Throw the man a dime

Busking sucks. Standing on cold streets, feeling exposed, putting up with smart ass comments from passing strangers for hours, before finally sifting through the lolly wrappers for the chump change to buy your next burger. It’s not a great gig, but you would earn more from a day of that than you would from a year on Spotify.

I’ve said before we aren’t in this for the money, and it’s probably just as well, because earning a living from music these days is nigh on impossible unless you are ‘lucky’ enough to become a puppet of some multi-national entertainment corporation. The Covid pandemic has exposed this more than ever. With musicians unable to work live they are relying on streaming and vinyl/CD sales to get their chips. With CD sales evaporating and vinyl still a bit of a luxury item, that leaves streaming as the main source of ‘income’.

Hands up all those who think musicians must be creaming it in this brave new world of instant access music. Not so fast. Here’s some basic facts to help you make your mind up. Spotify’s average payment per play on its service is $.0038 USD. That’s 0.38 cents. That means an individual artist on that pay would need to have around 3,000 plays to earn one hour’s worth of the minimum wage in Britain. So for a 40 hour week that would be 120,000 plays or 6,240,000 plays to earn the minimum wage for a year. For one person. Building that kind of following without live promotion is impossible.

At the same time, Spotify has tripled in value during the Covid pandemic, and its founder is now a certified billionaire. The gap between business owner and ‘employee’ has never been so stark since the days of cotton production in the slavery days. Streaming services basically say take it or leave it, since they hold all the aces. And it’s true. What else exists at the moment?

If it continues this way real music (as opposed to corporate product) is going to be another 21^st century extinction.

The kind of absurd inequities highlighted in music are playing out all over the world in almost every industry. The flip side of globalisation is that it benefits the few on an international scale, while leaving the vulnerable exposed to the shifting sands of local exploitation. What do you mean you want a living wage? Get it from someone else – I need to build a tennis court on one of my super yachts thanks and my private jet needs upgrading. I can go to another country and find cheap labour if you want to make a fuss.

Revolution is never pretty, but the appetite for it will continue to grow as the 21^st century progresses. Then we’ll see how much sway the mega corporations have over individual governments. Will governments repress their own people to stay onside with the billionaires club? Of course they will. You can bet your last wooden nickel on it. But the same tools that make the mega corporations powerful can be used against them to deflate their power. People have to organise themselves to create their own global communities outside of governments to compete as a way of avoiding messy and violent show downs with the powers that be. Access to technology hasn’t been limited. Yet. And there are some vastly clever people out there that can do it.

So where does all this leave your average musician right now? There is a ground swell of protest from established artists who are sick of being exploited, and there is an appeal to the parliament in Britain to try and get some kind of regulation in place. That’s fine if it puts pressure on the corporations, but it isn’t going to hit them where they live. They are exploiting musicians, so if there are no musicians left, what are they going to do? As I say, musicians need to start working together to claim some kind of territory for themselves. Any kind of alternative streaming service with a fairer payment system will do the trick, preferably owned by the people who are benefiting from it. Sounds like communism? If you say so, but what the fuck is wrong with people supporting each other to destroy a corrupt and exploitative regime? It’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees, and you should never die wondering.

The only problem is that artists of any kind are historically a selfish and bitchy crowd with no desire to help anyone except themselves. So on top of a commercial shift we are also requiring a complete cultural shift. And given how the covid pandemic has exposed the weaknesses in human nature, you would need to be a massive optimist to see the light emerging at the end of the tunnel. The times we are living through are tough, but tough times lead to the strongest solutions and those who can adapt best will eventually win out. It will be interesting to see what that looks like, and that alone should be enough to keep you looking ahead.

If you feel like chucking us a fraction of a cent or two, you can find our releases listed top right. I’m saving up for some new bass strings in 2023.