Have we Loved the Music Industry to Death?
Perhaps music's biggest Trojan Horse has been our refusal to treat it like any other business, because we love it so damn much
Eight months after I left university, someway into an aggressive campaign to become NME’s first ever full time work experience ghoul, I signed a lucrative contract with the magazine that allowed me to be paid for my services to filing and sourcing photographs of Russell from Bloc Party. ‘Refusal to fuck off’ had become my most recent way of gaining employment, in the one industry I was aiming for.
The first time I went to NME on a week-long internship I genuinely felt sad when they told me to go home at the end of each day, which is a different kind of sad in and of itself. It wasn’t even because I lived with a maniac who slept in his shoes and would try to dispose of his batch-cooked carbonara in our kitchen sink (does it count as batch cooking when you try to eat the entire batch in one, give up, and force a mountain of pasta into a plughole?) – I simply couldn’t get enough of being on the inside of the thing I loved the most.
By the time NME acquiesced and gave me a job, I was no longer living in the birthplace of the fatberg. I was about to become rich from my dream job, and I had no problem telling people how much I was going to be paid to work on a successful music magazine. It was my dad’s wife who paused at the £60 per day, quickly worked out the maths, and said: “that’s not actually a lot at all, is it?”. I couldn’t really argue with the numbers once they were pointed out to me. Especially because my train fare into London from Southend was £22 per day. But it hardly took the edge off my buzz, and although my new manager had told me what I’d be earning and I hadn’t questioned it at all, the truth is they could have got me for minimum wage in 2005, which was £4.25 per hour for a 22-year-old – £34 per day. So I was doing very well after all.
This kind of denial-cum-acceptance has powered the music industry (and all arts) to where we find it today. But has the vocational pull of ‘doing what you love’ been what we have to thank for it still being here in any kind of shape, or has it been instrumental in its downfall? Or, to put it another way, is it better to have something that’s on fire?
2005 was a long time ago, but not so long ago that you could buy a house in central London for three buttons. £60 per day was not a good wage, but like I say, I really didn’t care. I was lucky to be able to make it work by living at home, and as everyone who’s ever worked in music will tell you, you can’t put a price on getting your foot in the door. Other invaluable perks of working in music at the time included: telling people you work in music, hearing the third Strokes album before anyone else, wearing jeans to an office job, free gig tickets, meeting the occasional artist – all of them legendary and exotic – and of course legitimately discussing and contributing to the thing you’d be thinking about if you were working in a job you didn’t like.
You see, it really isn’t all about the money, although I’m sure it helped in the 1980s and ‘90s when there was also plenty of that too. Piracy brought the heyday of the music business to an abrupt end in 1999 with the launch of Napster, but the legend of a career in music had been writ in stone by then. Certainly for people my age, but the last 20 years has proven it to be true for younger generations too. It’s the Stings of the world who benefited from colossal record sales in the ‘80s, a do-over with the reformatting of already successful catalogues on CD in the ‘90s, and obliging algorithms over the last decade. The top tier are now selling their entire stock – namely to Sony Music – for $300 million (Pink Floyd), $500m (Bruce Springsteen), $1.27 billion (Queen). Business is good in rarefied sectors of the industry; in a majority of it, not so much. And yet a love for music itself continues to pull people in, their passion negating the cold, hard, low numbers, just as it had for me 20 years ago. In 2023, UK employment in music reached a high of 216,000, while in the same year Musicians’ Union reported that 44% of professional British musicians earned under £14,000 per year and were forced to supplement their wages from other industries. The average income for a working musician in 2023 was £20,700.
The reason any kind of grass roots or independent music environment exists today is because it’s being supported by those willing to make it work by any means necessary. Its survival is unquestionably a good thing, but you have to wonder if our desperation to “do the thing you love and never work a day in your life” hasn’t undermined the entire industry. Prolonged total collapse, but ensured that total collapse is the only possible end game.
When I stopped printing Loud And Quiet as a magazine in 2024, 19 years after I started it, my overriding feelings were of pride and satisfaction. I also felt pretty embarrassed. About what it had taken to hang in there for so long; about energies perhaps best directed somewhere else. It’s noble to slog on, but it’s kind of stupid too.
I couldn’t stop thinking about shoe shops, although all other fantasy businesses are available. I’m not sending for shoe shop owners here, or suggesting that some shoe shop owners don’t live for shoes to the point of distraction, at the glee of seeing the third pair of shoes sold by The Strokes before anyone else. Or something. A shoe shop simply became my mind’s example of a business run in a typical fashion, ruled by the realities of business that are often ignored by music industry companies/me.
A shoe shop opens on a street.
A certain amount of shoes need to be sold to cover the rent of the shop and the overheads of its employees.
The shoes need to be sold no lower than a certain price in order to achieve this.
Maybe the street is dead, or the rent is too high, or the shoes are ugly, or a Prime Minister crashes the economy and people are saying she couldn’t even outlive a lettuce, but after however long of trying to turn things around, the numbers are the numbers and the shoe shop closes. It’s a shame, but the business isn’t viable.
Like the 44% of working musicians who supplemented their wages to remain working musicians in 2023, my business didn’t work this way. There were good, comfortable times, and there were Liz Truss times. Long Liz Truss times. Longer than Liz Truss’s time. If I’d been running a shoe shop, my emotions wouldn’t have overruled what was staring me in the face. I wouldn’t have paid myself less, worked more hours, continued to take advantage of friends and contributors also desperate to retain and pursue positions in the music industry by asking them to work for free or offensively low fees. I would never have accepted £60 per day to work in a bank, say, but when you’re emotionally invested there’s always a margin that can be squeezed a little further.
This is the nuts and bolts of DIY culture (sadly, as much as proudly), but the decades of music workers undervaluing themselves have now led us to an unsustainable place. An exhaustion has reached everyone I know in music, as long conversations about how hard it is are rounded off with an optimistic, ‘but there’s obviously part of me that still loves it’, or, ‘but hey, it beats doing something you hate, doesn’t it?’. True, of course. And so the unsustainable is sustained a little longer.
2023’s high of people working in music seems to suggest that we can roll on this way perhaps indefinitely. Workers will drop off as they enter middle age, burnt out or needing more money than music is able to offer them as they raise families. The thrill and burden of working in music will be passed on to a younger generation who’ve never heard of Sting but are still invisibly touched by the legacy of a once thriving industry that was one endless, wealthy party. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing – this has always been a youth-centric field. But no industry can thrive with dwindling wages and increased hours, even one as vocation-driven as this one, largely happy to be able to say “I should be on the guest list” twice a week. ‘Don’t undervalue yourself’ would be the biggest lesson I’ve learned over the last 20 years. Followed by ‘pretend it’s a shoe shop’.
Like I say, it’s not all about the money. The problem is that the industry knows that.
Fantastic read 🙏🏻