Great article. Made me change my thoughts about Courtney Love. Smart girl. Messed up, sure, but smart.
Wow. A full day late. I guess that’s $24 short too then.
In my business I deal with a lot of musicians who have enjoyed various degrees of success.
Is it hard to make a living in rock music?
Yes it it. Then again, it’s hard to make a living at a lot of things. It’s hard to make a living as a doctor, if you consider how many years it take to become one.
To begin with, you day job will pay your bills better than your music will. Although, there is a regular pay cheque to be made in cover bands, wedding bands and so forth… they are unlikely to satisify your need to be an artist though.
Tell your son that it’s possible, but…
- It may take years of hard slog.
- He will have to approach it like a real job or a small business… to begin with, at least, all the money he/they make should go back into the band.
- He will have to know how to make friends and get along with people. Divas and other ego tripping idiots tend to end up sleeping in the van, and have a hard time convincing bands to play with them.
- Just like black lung and miners, being a musician has its own health hazards of alcoholism and drug addiction. They will greatly impair his ability to be successful, no matter what the evidence is to the contrary.
- He may have to move to a bigger city… with more muscians, gigs and/or more centrally located for easier touring.
- He will have to tour a lot. A friend of mine, who is just beginning to make a good-ish living as a musician (she’s been at it 15 years) spends easily more than 300 days a year on the road.
- He will have to get used to sleeping on floors.
Good luck to him.
Impossibly hard today. There is far too much talent out there that will never get beyond the local bar scene. You are much better off trying to win the lottery even if you are as good a Vaughan or Hendrix. For every Nickleback or Audioslave there are 500 bands and solo artists that you have never even heard of.
I’m not trying to crush anyone’s dreams of becoming the next Edwin McCain or Eric Clapton, but you’ll recall when the greatest selling country singer of all time tried his hand at rock music and got stomped like a narc at a biker rally. There’s just so much talent, that you have to set kittens on fire on stage to get noticed anymore.
However, this shouldn’t discourage anyone from learning to play the guitar well, which is a reward greater than any financial wealth you could possibly achieve. Why would I want to take something that I deeply love and appreciate and turn it into an occupation?
Ultimately, this is my mindset. Having my music/guitar playing as my escape has kept me sane and is, other than my family, my greatest joy. I feared it becoming a job and losing that sense of it being special. I have seen some friends lose their love of music as they slogged thru trying to make a living - so sad.
Enthusiast - who is the country star? Is that Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines? I didn’t realize that was hard rock per se - and I would say it didn’t work more because it was just…weird.
You son might enjoy, The Cheese Chronicles, an entertaining book about what it’s really like to be in a rock band that’s had a small amount of local success. The band is Government Cheese and they were slightly successful in the 80’s. It’s a really, really tough slog.
I’ve written elsewhere about my stuggles in the music business. I gave it up. My brother, on the other hand, is 41, and has been at it since he was 17. He is an excellent musician, and 300 times the guitarist I will ever be. But he’s still living below the poverty line, and has never made a profit, ever. There are other mitigating cicrumstances in his life that keep him out of the big time, but there is such a small market for the blues, he is never going to go anywhere in the business. He lives in an economically depressed area, and has to go between being on welfare and taking minimum-wage jobs 40 miles away, just to pay his bills. Nobody will hire him because he has no measurable employment history. He lives in a little room in somebody’s house. All this slogging, and he has absolutely nothing to show for it. And he’s angry and bitter about it. So it isn’t any kind of picnic, trying to play music with soul and substance for a living. If he was willing to sell out and play what’s popular, maybe he’d get somewhere, but he’s 20 years out of the demographic for that kind of music, and he is suffering for the level of musical integrity he strives to achieve. It’s sad.
A good friend of mine is a bass player in a well known local metal band. After more than a few years of struggling in this market, they started opening for national bands and getting a wider fan base. Two years or so ago they were signed to a big contract. They packed up and moved to LA with stars in their eyes - they were promised the moon.
[aside - these weren’t young naive guys, they were all mid-20’s to early 30’s, all had been through quite a bit in their personal lives. By no means were they clueless]
After a year of playing in places they wouldn’t deign to here, they came back. All were at least 20#'s lighter due to the chic starvation diet. One went back into drugs hardcore.
Now back being big fish in a little pond, they’re content. My friend still works his regular full time job, as do the rest of his bandmates. Gigs are weekends only. They got rid of the member who drank all of their profits, and put out their own CD’s.
Before I get into my experience, I just want to point out that the “Courtney Love” article is almost entirely cribbed from an article that Steve Albini wrote for The Baffler about 10 years prior, which you can read here. It always just irritates the piss out of me when I see people give ol’ braindead Courtney the credit for that one.
As I may have mentioned around here before, I’m in a band - a real one. If you’re into the indie or college rock scene, if you read Pitchforkmedia.com, you’ve probably heard our name, and if you go to shows, you may have seen us open up for bigger indie rock bands. You can walk into any given Best Buy or Tower Records and buy our albums.
That aside, we’re incredibly small-time as these things go. We’ve never been on the radio outside of college stations and we’ve never made a video. We work day jobs.
The thing about rock music is that nobody should expect to make a living off of it; it’s just one of those crafts, like pottery or painting, that you have to keep on the side as your hobby or interest. Making rock music is not like being an accountant or mechanic; it’s not your job and you shouldn’t expect to be able to make a living off of it. The focus should be on writing great songs and making great records, period. If they’re good enough, consider releasing them for other people to hear and pay you money for, and work on live performance. If this all comes together - you make good records that get released in some legitimate fashoin and tour to support them - you’ve won. You made it. Don’t expect it to be your job; think of it as a hobby or craft on the side.
We make decent money off of our music, but we all work day jobs and tour when we can. That money usually goes back into the band - I bought a new synthesizer and better recording equipment with money made on the last tour. None of us are expecting to pay rent out of what we make on tour, but it helps.
What band are you in? I’d check you guys out.
I agree with all that’s been said in the replies to this thread. Here’s my experience and opinion.
I have been making money playing the guitar since I was fourteen. When I was in my early twenties, it was my only job for a couple of years. When I was full-time at it, I made what would be the current equivalent of about $30, 000 a year, with no medical or disability insurance or any shred of security. From 1990 to 2000, I played in a pretty good wedding reception band, playing around 30 gigs a year at about $250 per gig per man. That band put my daughter through college. Now I’m in a bar band, twenty to thirty gigs a year, usually $100 per man, playing classic and indie covers with three much younger folks (I’m 51). I’m having more fun now with music than I ever have before.
About ten years ago, I took jazz lessons from a man who has never had a day job. He’s a fusion guitarist who distributes his own CDs, plays gigs, teaches, has endorsement deals with Fender and Dean Markley. He gets $50 per hour from new students, accepts less from those who have been with him for a long time, and as a practical matter, can’t get more than 15 to 20 hours of teaching in per week. With all of his talent and effort, from outward appearances he is working very hard to stay in the middle class, and he depends on his wife’s job for medical insurance. He also appears to be very happy with his life, although he would prefer to be rich and famous.
The time I have spent learning to play guitar has brought me more rewards than anything else I’ve done. Some of those rewards were financial, most were not. I have friends who are far more talented than I am whose lives as full-time musicians are a constant struggle. I highly recommend it as a paying hobby, but don’t think that it’s a good career choice unless the passion to play to the exclusion of all else is firmly in place.
Hmmm… ten fingers, eleven toes?
I hope so, because otherwise, if Pitchfork liked you, out of principle, I’d probably have to hate you.
I highly recommend *So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star * by Jake Slichter. He was the drummer from Semisonic, who had a monster smash hit (Closing Time) in the '90s. It’s a rated PG story giving the ins and outs of the music biz, the specifics of a recording contract and touring, the highest highs (a Grammy nom) and the lowest lows ( being a performing monkey, lip synching, getting dropped by your label).
It’s fascinating and a darned good read, an education for any music fan.
Thanks for reviving thread and recent posts. I’ll tell my son in the AM. Back to Rose Bowl.