Music, Which is Important

"He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain."

-Mark Twain

I haven't updated in a while. I've been trying to get a music career off the ground. Like everything else, it seems like the universe has some fundamental law against me being allowed to make a subsidence-level wage out of something I'm both good at and enjoy doing.

Music should work like the movies. Not like every album would cost 60 million to make and half that again to publicize, but just a huge community of musicians swapping out to make new music. Like sports teams maybe. Only without the fucking contract disputes but with way more drug and sex scandals.

I'm fucking burned out on it. But I've been burned out on it for three years.

You have any idea how many musicians are burnt out with the job by the time they release their first record?

Fuck, imagine a world where any 18 year old could send in an Audacity recording, a three page essay on the foundations of music theory and how it applies to them, and an explanation of what they want to accomplish musically and be told to come to X rehearsal space and sit in on a few jams to see how they do.

Imagine a world where bands don't have retirement tours every ten years because they're so fucking sick of doing this they can't imagine ever wanting to again only to realize two years later that "Yeah, I had to go do a jazz or country album, but this is something I enjoy. Fetch the media circus!"

Imagine getting paid for hauling your gear 50 miles in the rain on a weeknight to play for 20 drunk assholes and not being treated like you personally insulted the owner's dead mother at the end of the night.

My point is, musicians have to figure out how to look at sleeping indoors and doing what you're good at professionally and not see an unsolvable equation.

The irony is that music, in some ways, figured out how to adapt to the new market far quicker than movies or video games did. Video games are still selling 60 dollar discs and movies are spending more and more money for fewer and fewer returns. That's insane.
Music got smart fast because it had to.Music went from CDs to MP3s fucking overnight. Napster was an extinction-level event. Our old strategy did not work. Film studios can spend the money on lawyers and games are hard to pirate. But music had to turn a hard-copy $20 single into a $1 download overnight because that is what the market demanded.

And we should be applauded for that.

Except somewhere along the way musicians were written out of the bottom line. We became unpaid interns in our own industry. And that's because we're using the same marketing strategy as games and film. Focusing on individual trending artists instead of the artists as a whole. Making bland, homogenous crap just edgy enough to make teenagers feel rebellious and just safe enough to get a pass from the censorship committee.

That's why Spider-man, a ten year old film, gets a gritty, sexy reboot when there's a perfectly good Moon Night just lying there. That's why games like Resident Evil 6 and Call of Battlefield 4: Saber-Rattling Racist Idiot get made and Tim Schaffer makes games on Kickstarter. And that is why the VMAs look like a science-fiction adaptation of the Senate during the fall of Rome while the best guitarist in your town is selling tickets to his own show out of pocket because the dickhead that owns the club convinced him that doing the club's promotion work for them was in everyone's best interest.

Why, yes, Tom. We'll give you all of our apple if you just let us whitewash that fence.

There are a lot of solutions out there. Government subsidies, demanding of legislators that we be included in general wage  or contract law. Fuck, there's a music union, just nobody knows about it and most of the ones that do don't know why they should care.

Fuck, new guitars should be sold with a union pamphlet stuck in the strings.

Anyway, it has to happen soon or there won't be any music. Not as anything other than a bland math problem created to appease the most people with the least maintenance.

Fair Trade Music (link) is doing something. I mean literally doing something, not writing resentful blog updates about how I didn't want to be a nuclear physicist in the military like I should have done. It's a grassroots campaign based in Portland, I think, with Union support. It's a brilliantly simple idea: talk to all the musicians, promoters, managers, friends, and venue owners you know about a fair wage for musicians.

I know most people think "musician's wages" and immediately get a visual of Guns 'n Roses in their heyday, but the fact is: most musicians work way fucking hard. I can't speak to electronic music or country or whatever, but for a modern rock or metal musician, describing them as "on a budget" is far too charitable. Trying to record an album, while simultaneously starting a delivery marketing business with three other equally broke friends, and finding a stage-worthy drumset on a paycheck scientifically proven to be below the poverty line is not "on a budget."

Get involved.