Triggered by the experiences of UK singer Kate Nash (among her inspirations: Buzzcocks, John Cooper Clarke, Hole, Pussy Riot and Bikini Kill; winner of a Brit Award for Best Female Artist) in the music industry, this article (I don’t agree with all sentences, but it raises interesting questions).
Some extracts: Nash ‘told Rolling Stone that she loses money with every show at present. Nash estimates each performance costs her about $10,000 in production, including backing musicians, a stage crew, and potentially a sound engineer … Coupled with the rise in dynamic ticket pricing (which fluctuates based on demand), stagnant performance wages, and the skyrocketing cost of travel, accommodations, food, and gas, Nash was in a sinkhole of debt just for doing her job.
Nash informed the music publication:
She placed the blame on those same millionaires for “trying to … ruin everything,” and, generally, “late-stage capitalism.”’ …
‘Business Insider headlined a recent exposure, “Want to make money as a pop star? Dream on—Why it’s nearly impossible to make money as a musician in 2024 (unless you’re Taylor Swift).” It observed that, “Music has always been a business, but streaming, TikTok, inflation, and the ballooning costs of touring have dramatically altered a musician’s traditional routes to making money. … In the age of [Michael Jackson’s] Thriller, the great blockbusting album of the early 1980s, 80 percent of revenue in the music business went to the top 20 percent of content. Now it goes to the top 1 percent.”’
‘Deresiewicz noted that, according to one economist, in 1982,
the top 1 percent of artists garnered 26 percent of total concert revenue; by 2017, the number was 60 percent [What is it now?]. At a mega-festival of two hundred acts … 80 percent of the money will go to the three or four headliners’.
When I interviewed Gene October of Chelsea in 1978 he said that too many people in the music business were just businessmen. It seems to have gotten worse.
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