This is a technology problem. Media technology (radio, recordings, television, and movies) has essentially killed live performance of all kind compared to what it was once like. Bars and hotels that used to rely on gig musicians can now play a Spotify playlist over the speakers. Repertory theatres once existed in every small and medium sized city in the country, each supporting several actors earning salaries sufficient to raise a family—all wiped out by television.
It would have once been unthinkable for even a small city of <=100,000 people to lack multiple live entertainment options 7 days a week. No more—we’re all at home, watching our particular chosen thing, listening to our particular chosen album, playing our own chosen game.
Some will claim this has been an advancement. “How lame,” they say, “it must have been to have to go to the Local Entertainment Venue and just listen to whatever act was on that night. Nowadays I can listen to Acid Techno Super Hop, my particular chosen favorite, as much as I want.” But the losses in communal behavior have been significant. Most critical is the disappearance of dance. Dance is a fundamental human behavior, stretching back to Paleolithic times. It is nowhere to be seen in many cities today, because no one has any occasion to do it except weddings, at which it is very common now to stand around awkwardly after the bride and groom have fumbled through some rehearsed step.
Most people who make a living as a musician these days do so by being a "renaissance man" of sorts, where they make their money doing a multitude of different things. This includes playing live, but some other examples live sound, stage tech, lighting, promoting/booking events, instrument trade shows, and composing music. You can think of this as being "T-Shaped" in the software industry, except the difference is in the music industry, you need to be "T-Shaped" just to survive, not simply to excel. The "long part of the T" is what you generally want to do most of the time, and it's usually how people identify their job when asked. But really, most of us do a combination of many different things to get by, almost none of these jobs pay enough or are regular enough to do it on their own.
This was, and still is, a HUGE shift in the way I live my life after moving careers from software development into music composition...
Even as a film scorer, who has jobs that last for a long time and include many personal conversations with the film makers, you're not guaranteed to get back-to-back gigs, so when you're done with one score, what's next? It's not like there's always someone handing you jobs if you're doing this by yourself. But that's my preferred angle, because the jobs do last longer and there's a more regular (and higher) payout. It just takes a lot of back and forth with the people making the film, in order to get the vibes just right.
From what I have seen as an occasional musician and running sound is that these days most musicians are not willing to make the sacrifices and put in the time, they will not take that poorly paying weekly gig and spend a year or two refining their performance and learning to read the audience which is a major part of making it in music.
I know a good number a professional musicians who have made it to the point where they can live off of music without constantly working, every single one of them started out the same way, playing every single show they could regardless of pay or location. This started to change around 2010, the venue I used to do sound for primarily targeted musicians who were starting out either on the local scene or national scene (just starting to tour and trying to make a name out of their home town), by 2015 music was mostly done there because the 19 year olds who had only played a few shows were not happy with $25 and a meal to sit on stage with their guitar for an hour, they wanted $100 and expected to play to a full room.
The boom in home recording also probably played a role, the starting out musicians are often resistant to it because they see it as pedestrian and not for serious musicians, musicians record in studios, not at home. Record on anything anyway you can and bring a few dozen copies to sell at those poorly paying gigs.
>they will not take that poorly paying weekly gig and spend a year or two refining their performance and learning to read the audience which is a major part of making it in music.
they literally cannot afford to do such things unless they are already homeless. It could have been an okay side hustle as recent as a decade ago. But today you're not gonna do much more than grab grocery money without being in a very specific scene. That meal you mention can easily cost as much as what they were paid for the gig.
It's been declining for decades, no doubt. But when the economy starts getting hard, "passion projects" dry up. being paid $100 a week is much closer to a passion project than a side hustle at this point.
> they literally cannot afford to do such things unless they are already homeless.
Or already rich
True, but I argue that losing money on a hobby (or "bad business") means you can afford to do it. It's just not making you money, not keeping you off the streets.
Yeah definitely. I’m a musician but I don’t have an interest in being heard, but I’ve noticed that those who do want to be heard don’t want to put in the effort to be heard.
Interesting take. I wonder if all the new ways of being heard (social media, mainly) have made the "cost" of being heard via music relatively higher.
There was a brief period in history when Being In A Band was a big deal. That's bracketed by, perhaps, the British Invasion and Myspace Music. Before that, musicians were low-paid background music systems. After that, anybody could do it at garage-band level. In between was the brief era of the Rock Star. The nostalgia here is for that era.
Not a new observation.
Yeah. There seems to also be the implicit assumption that (recorded) pop music, whilst only a relatively recent phenomenon, is here to stay. It isn't. It had a golden age after recording and reproduction technology became cheap enough to own and before streaming services came along, gave us too much choice and siloed our tastes. I don't think I'd change much — I mainly listen to 'weird' stuff that probably wouldn't have existed, let alone be discoverable, without such services — but the pop era does seem to be over. No one cares about 'the charts' anymore. In my parents' day it was a primary cultural reference point that seemingly everyone followed; now almost no one I know would be able to tell me what's in the top ten at the moment.
I've played music my entire life (picked up a guitar at 6 years old and just never put it down). I actually just released a new record last Friday (https://open.spotify.com/album/6JU0jmz537a6r2xrTvCcmn?si=eg4...). I joined a band when I was 15 (~2004), and we had some long tail success. We were able to tour, play huge shows (the Gorge in Washington, sell out the Showbox in downtown Seattle, an arena here or there). After high school I went to school for audio production, and even then I knew it was going to be tough to make a living. I ended up pivoting, studying math, now I'm in machine learning.
Music is the thing I love more than anything. I love writing it, releasing records, playing shows, and connecting with people on an emotional level. Never once have I considered it possible to have a fruitful career as a musician, despite seeing more success as a musician than most can ever dream of. Additionally, the industry (like many others) has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. In many ways, it has put much more power back into the hands of artists: you don't need a huge studio/record label/promotion to release a record. You can just release records, and promote them yourself. The flip side of that is there are SO many more people releasing music these days, which makes it really difficult to cut through the noise if your music is halfway decent.
Finally, recommendation algorithms have truly transformed the landscape of content creation, likely irreversibly. I get messages _daily_ from people who have "hacked" the TikTok algorithm, and can get my bands plays. There is an entire cottage industry of algorithm "hackers", some of them actually have results too.
One odd anecdote: I love Alex G. I've been listening to him for over a decade, and have flown out to see him play in places like New york/Austin TX. A few years ago he played in Seattle, and the entire demographic of the audience seem to've changed overnight. Way younger, more "mainstream" looking kids, filled the Showbox in Seattle. The strangest part was that no one seemed to know the words to his songs anymore. I did some digging, and he'd gone viral on TikTok. A few of his songs went absolutely bananas on there, and it completely transformed his fanbase. They knew the words to those songs, but not his entire set. Is this bad? I have no idea, but the trimming down of content into bite sized morsels _feels_ bad to me, and I believe it will dramatically alter this next generation's baseline attention span. Again, not a moral judgement, just a factual claim.
I don't know if it's good financially, but do you have a bandcamp? I like getting cds / mp3s there usually and it doesn't need a sign in to listen to the song.
>The flip side of that is there are SO many more people releasing music these days, which makes it really difficult to cut through the noise if your music is halfway decent.
I think one thing important to consider here is that part of the experience of enjoying music is not necessarily how good the song is, but how much, and how many, other people are enjoying it. People often listen to (mediocre) music simply to have a shared emotional experience with others.
For some reason this just sounds depressing.
Imagine bonding over gruel, because everyone else is eating it and you can’t connect with them unless you are able to discuss the consistency and mouthfeel of the gruel.
Relatable. Some of my best friends were made in the heat of struggle, not in a fancy establishment. When you're happy and comfortable, people are a dime a dozen. When you're down on situation, any human contact is a luxury, and the experience embeds itself in your mind.
As Charles Cohen said, the path of a progressive musician is a lonely one. Some level of loneliness is just something you have to accept
"Clichés like this are beautiful, because they reflect us and we are beautiful. Take, for example, this chord progression. It only became taboo because it was too powerful -- that's why you won't forget it." --Porter Robinson
Pop music isn't gruel. A lot of it may be slop, but it's deeply appealing. Somebody somewhere solved for what "works", and a million copycats cloned it with minimal effort because it works.
So don't think gruel. It's more along the line of... McDonald's. Bad food, but it's appealing. And people do bond over it, or at least they used to before people stopped caring and fast food places became utter hellscapes. You still see kids bonding over McD's in Japan.
> They knew the words to those songs, but not his entire set.
This has always been true for recorded music. Originally people would buy mostly singles after hearing a song on the radio, then maybe listen to the B-side too.
Listening to complete albums was only popular for a short while before streaming brought single songs back to prominence as the main way people consume music.
Don't disagree. I'm merely commenting on the dramatic change in his audience, which IMO opinion was driven by TikTok virality. Going from a crowd of people who were singing along to people standing around waiting for the "TikTok hits" was really strange.
I had a similar experience when I went to see James Blake; the audience was bimodal in age and there was a younger crowd that only knew a few of his singles that had gotten real big (collabs w/ Travis Scott and Rosalia)
So maybe this is normal as we get older? I didn't know this had happened with Alex G but I'm happy to hear about his success -- to me that's the main thing that matters, however an artist finds their audience.
Not for alex g. He has had a cult following as the best songwriter in rock music for a decade plus. Up until he took off on tiktok everyone at his shows knew almost all his songs. I guess really the complaint here is just that he went from cult musician to a having more pop appeal.
Was there a time when it was common to have just one song on the media you bought?
The entire 45rpm era, from the 1950s to the early 1970s! It’s why they’re called “singles”! And also iTunes, so from about 2005 to 2010.
Hey thanks for posting your music, had a listen, enjoyed it.
Thanks for listening!! Every little bit counts :D
Man the tiktokification of alex g absolutely blows. Same with mitski, unbearable live shows now. It is a bit difficult for me to be mad about it though because at the end of the day the complaint just boils down to being mad that these artists have become more popular, pop sets have always been like this. More popular = more money for them which cheers me up a bit
Is there data to support "the decline" or just anecdotes?
There are half a dozen venues within a mile of me that have 3 bands a night five days a week. I also work with musicians that have full schedules of church gigs, weddings, etc on top of symphony and opera appointments. This is in a city smaller than NYC. I cant imagine NYC is any worse?
I live in a small town in a rural area near the centre of the UK.
I was recently told by a guitar shop owner that he sold more PAs than anything. Why, I asked, is hard to get gigs now?
"I'm playing 3 nights a week", he said, "1 with my Beatles cover band, 2 general covers". His band was a twosome with backing tracks. £350 a night, split 2 ways. I was suprised you could do that well in such a remote area, but it would be a good start towards a living.
I have a group of friends I know since middle school. They created a band when we were ~15 and did not stop. When we were 30 or so they were having regular gigs in bars and auditoria.
When I was discussing with the owners of the bars, I always asked "why us?". They would often say that we were the only ones that did not look desperate to get a gig.
And that was true: we all had high paying jobs, they even self produced a few CDs for fun (and Christmas presents). The band was always for fun because nobody relied on it for their life.
When I read many comments here I realize how lucky we were.
>"What's the best way to make a million dollars as a concert pianist? have 2 million dollars"
I cannot for the life of me find where the heck that was said, but the sentiment makes sense when you see how competitive that side of the industry is. And that those kinds of positions are one of prestige, from people who can afford to practice all their lives and be in a certain scene to be considered. But you aren't making money from it.
I can imagine a similar sentiment even with small time bands like this.
Can't it be enough? Do we have to endlessly repeat everything that worked once? Hasn't enough pop been made? I feel the same way about actors and movies: if actors or set designers never work again because of AI, shouldn't we just mourn them (or watch the millions of hours of film we already have) and move on?
Recorded music killed people playing music to entertain the rest of the family. You used to teach your kids how to play instruments so they could entertain your guests or have a good time during a boring day. We can still do that, playing music alone is fun, and playing music together can be transcendent. Singing in harmony or in unison is intimate.
There's an athletic element. I'll always want to see somebody, in person, playing music live. It's like watching a juggler. What we've done is isolated music to these horrible alienating mass consumption venues, rather than it coming out of every bar, and every other restaurant, and from the street, and in people's homes. It's a debasing and commoditization of music, helped by the introduction of artistically unintelligible lyrics in the 60's, and draconian, authoritarian intellectual property laws that demand that you never play any song that you hear, you have to create new product.
And as above, this goes for movie entertainment, too. People will always want to watch plays, they're assemblages of memorization, vocalization, and coordination of movement. They astound. You can do it yourself: you can memorize a poem and bring it to a party, or you can come up with a skit. This is how people entertained themselves before being colonized by the tyranny of mass-produced recordings.
I don't know if it's clear from the above, but I hope AI completely devalues recorded music, and ends the celebrity worship industry that is built up around it. Generated music will be everywhere, and it will feel like slop. Watching someone in front of you, showing you what they can do, will never be devalued. Joining in because you know the song will bring back the feeling of the Irish and English broadsides that we derived this pop stuff from, through the blues, and that we enjoyed together for centuries.
Going to a concert in an arena and sitting half a kilometer from a band to listen to them play is dystopian. People who lived through a time where the production of music was commonplace and pervasive, not just its consumption, if they were teleported to this era, with its paid streams through earbuds, would be depressed.
edit: was a professional touring musician for a number of years a long time ago.
Lefsetz, Let the Clubs Close https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2024/11/04/let-the-clubs-close...
I don't know. I still have gigs every weekend. It's still a major part of my income. I fill-in a lot for other people too. Guitar, Bass, Percussion.
Can I survive only on weekend gigs? No. But then again, I can't go without them either. Most of the time I look at it as a part-time job.
I have no aspirations to ever get paid gigs as a musician. To the point where if anyone ever does try to pay me, I'm not sure how I'd deal with it.
But I play lots of gigs on the streets and similar. My favourite is the rehearsal in a public space that accidentally turns into a gig. Life-changingly wonderful stuff.
Tough life being an actual pro musician, although there's an OK living to be made in teaching for the right people.
"You used to be able to make a living playing in a band."
Yes, but not a good living.
Depends how far back you want to go. I worked with guys a generation older than me. One clarinet/sax player worked in the "house band" at the Elmwood Hotel in Windsor Ont. Canada, in the 1950s. He had a wife and kids and a mortgage. He worked 6 nights a week and name acts like Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman came through the town on their tours across N. America.
That's when professional musicians were musically "literate", so many acts showed up with just their soloists and boxes with their "charts". One rehearsal and the show was ready to go.
Sometimes not even a rehearsal. Chuck Berry was famous for just showing up minutes before he was supposed to go on and using whatever musicians happened to be around. Apparently, lots of not-yet-famous musicians were in Chuck's backup band at one time or another, Springsteen among them.
https://boundarystones.weta.org/2017/03/21/when-chuck-berry-...
That is true, but he was not famous for sounding good live.
My best friend (son of a session musician) tells the joke "what's the difference between a session musician and a pepperoni pizza...the pizza can feed a family of 4".
the endless need for ever-increasing profits is what kills any creative profession.
You see this in Hollywood with the stremaers now underpaying the people that make TV shows and movies possible, offshoring to save a few dollars, reducing the number of writes on staff and so on.
I'm not surprised to see the same forces at play for session musicians and so forth.
This is a systemic problem. Companies will happily kill an industry to increase short-term profits.
What holds this system together is that too many people believe that they will ultimately benefit from the exploitation built into the system plus people who love the creative skills they've spent years honing willing to work for pennies to stay in that industry. You see the same dynamic in the video game industry.
Why do you think that are so many willing to work for pennies, instead of changing profession? Or so many willing to pick a profession that is known beforehand to usually have low wages?
People have a drive to work on beautiful and important things. This is easy to exploit, so it is widely exploited.
What do you think about the model of supply and demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand in relation to low paid beautiful and important jobs?
well at least you can make very comfortable money in games. Maybe less than half of what you get at google, but half of $300k is still far past what most people can ever hope to aspire from. Games are still tech after all.
On the indie side, I'd much rather take my hopes to transfer that talent to makig the next hollow knight than the equivalent in music to be the next Bieber. I'm not going to call it a meritocracy, but games (for now) still have a reasonable monetization model. I hope by the time I can make my own game that that's still somewhat the case.
The article doesn't mention Patreon once. What a gig is, has changed.
Are musicians/bands seeing success on Patreon? Are they releasing music monthly or just using it to communicate and receive recurring support?
I try to support bands I follow as much as possible (buying merch, streaming their music, and going to shows). However the jump to a recurring subscription is a hurdle. Bands seem to still be in the record -> tour -> hiatus cycle and I imagine that needs to change if they're releasing music over the year.
> Most critical is the disappearance of dance.
Have you looked at TikTok? It is full of young people performing incredibly complex dance moves.
Still incredibly isolated with the thin veil of being interactive because you get likes or whatever.
We've traded social connection for micro-dopamine hits.
And I don't think I'm being an old man shouting at clouds. I think it's genuinely worse.
Some teen dancing on a streaming service is very different from a venue charging admission and beverages for a couple hundred people spending an evening out.
The GP was clearly talking about dancing as a social activity. TikTok dancing isn't social, it's a performance for an invisible audience.
> isn't social, it's a performance for an invisible audience.
I know what you wrote is fairly obvious but the wording really resonated with how I feel about social media platforms but couldn't quite word it so well.
There are plenty of folk and partner dances in many big cities.
100%
There are some great recordings of music out there but fundamentally their sum is worthless up against a society where there is music and dance being performed all the time.
Maybe modern medicine and food abundance is worth it but the imitation of art is a poor substitute.
Having lived in NYC, Broadway, off broadway, off off broadway etc. look like they are thriving. I don’t think recorded media comes even close to the novelty and spectacle a theatre production is. Have small towns really lost all their theatres?
New York City is the greatest concentration of wealth on the planet. The continuation of theatre there should come as no surprise.
I am speaking of the cultural shift in entertainment, from a variety of local live options on most days of the week to just television in most places across the country.
I should also emphasize that the persistence of community theatres that mostly recycle the classics (endless Shakespeare, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and The Crucible) is not a substitute for actual thriving local entertainment, but a shadow and a memory of what once was.
The town I live in has 6000 people and there's a play or live music event in the town hall every couple of weeks, maybe more often in summer. I don't go to many, one or two a year, but presumably enough people turn out.
It's not that they lost all of them, but that they make far less money, while the top performers in NYC do well.
It's not unlike what happened to soccer as television got cheaper and cheaper: You can go watch your town's third division team, or you can watch Real Madrid play on TV. In 3rd division nobody can be professional, in 2nd division you make less money accounting for inflation than 30 years ago, but the top players in the top teams are even bigger stars, now that the entire world can watch them play every game.
And on theater, let's not forget that many parts of the spectacle are almost impossible to take on the road. You aren't going to feed a production of Phantom of the Opera in a small town for 3 months: National tours rely on 2 weeks per large-ish metro. And when you are only going to stay there for 2 weeks, there are things you just can't get away with, economically speaking. The equity Hadestown tour would need to remodel way too much to accoout for the lift on broadway. The non-equity tour, which plays even shorter windows, can't even rely on the turntable on the floor. The car in Back to the future isn't going to fly over the audience, do half as much movement, or get fire effects on the scenario.
And even if you look in Broadway itself, many don't recoup their own costs. For every Hamilton or Lion king there are many shows that don't last 6 months.
I think it's more accurate to say it became a "premium". I could probably find some live music at a rinky dink mom-and-pop cafe in a far out suburb even as late as the 90's if I tried.
By now, that prestige of a live music seems to only really come from a bigger joint, or as more of a passion project than as an expected way to get customers in.
>Have small towns really lost all their theatres?
It's mostly a thing regulated to colleges. So it will depend on that. I haven't seen a smaller town without a college that still has traditional theatre around, personally. Though I have seen forums where that scene would obviously have hosted such events, abandoned.
I do improvisational comedy, which is a form of theater. it's a niche thing where I will see basically the same faces around town, and that's in a major metropolitan area.
Fellow hobby improviser here (Sydney, Australia). My impression so far is similar: I'd say about a 5-10% rate of new faces attending shows and related gigs.
Comedy festival shows are a slightly different story, but I'm not sure how effectively they lead to new recurring audience members.
I also see venue sizes and hire as one of the largest risks/problems with greater popularity. Venue hire is expensive AF, but smaller gigs in places like pubs suffer all the same problems as described in the article.
A show has to be significant enough for someone to turn off Netflix, Spotify or a podcast AND leave the house AND commute to a venue, for MULTIPLE people*, all at the same time.
* I assume most people go to shows with other people, unless they're already embedded in the community.
One of the most culturally developed and wealthiest places on earth has lots of live spectacles..
Color me shocked.
On the other hand, I my 150k people city in southern Poland there was no shortage of entertainment, theaters, dance halls and parties 50 years ago under the communist regime.
My grandparents partied all of the time, their pictures are an endless collection of parties, literally people bringing a sausage, a potato salad, few vodkas to some elementary school or industry plant warehouse and having fun from 6 pm to late at night. They went to see live boxing, soccer games, theater, concerts, movies.
I'm 37 none of my friends lives like that, none. There are many more restaurants, probably 20 times as many.
I'm strongly convinced that people used to have more fun once.
My grandma thinks 100% the same. She constantly wonders why are people much better now under any measurable metric like education or wealth, yet they seem to really do nothing in their life.
I take it milk bars were not somewhere to linger with friends?