Thread by @fieldmusicmusic

Seeing as it’s Spotify unwrapped week and it’s Bandcamp friday tomorrow and there’s a streaming inquiry going on, here’s a question I’ve been pondering: How successful should a musician have to be to make a living from making their own music? Strap in for THREAD TIME! (1)

This is partly informed by me suspecting that me and Peter are basically the least successful musicians managing to make a (meagre, let’s be honest) living from our own music, but our circumstances are very, very particular and couldn’t be a very effective model beyond that (2)

Namely, we live somewhere where space is cheap, we have always been interested enough in recording that we can make records ourselves very cheaply, we are prepared to suck up a lot of hard, boring work (driving, repairing, bookkeeping, tour managing) in order to... (3)

...continue, even though those things make us feel less creative and really fucking uncool. Also, our parents were really supportive of us making music, on the proviso that we didn’t just dick around. This is not an inconsequential aside. We might not come from... (4)

...a wealthy background but we still had support and it’s excruciating to think that some super-talented young person might never get an opportunity because there’s no route in without at least a bit of parental (or other) support. (5)

But back to “How successful should a musician have to be to make a living from making their own music?” There are loads of reasons why this is a difficult question to answer. For one, it is nigh-on impossible to compare a musical career now to one in a different era. (6)

There has always been an excess supply of people wanting to make music. Now, more than ever, there is an excess supply of people who CAN make music. To me, this isn’t a bad thing but it does vex the original question. (7)

Especially as the demand for music might have decreased or at least is extremely unequally spread. The demand for Miley Cyrus is extremely high. The demand for, ahem, Field Music is limited. (Beautifully so - thanks to you all!) (8)

I might argue that Napster and mp3s brought a close to a RELATIVE golden age for being a musician. There was a decent period where lots of people bought music and where music was the dominating cultural expression for young people. As the 60s moved into... (9)

70s, 80s, 90s contracts and royalties got better (relatively). BUT a band at our level probably had to play a couple of hundred shows a year (which was possible because live music was a much bigger part of the night-time economy) - sounds pretty knackering to me - and... (10)

...probably NEVER got to make a record, because making records was relatively expensive.

The (re)birth of independent labels (where being an indie meant you could do something uncommercial as opposed to try to make a quick buck with fewer expenses) might have been... (11)

...good for us but it wouldn’t have generated enough income for us to make a living for 15 years unless we became a widely beloved cult concern. Or were scooped up by a major willing to chuck money away (ah, the 90s *sigh*). (12)

There are lots of reasons why now is a GOOD time to make music. You can make music cheaply. You can get it to people cheaply. In the UK maybe there are more routes to radio. You can easily communicate with people who like your music (& sell them stuff - thanks for that btw) (13)

But despite all that (and that there’s no good answer to my original question) what’s clear is that the paradigm has changed and regulation hasn’t kept up. Technology may well have rendered the old systems obsolete. If they're not, then they are clearly creaking. (14)

If you’re not involved in the music industry you might not realise how dependent musicians are on archaic systems of payment. For every copy sold an artist gets a royalty (after costs have been accounted for). For every copy (mechanical reproduction) of a record made... (15)

...the songwriter gets a royalty. For every radio play (and live performance, theoretically) the songwriter gets a royalty. The question of whether a stream should count as a radio play or a copy made hasn’t been addressed from a regulatory point of view. (16)

It’s not obvious how to address it but until it is then the original question will stay a vexed one and you’ll continue to have apparently successful musicians who can’t pay the rent and voices from the general public saying that no-one owes musicians a living. (17)

In addition, these problems seem fairly common across creative industries where digital reproduction is possible. Not for the first time, copyright is struggling to keep up with technology. (18 and hopefully END)

Okay, there's more. I am extremely grateful to @MrTomGray for his work on the #brokenrecord campaign and to @johnharris1969 for writing about it. I used to naively think that the low royalty rates from streaming would eventually sort themselves out as the economy of scale...

...but it seems likely I was wrong about that and that advocacy is essential. And that's difficult because, of course, we all want the dudes at Spotify (great platform btw👍) to love us and put us on their front page.

And also, music making seems particularly ill-suited to effective unionising - so many self-employed people working on scratch because they love it. We've been the gig economy since before that phrase was invented.

One more aside before I really REALLY go to bed. I like that pop music is commercial. I don't want everything sub-chart level to become reliant on arts-sector funding. There's something beautiful and noble about how accessible and anti-elitist pop music is.