I don’t think anyone has a good take on “the future of music” right now. I’ve heard (and recorded) some damn good music by day-job bands. The economic models that have led to touring acts are undergoing massive changes.

It no longer takes a half-million dollar room to record an album. It may not sound as good if you record it on a Mac Mini setup with Garageband, but it’s 90% of the way there, and you’ve got the gear for the second album. This makes it easier to get the skills and tools and take the time to make the song you want.

The economics of “single” versus “album” are changing again. The current price/value model of a single song versus a collection depend on physical production, distribution, and retail sales. However, if a band makes 10 songs and sells them for $10 as “an album” or 99 cents each on iTunes and finds that they only make money on 3 of the 10 tracks, then bands may start making only the “money” songs and not the filler. We may also see the old “an album is a discounted collection of previously released singles” model reappear.

Internet distribution is not tied to a specific locale. Not only does the internet mean that it’s incredibly cheap to keep old material “in-print”, it also means that gelgraphically indistinct groups may be buying the music. If your audience is getting the music from “tartanpodcast.com”, the band doesn’t necessarily need to book gigs in the Glasgow area, becuase the audience is in Christchurch and Jersey City.

Nobody knows what to do with this. It’s one of the reasons that it’s unclear what bands should be doing to be successful. Should you tour, should you sign, should you stay indie, should you put out a CD, should you go to iTunes?

I like the idea of patrons, but then I’m married to a medievalist.

Sort of like the “trust fund kids” who feel free to take jobs in, say, Public Radio, without worrying having enough to send their own kids to elite private schools?

I seriously wonder if this is the future of music—not just trust fund kiddies but also local bands that may record but rarely or never tour because their well-paid day jobs don’t permit it. Who knows—maybe musicians will even start to live off the largesse of rich patrons, again. In fact, given how little it would probably keep a band going, I’m surprised this isn’t happening already. $50-$100K a year would probably do it and wouldn’t ‘owning’ a band be much cooler (not to mention 100x cheaper) than, say, owning a sports team?

Another thing I think musicians are facing now—music doesn’t seem to matter to kids in the same way it used to. I think of the scene in Almost Famous where the big sister reverntly pulls out her secret record collection and says, “This will change your life”. My own teenage kids listen to a huge assortment of stuff compared to the few albums I owned at the same age (no, they’re not downloaders), but none of it is critical to them. There are no musical heros whose next release they eagerly await. They’re not really much interested in concerts—going to one certainly wouldn’t be any kind of quasi-religious experience. Maybe they’re not typical (though the attitudes of their friends seem similar) and maybe they’ll change when they move out and go to school, but maybe not. Something basic seems to have changed.

Some places we played for the door or a cut of the door, sometimes we got a percent of the bar, some places had a guarantee. As the engineer, I got a set, pre-negotiated amount. The Band’s money was in product sales. A new venue might not have 50 people in it, but if a band has 5 CDs, it can make more money from them than it does from the door. Buying CDs direct from the band provides the band with a much larger percentage of your cost than buying it from a CD store.

We usually looking for two things in new places. The first was CD sales. The band needed those to pay back the investors from the last CD, who were usually family and friends. The second was contacts and word of mouth and exposure. It helped, for instance, to get into the Milwaukee Irish Festival to be able to say. “Last year we played Mo’s Irish Pub and we had a great time, as did everyone who came out.” Better still to meet the head of the enterainment committee and invite her out to the show in 2005 so she knows who you are in 2006. One contact can make a mediocre tour worth something.

Oh, and I also know of a number of bands who have produced “The NameOfBandHere: Live in Europe 200x” to pay for the trip. Sometimes that works, too.

Personally, I don’t mind bands being on the radio, or doing soundtracks. Ads are uniquely irritating because they only play 20 or 30 seconds of a song, and you’ll hear that snippet over and over again over the course of a campaign. I find it almost impossible to listen to Moby’s Play these days without thinking “Car ad … Coffee … Different car … Tyres…”, for example.

I hate to sayh it, but when I moved to Chicago some time back I noticed a trend in what I refer to as “trust fund bands”. These are eager, nice, and sometimes exhuberantly creative bands that don’t really need the money. Clubs are then free to book based mostly on a political process of letting the “cool kids” play.

Make no mistake. Clubs find a way of winding up making money. Usually they have a nut that they take for the house sound and the engineer. The bar sales typically will cover the rest of the overhead and then some. Any door profits (after the house take) goes to the band(s). The pickings quickly become paltry.

Support your local musicians. Many times there is someone out there more committed and more talented than those who have risen in the ranks. I see terrific talent all the time. A little bit of encouragement goes a long way. I am the proud owner of a lot of DYI discs. I listen to it more than the label stuff. Some is of unique and thrilling caliber.

Support your local musicians. It is rough out there.

Kenny G?

I’m not sure why “getting groupies” (ok, let’s make it gender neutral) should be taken off the table as an economic consideration. Tasteless and medieval as you may find it, it is nevertheless an extremely popular fringe benefit that influences decision-making in that area. I know bands that tour certain cities more often because they prefer the groupies there, for example.

I wonder if people feel more or less uncomfortable with songs being licensed for advertising or film & television soundtrack use, as opposed to straightforward mainstream radio success. I can see the filthy ad agency lucre carrying more of a capitalistic tinge, but mainstream success means the common people are fans, which seems a bit more mystique-crushing.

I suppose this can apply to jazz as well, although I don’t even know what mainstream jazz success would look like—but I wonder if elitist fans would prefer to hear their darlings in Microsoft commercials or on tour with Kenny G (for lack of a less ludicrous example).

Sheer prejudice. It affects jazz, too—who was it (a jazz musician) who complained that the problem with jazz was that if more than nine people like you, you were “mainstream”?

At the risk of derailing the conversation: why is this so, in your case? As a working musician who is in the position to be able to benefit from television licensing, I can of course argue until I’m blue in the face that a bit of corporate patronage shouldn’t take anything away from the music, but it’s a plain fact that many people agree with you here. Is there any rational reason for begrudging the artists a chance to earn money from their work, or is this just an indie prejudice?

The problem becomes even more acute in an environment where almost any recently released music is available as a free download to anyone willing to spend a few minutes on a P2P network and undertake the very light risk of minor legal repercussions. So while bands like the Bottle Rockets, and most anyone else touring the bar/club circuit, might not make much of an income playing shows around the US or internationally, it almost certainly provides their major source of income since record contracts and royalites will at best cover recording expenses (outside of flipping burgers or cutting drywall, of course).

Michael Neumann recently discussed the implications of downloadable music for intellectual property rights, but ends up coming up with schemes for the protection of consumers rather than thinking much about the plight of contemporary artists.

As it is, live shows are the bread and butter of the bulk of musicians out there. And as your example shows, in many cases the bread is a mere crust and the butter a bit rancid.

One can imagine few workable systemic solutions short of establishing government grants to musicians in various genres. In practice, solutions are often ad hoc, ranging from couch surfing and living the ‘struggling artist’ life, to simply getting a second job, to licensing your songs for advertisements (this last is of course not possible for everyone, and it certainly makes me think twice about buying the album when I see Tortoise hocking Volkswagens on teevee).

An American band touring the UK or Europe in a van for the first handful of times is almost certainly losing money or at least earning less than they would at any day job, in hopes of stirring up enough enthusiasm to make future visits profitable. Van hire, a driver, airfare and equipment rental (or worse, shipping their own equipment) are all costs most US bands wouldn’t face at home, assuming that like most bands they own their own van.

The club will most often at least break even, except in the rare case when they’ve promised the band a guaranteed fee that’s not covered by door receipts or margins from the bar. Even then it’s sadly not that uncommon for the club or the third-party promoter to simply refuse to pay.

And like Jo Wolff says, even in the US, a single university date can offset the losses from a dozen miserable club gigs.