of the smaller operations, and promoters, without the cash to book artists once night life resumes. The owner of two well-liked venues in Seattle told Billboard that he expected to lose “six figures” of income every month the shutdown continues. And Live Nation, the events behemoth expected to absorb an even larger chunk of the concert industry, has already seen its market value plunge in half, by nine billion dollars.

These circumstances make it all the more understandable why, as the crisis unfolds for musicians, words like “assistance” and “relief” and “support” have infiltrated every mention of artists in this moment. Even where the industry has resorted to self-mythologizing, the tentative note of worry appears. In response to the stimulus package, the C.E.O. of the Recording Industry Association of America, said that “The power of music will help us get through this crisis.” But what’s on the other end of this crisis, and should musicians actually be eager to return to that place? The volume of fund-raisers, and the daily calls for financial support for musicians, can be stitched together to reveal a silent plea, one that suggests we should look at the current crisis as a mandate to move away from a broken economic model that condemns those who pursue a creative life to poverty. As musicians and artists rally, offering us bedroom performances and curated playlists, we have a chance to rethink our relationship with them. Or, at the very least, consider the status quo that awaits them once this crisis subsides.

The norm for many musicians is an environment pitted with corrosive conditions for mental health. A 2018 survey of musicians, led by Alan B. Krueger, an economics professor at Princeton University, found that half of its respondents reported feeling “down, depressed, or hopeless,” or more than double the rate of adults in the United States. This same survey, which was conducted in partnership with the music relief group MusiCares, found that the average musician earned just twenty-one thousand three hundred dollars from their art in 2017. The survey also complicates the commonly held assumption that live performances are a good source of financial stability for working musicians. For any artist that has yet to hit the mid-tier festival slot—say, a small-font Coachella billing—you’re likely the kind of average musician cited in the survey who made less than fifty-five hundred dollars from the toil of travelling across the country for weeks at time.

Success, and the financial security that follows it, is essentially in the hands of a small pool of musicians. “There’s very little middle- and lower-class in recording. That world has dried up,” Daniel Glass, the president of the independent label Glassnote Records, told Pitchfork last spring. But it’s been a historically profitable moment for the music industry as a whole. Digital streaming, led by services such as Spotify, Amazon, and YouTube, has rapidly increased the total revenues generated by music and consolidated the ways that we connect to music. In 2019, the industry surpassed eleven billion dollars in revenue, with nearly eighty per cent of that amount earned through streaming. This past week, Spotify announced a COVID-19-relief effort of its own, pledging up to ten million dollars in matching contributions, a figure close to just 0.05 per cent of its estimated market value of twenty-two billion dollars. The same Princeton survey reported that only twenty-eight per cent of musicians earned any income from streaming revenue, and, when they did earn money, that amount averaged out to a hundred dollars per year.

The collective readjustment of daily life has awakened some old sensations. The Bandcamp fund-raiser, and the calls for support by musicians, artists, writers, and printmakers, has brought back the gratification of picking up an album from a merch table or calling to order a book from a locally owned bookstore. The feeling has less to do with the fuzzy values of physical media versus digital goods but, instead, the relationship that these exchanges cultivate. The act of reaching out to someone, for something real in return, is gratifying. Like the supply chains we’ve long become estranged from in the world of Amazon, the relationship between music creator and listener, between art and value, has been disrupted, undeniably, by the mechanics of streaming music and by the greed of major labels.

In an essay for Artforum, last year, the writer and musician Jace Clayton, a.k.a DJ/rupture, wrote how Spotify, for one, has severed the connection between artist and listener, one of the longest-running relationships in our culture. “Production credits, liner notes, record labels, any artwork beyond the (now tiny) cover, this rich contextual information reflects how people come together around music, and is precisely the stuff that Spotify actively strips from the music via their interface,” he wrote. “When Spotify discards it, they are training us to regard music as little more than a few megabytes of digital audio stored on Google-run servers.” What remains in the streaming landscape isn’t a community but a single bad habit shared by an entire culture. We have unlearned that music requires a committed audience just as much as it requires musicians. Amid the stupefying confusion of the global crisis, one that is further isolating our physical communities, the need to put the pieces of music back together has never felt clearer.


A Guide to the Coronavirus