By the second decade of the 21st century the music industry had become analogous to the Soviet Union in its final throes. The dogs in the street knew the system was unfit for purpose, but nobody wanted to contemplate the chaos that might follow the dismantling of long-held certainties. The artist serf class limped along, marketing their work through social media, earning a pittance from streaming revenues. At the urging of their managers, labels, and the service itself, musicians published their Spotify stats at the end of each year, like turkeys voting for Christmas. The best Spotify could come up with by way of consolation was a tip-jar click-option whereby subscribers could compensate artists with a few pennies for the poor box.
Musicians found themselves trapped in a vicious bind: you couldn’t afford to forego Spotify’s potential for exposure, but that exposure generated almost zero income. The only alternative was to pivot towards gigs and merch – vinyl, CDs, T-shirts – assuming you were the kind of artist who could or would play live shows or tour.
Then Covid-19 happened. On a Wednesday afternoon in March of 2020, myself and my collaborators in our band Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance sat in my back kitchen rehearsing for a guest slot with Jerry Fish in the Presentation Centre, Enniscorthy. The gig was pulled the following day. By that weekend Coachella had been cancelled and Live Nation was calling all touring acts home. Overnight everything went online. High-gloss productions like the Courage series and Other Voices provided distraction, but audiences soon wearied of dadblokes busking Wonderwall into their phones and calling it a digital event. By year’s end nobody wanted to partake in another Zoom meeting ever.
Last spring, as we neared the end of the third and most brutalising of all the lockdowns so far, the WP editors sent an email. Attached was a Wire magazine editorial which asked some hard questions about the tolls that sharkpool social media engagement, hyper-capitalistic marketing strategies and financial uncertainty can take on an artist’s mental health (never mind the logistical nightmare of touring the UK and Europe post-Brexit; for a sobering insight into that particular shitshow, the interested reader is directed to search out a forensic online diatribe written by ex-Marillion singer Fish).
There must be a better way, right? A more humanistic way to operate as an artist, a way that engages directly with audience, community, an eco-system of fellow musicians? A way in which the sharing of information and resources might ameliorate some of the bite-down of financial realities?
Ask around, the editors suggested. Get a sense of what’s going on. Combine it with your own experiences. See what comes up.
Brian Crosby has some ideas. He generally does. He’s had a long and very interesting career as a musician, film composer, producer and artist in his own right. Crosby began playing music with Damien Rice as a teenager, which led to Juniper, then twelve years with Bell X1, then The Cake Sale collective. In 2008 he moved to Berlin and converted an old factory in Kreuzberg to a studio complex that became a hub for the city’s film music scene. There he flourished in a collaborative environment with fellow residents Dustin O’Halloran, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Rutger Hoedemaekers and the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, working on numerous TV and film scores, including speculative early recordings for Blade Runner 2049.
In 2017 Crosby moved back to Ireland with his family and built Treehouse Studios. This year he released his solo piano record, Imbrium, an instrumental work of neo-hauntology somewhere between Brian Eno and Erik Satie. He’s also an outspoken advocate for creators’ rights in the digital world and an IMRO board member. I ask him if the Soviet Union analogy is too pessimistic a reading of the situation.
‘I think it’s a pessimistic conclusion,’ he counters. ‘I think it’s a realistic description as to where it’s at. You’re right, it is based on an old model that served its purpose in the ’90s, and going into this century, but not in the digital age. I don’t think there’s a lack of solutions; I do think there’s a big problem with who’s in control, be it the platforms, or more fundamentally the three major labels, who are doing very well in this streaming age because they’re in a position of power, or a de facto monopoly where they can dictate the licensing deals that are done. Another big issue is that the three major labels have publishing divisions, and it’s in their best interests to keep the balance tipped in their favour.’
In the teeth of this rigged-game scenario, the act of releasing an album like Imbrium seems almost foolhardy, a statement of artistic insolence.
‘For me, releasing a record fits into a bigger picture. I sadly never had any expectations of it being a commercially rewarding exercise. There was always the potential that it could get featured in a film or something like that, but without a fantastic piece of luck it’s never going to generate income on its own. But it is an important part of what I do. I make my living with commissions and I think it’s an important vehicle to find your voice and tell the creative world that if you like that, then you can hire me.’
Perhaps we need to reframe the creative act as a more holistic pursuit, good for mental health, but best treated as a loss leader. In other words, remove the burden of financial expectation from the process.
‘I’ll roll this back a little bit: I would take issue with the assumption that engagement in creative exercises is good for mental health! I have found the release of an album has been the single most demanding thing I’ve ever done in terms of mental health, the promotion of it. The actual making of it was very enjoyable and very rewarding. But how one is expected to essentially be a slave to social media 24/7 in order for it to stand any chance of surviving the 60,000-plus uploads on Spotify every day ... I went through a four- or five-week period when I was in that release/promo state and I found it hugely stressful, and it definitely wasn’t a sustainable state of mind.
‘Promotion requires this whole new field of audio-visual content creation that I didn’t really have any expertise or practice in, especially when we look at the stories format on Instagram or Facebook where something disappears after twenty-four hours – there’s this constant pressure to upload new and engaging content to alert people. I’m just not good at that. I tend to put a lot of effort into anything I do, and the idea of just throwing something out casually I find very difficult.
‘But with streaming replicating traditional record sales, yeah, that does pretty much mean it’s a loss leader. It’s never going to recoup what you’ve invested in making it, promoting it, everything else. I’m not really a live musician, so I don’t have that. I feel for bands at the moment who don’t have anything to make up that loss-leading exercise.’
Insult to irony: many musicians now find themselves forced to work for the same kinds of Big Tech entities that have exploited and strip-mined almost every form of art and entertainment they were raised on. Governmental bodies provide little or no protection; there’s no legislative precedent for this kind of organised plunder. But musicians persist, because the alternative is not to, and that’s no alternative at all.
Pillow Queens are your classic rough-edged indie rock guitar band, massively popular here at home, increasingly so abroad, with a slew of singles and EPs behind them. In 2020 they released a debut album, In Waiting, which all but swept the end-of-year polls. An all-female four piece, they have a strong following among the young LGBTQ+ community. In previous years they might have confidently quit their day-jobs and survived on album advances, royalties and tour support, but the current climate is way more prohibitive.
‘I was working for a big global tech company for a couple of years while doing the band stuff,’ says guitarist/vocalist Sarah Corcoran, ‘and any lyrics I contributed to the last album I wrote on the top of that building looking out over Dublin. I know everyone struggles with imposter syndrome, but I didn’t feel like an imposter, I felt like a plant or something. I was in there ‘cos I needed to make a living, but it was really interesting to be making a commentary on something I was actually benefiting from.
‘The four of us work full time, and some of the girls have not made a plan as to what that will look like when we do go on tour, whether we’re going to have to quit or look for time off. The great thing about touring is it pays for itself, but at the same time you’re paying rent for whatever place you have at home, so it doesn’t make a ton of sense to be in a band, you have to really love what you do or else you wouldn’t do it. The strain that touring has on a musician’s mental health is humongous, and you can’t expect anybody to sustain a lifestyle like that. I know in the old days it was very sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll: now it’s bed at eight o’clock because you’ve got to get to the next city. In order to make money you’re touring two hundred days of the year, which is madness. There’s no way a band could sustain that past a couple of albums.’
Maybe the sanest approach is to forget the old global domination paradigm and adopt a sort of farmers market model: direct engagement, mailing lists, physical merchandise. Here in Wexford we’re lucky enough to have a vibrant artistic community comprised of musicians, visual artists, writers, actors, photographers, filmmakers and theatre producers, all of whom end up being each other’s audience. This kind of collaborative model thrives on the barter system: I’ll write your press release if you lend me your vintage mic for a week.
Sarah: ‘I think there’s been a huge surge in exactly what you’re describing throughout Covid. It’s everybody being a little bit vulnerable, I think. Because we’ve been brought up in this dog eat dog atmosphere nobody wants to be seen to be struggling, everybody wants to fake it ‘til they make it, especially in an industry like music – it’s all about perception, you need to look like you’re doing well. But when Covid hit we were all in the same boat. Nobody’s playing gigs so nobody’s getting a fee so we’re all struggling, so let’s just be open and honest about that. There was a lot of funding put into musicians, there were song writing camps, which I availed of and loved, and there was tons of collaboration happening, more than I’ve ever seen before.
‘Describing it as a farmers market is brilliant, because we’re encouraged to buy local. I think the answer might be not just musicians supporting each other, but cross-practice collaboration. If you look at the success of something like Normal People, which was an Irish author, Irish director, an incredible TV series that did amazingly internationally, and the amount of Irish music that was featured – some of the acts on that soundtrack got tons and tons of plays on Spotify, and it also brought them into the awareness of people who never would have heard them before, who might buy their record or go see them on tour or buy their merch and tell their friends about them. I think if we lived a bit more with that ethos, to think more locally, we could support each other more and we’d thrive, because it’s sustainable. We described the band as a bakery recently. When somebody pays for a cake we can buy more yeast, but nobody’s taking a wage. So we’re all there working in the bakery voluntarily, but the bakery is running really well and we really like the cake.’
For his part, Brian Crosby’s experience of the co-operative set-up in Kreuzberg paid dividends in terms of creative energy and straight-up work opportunities.
‘In Berlin it was like an ex-pat community, and we were all in one building,’ he recalls. ‘I spent eight years in that studio, I rented this factory floor and it was quite an egalitarian set-up, there was no hierarchy as such, people would meet in the corridor and invite each other in to work on projects and it really raised the bar for everybody. Just being there meant you were busy. It was a transition for me from being in a rock band or an indie band to being in this world of neo-classical music, film score music.
‘What Dublin doesn’t have are these physical hubs. The creative industry could really benefit from that. It’s very hard to imitate that with forums or guilds or societies or whatever. Having a physical space where there’s human contact, hanging out over coffee, a conversation can easily turn into a collaboration. I’ve always maintained that a collaborative process is far more enjoyable than being isolated. To be able to share the enjoyment is a much more pleasant human experience.’
Which is in direct contrast to the capitalistic, competitive model sold to us by online platforms. For any artist whose temperament tends towards introversion, the levels of self-promotion and groupthink endemic to these mediums can seem deranged.
‘When we started the band, I personally really liked the social media side of things,’ Sarah says. ‘The personality of the band was something that people were relating to. But the more public appearances and press that we’ve done, we’ve started getting a little bit of negativity online, and that will make you want to take a bit of a back seat, especially in Ireland. The reality of it is, you need to make a decision as to whether or not you want to become something like an influencer, an online personality. It’s such a strange thing: a band like Pillow Queens are an indie act, we’ve only done self-releases so far, and we’ve only been a band for four years, and we’re dopes at the end of the day, that’s our personalities. This idea of becoming an influencer or a celebrity really doesn’t suit us.’
On the other hand, it can provide alternative forms of income. A key point from Iggy Pop’s 2014 BBC lecture Free Music in a Capitalist Society: diversify revenue streams, so if you lose one you’ve still got three or four more left. Many musicians now host podcasts or moonlight as DJs, authors and public speakers. There’s no shame in paying the rent.
‘I think it’s kind of accepted,’ says Brian Crosby. ‘It used to be the case that if you were seen doing something else it would signify that you’re not successful enough in your primary engagement, but now it’s cool and actually commendable to try a few different things.’
Mutate and survive, in other words.
Colm Mac Con Iomaire has done just that for decades. He’s in the unique position of having lived through the roaring ’90s as a major label artist with The Frames, who then rebooted as a self-sustaining indie act, sweating and slogging their way back to a position of solvency and success. Few Irish bands were better at exploiting the currency of community.
‘With The Frames, the Columbia Hotel in London was kind of the foreign office, or a diplomatic centre for Irish bands to be able to actually talk to each other in a safe space,’ Colm recalls, sipping mineral water outside a cafe by the Slaney in Enniscorthy on a summer’s afternoon. ‘You could have the conversation out on the table about, “How’s your business? What’s going on for you?” If nothing else I think our band helped break some of those taboos. You know, Mundy gets dropped for the first time and you go, “You broke your cherry!” as opposed to, “This is the end of your career.”’
Colm switched from being The Frames’ and Swell Season’s secret weapon to a sort of freelance consultancy position ten years ago. Since then he’s released three stunning solo records – The Hare’s Corner, And Now the Weather and The River Holds Its Breath – that bear the rarefied airs of traditional, modern-classical and folk-rock. Because his music is primarily instrumental, it crosses cultural borders: he’s as likely to be found playing the role of musical envoy, performing for the Dali Lama, dining with Ennio Morricone or accompanying Colum McCann to Gaza, as he is at home on the farm in Wexford. Ask him to distil all his creative experience into a single word and he offers this:
‘Compass. It’s all about internal, artistic, creative compass. It’s like a bee. How do you find the pollen? For whatever reason I’ve found that stuff gets easier the older you get, you acquire more experience and instinct, you know the terrain. I suppose the biggest change is confidence, and also financial security is huge, the tangible thing that helps to underpin confidence. The world is a very precarious place, everything can change in a heartbeat, but when you actually accept that, on a deep level, it starts to change. Other people might be tenured and salaried, but they still might have that epiphany if they’re hit by illness or lose someone close or have a mid-life crisis.’
Or if a pandemic strikes.
‘Exactly. It’s very sudden. We’ve long been conditioned and groomed into thinking that artistic sovereignty is the preserve of the very successful and is something that comes at the end of a career, and that as a novice or “unsuccessful” artist we just accept that we will need to compromise our integrity or vision. So much time in one’s creative life is spent obsessing about what other people are doing or creating, why are they more successful than I am or whatever. And that’s actually waste, clutter, that’s noise, and all creative people, all humans basically, realise that to find your own creative source involves having to excavate your own basement. It takes courage and confidence. We completely rely on breadcrumbs of praise, the occasional teachers who water the sapling.
‘Martin Egan was a real early champion of mine in the mid to late ’90s and introduced me to stuff like The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron, Morning Pages. I owe him a debt. There are people like that who just help you orient yourself. I suppose they’re elders who’ve been along the way. And as you get older you learn to pass it on. It’s not mine to hold onto, so you share the information. People sometimes think that they need to be enigmatic about their process or success because somebody else is going to take it off them. Actually, the reverse is the case: once you stop sharing and paying it forward, once you cut yourself off from that, your source immediately becomes more stagnant, smaller and smaller, until it dries up. It’s all part of being in the flow of life.’
So how does he reconcile a state of spiritual and creative hygiene with the bzzzzt of social media promotion?
‘I struggle. I have no idea, to be honest! I strongly recommend getting somebody else to do it for you! I inhabit different realms, but that is the realm I’m most uncomfortable with, the idea of promoting myself as a performer, someone you really need to come and see. It makes me cringe. The voraciousness of the technology, the constant need for content ... More is less.’
Post-lockdown, one thing is for sure – we can’t afford the luxury of fatalism. This, in an email from Brian Crosby:
Some headline quick fixes that would greatly benefit the sustainability of what we do below:
Social:
Implement UBI for the arts sector.
Streaming:
Fix the economics surrounding Streaming as follows:
Adoption of a User Centric Payment System so artists can earn directly from their listeners subscriptions rather than the current Pro Rata model which pools subscriber revenues together and distributes according to which artists brought in the most streams.
Amend legislation so that Equitable Remuneration can be applied to a share of streaming, resulting in writers, musicians and publishers being paid in the same way as they earn from radio and TV broadcast via our collection societies, and that the split between the song and the recording is on a 50/50 basis.
Oversight on streaming platforms to improve transparency and ensure algorithms are not biased.
No reduction in royalties in exchange for enhanced plays or access to playlists (e.g., Spotify’s ‘Discovery Mode’).
Film Score Work:
Protect screen composers’ ability to earn a living by protecting against the use of Full Buyout Contracts.
‘We need to identify abusive or opportunistic business models by large tech companies,’ Brian elaborates via Zoom. ‘I think creators’ rights need to be addressed, and the acknowledgment that we have essentially a weak negotiation position. Streaming is a great invention, but the economics around how streaming is handled need to change – and they will change.’
‘There has been a really impressive UK public inquiry over the last few months, where a bunch of MPs brought the various stakeholders to the table – it was a pretty grilling Q&A. It’s very educational and very revealing footage, it’s available to stream, they have the heads of Spotify, the heads of the labels, they ask for various submissions from various artists and stakeholders, and it was incredibly clear as to what the issues were. I think they will make recommendations in the coming weeks, and if that sticks it will be a gamechanger as to how the economics turn out. There’s nothing wrong with the service, the service is brilliant, especially Spotify’s playlisting service, it’s a really cool thing, but there’s a dark sub-layer to it.’
Pillow Queens’ Sarah:
‘We need to stop the reliance on streaming and buy the physical record or the digital files online, as long as you’re paying a fair amount towards the artist. I think that’s the way forward, rather than touring – we’ve seen how the last two years has gone in that respect, we can’t rely on it, in terms of lifestyle and mental health and the cost and the environmental impact of travelling.
‘The day before yesterday we put up an Instagram post, one of our songs did a million plays on Spotify, and it was the first time that’s happened to us, it was a big deal. And the caption that we put up was, “If this was pre-streaming, we’d be billionaires.” It was tongue-in-cheek, we wouldn’t be billionaires, but I think a million streams on Spotify is the equivalent of four grand, and we spent three times that making the album.’
One final thought. The more transparent musicians are about their hardships, the better for everyone. To extend the Soviet allegory, glasnost is good. When Donal Ryan came clean about the economics of the book business a couple of years ago, it started a much-needed conversation about the numbers of working poor in the arts sector.
Colm Mac Con Iomaire: ‘That’s what needs to be done to the music industry: shame the fuckers, because they’re actually stealing. Every time a new technology comes along the copyright laws are twenty years behind. And the more powerful these technologies have become, the more enabled and brazen the overreach into intellectual copyright property: “This is good for everybody; everybody can listen to this. We just don’t want to pay you for it.” The people who set up all the streaming sites [did so] with the consent – and more importantly the back catalogues – of record companies who have shares in these companies. That’s been a way of repackaging and selling their warehouse of stuff again, and just cutting out the person they used to have to pay, who was the supplier. That’s where it comes down to tell the truth and shame the devil.’