Pay for this line of work has not only not kept up with inflation over the past 20+ years, but also and even more so, has actually paid less over time, not more. While it was difficult to make a living in this field 20 years ago, it is even harder to do so right now.
It is a profession where people ask you to work for free all the time, telling you they are glad to give you exposure...And it is a profession where there is no reimbursement for travel time or costs, no sick time or vacation time, no reimbursement for hours of preparation, rehearsing and marketing, and little understanding by the public what a reasonable contribution for services might be. Worse of all, the growing online access to products has made production costs impossible to recoup, never mind making a profit.
If you are a professional musician, all of the above is what you face. And to the average listener, it is all invisible. They simply want to enjoy your music, with little or not awareness or even care about how the music industry today impacts you.
Did you know that buying one album from a musician provides more income than 200 hours of streaming?
Did you know that a $20 album purchase earns the same a royalties from 5000 track streams?
These are the hard realities of the music industry today. The economics of being a musician in our streaming age just don't add up. No matter how talented you are, if you are a musician, there is a very high chance that the costs of being a professional musician are higher than the income you can possible generate.
When albums were the primary medium for enjoying music, an artist might invest $5000 to $20,000 in putting together a quality album product, which they could sell to happy fans at shows for $20 each. With that economic model, it took 250 to 1000 albums sold to cover product costs. If an album made a run of 1000 albums, for an album that cost $5000 to $10,000 to make, there was a chance of earning back the money so it could be funneled forward into another recording project. And for an album in this cost range, there was a chance to make a profit once the first 250 to 500 albums were sold.
Today, almost no one buys physical albums, In fact, many people, especially in the younger generations, lack a CD player or mechanism to play a physical album. Ironically, the people most likely to want physical albums are other musicians, who understand the treasure they are holding in their hands.
To take this further the $5000 to $20,000 a musician invests in producing a quality album only includes a long list of recording costs (studio time, sound engineer's time, recoding, editing, mixing, mastering, hiring other musicians to play on the album, writing and making charts for songs on the album, licensing fees for covers, registration of songs/album with Library of Congress, design of album artwork, physical reproduction of CD's and distribution channel costs). A huge, unaccounted for cost is the musician's time.
If I spend 8 hours per week working on the creative part of making an album (writing, arranging, recording, studio time editing with the sound engineer, working on album art concepts) and it takes me one year to complete an album, that means I will have invested 400+ unpaid hours on top of the expenses associated with recording and producing an album--physical or even virtual. That is a lot of unpaid time.
Then there is all the time it takes to market and promote an album. Reaching out to media, venues, reviewers and building relationships over time so that your music is visible takes countless more unpaid hours.
To be a musician today, requires having two full-time jobs: one to earn enough money to take care of yourself and survive so you can be a musician, and one that pays so little it is painful, even though it is who you are: being a musician.
It has never been easy to be a musician. It is just much harder now that it ever has been during the course of my adult life. And the growth of the streaming industry, which has made music and musicians nothing more than a commodity people feel entitled to have for free, has created an impossible economic model for musicians.
If a person works for Whole Foods, they are paid a minimum of $15 per hour, with benefits. If you add up all the hours a musician invests in all facets of their professional career, the return on their investment sadly is almost as minuscule as the payment they get from streaming their music.
Next time you go to a show, support your local musician. Put a $20 bill (not a $1 bill) in their tip jar. And buy their album. If you can play a physical CD, you will enjoy the album concert and all the care that went intro creating the album, something that eludes the streaming listener who picks one song from a playlist. And even if you can't play a physical CD, consider it a work of art you can treasure.
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