[ If making a fortune is your goal, a career in music will take
you a long way—in the wrong direction. Working in the music industry
today is attempting to thrive in a hostile environment. Only the very
lucky, well-connected, or well-funded survive.]
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WHEN MY SONG “RICH PEOPLE” WENT VIRAL, IT DIDN’T MAKE ME RICH
 
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Carsie Blanton
January 30, 2023
The Nation
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_ If making a fortune is your goal, a career in music will take you a
long way—in the wrong direction. Working in the music industry today
is attempting to thrive in a hostile environment. Only the very lucky,
well-connected, or well-funded survive. _

Musician Carsie Blanton, whose song “Rich People” went viral
online, poses for the camera., Photo: Grant Goldsworthy // The Nation

 

I’ve been a full-time working songwriter
[[link removed]] for 15 years.
In November, one of my songs went viral. The song was “Rich People
[[link removed]],”
which is a jazzy, jokey song about capitalism. The lyrics describe
being bombarded by bad news, and having that news blamed on all the
wrong people (black people, Jewish people, immigrants), when the real
culprits are the super-rich.

This was my second taste of Internet virality (the first was
a tribute [[link removed]] I
wrote to John Prine when he passed in 2020), and it was a mixed
blessing. After spending a few hours gleefully watching the view count
climb into the millions, I spent a week deleting comments and banning
trolls.

Some of the comments were great (“She’s like Shania Twain meets
Rage Against the Machine!”), but many weren’t. Of all the
bad-faith, harebrained, and fashy comments, I found this one the
funniest:

I’m 37, and I’ve been working as a musician since I was a
teenager. I’m an independent artist, meaning there is no record
label funding my work. And I’m an American, meaning there is no
public funding, either.

Among working singer-songwriters, I’m fairly successful. Since the
late-pandemic return of live music, my band and I have played about
150 shows throughout the United States, United Kingdom, and Ireland. I
have 90,000 monthly listeners on Spotify
[[link removed]], and about
150,000 followers across various social media platforms.

All of that work, content, and fandom does generate money. But the
amount I get to keep is less than you might think, and my business is
operating from beneath an ever-growing mountain of debt.

I hear similar stories from other working musicians. Most of us
don’t like to talk about money, because it’s embarrassing; we feel
fraudulent, disorganized, each nursing a private personal failure.

But really, every person working in the music industry today is
attempting to thrive in a hostile environment. Only the very lucky,
well-connected, or well-funded survive.

So, for the love of music: Let’s talk about money.

DEBT, TROLLS, AND ROCK & ROLL

In 2021, my business—which we’ll call Carsie Blanton
Industries—generated a little over $240,000 in revenue. (That’s
gross revenue, before taxes.)

Carsie Blanton _the person_ made about $31,000. That’s what I put
in my personal checking account and spent on my personal life:
rent, dog food
[[link removed]],
Hulu.

Meanwhile, Carsie Blanton Industries operated at a loss, taking on an
additional $30,000 of debt, for a grand total of $200,000.

THAT’S RIGHT. FIFTEEN YEARS INTO A SUCCESSFUL MUSIC CAREER, TOURING
THE WORLD AND LIVING THE DREAM, I AM $200,000 IN DEBT.

Luckily, I never went to college, so I like to think of it as the cost
of my PhD from the very prestigious School of Hard Knocks.

While I’m in confessional mode: My husband makes more money than I
do, and has supported me and my work throughout the years in lots of
ways, including financially. Because of him I enjoy luxuries like
health insurance, therapy, and access to credit.

I struggled with whether to reveal that last bit (“Privilege!”
“Bad feminist!”), but feel it’s worth the risk, because this
arrangement appears to be pretty common. Many working musicians have
partners or family members who supplement their income with money,
credit, a house to live in, or health insurance.

And musicians aren’t the only ones relying on family to bridge those
gaps. With 50 million Americans
[[link removed]] duking
it out in the “gig economy,” and a quarter of adults
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34 living with their parents, it’s probably time to retire the trope
that success counts only if we have achieved it alone. (That way, at
least _somebody_ can retire!)

GETTING PAID

The “Rich People” trolls were wrong to assume that a viral video
would make me rich. (In fact, those 3 million views have made me
exactly zero dollars.) In reality, there are three ways I get paid to
make music.

1. RELEASING ALBUMS: My last few albums have cost between $25,000 and
$50,000 each to record, mix, and master. Most of that money went to
other people: musicians, producers, engineers. Most people, these
days, listen on streaming services. Spotify pays me about $.004 per
stream. (That’s four-tenths of one cent.) So if a song is streamed a
million times, I make $4,000. But to date, only a handful of the
hundred-or-so songs I’ve released have made it to a million streams.
So if I need 10 million streams to pay off a $40,000 record, but I’m
only getting 2 million: My streaming revenue comes up about $32,000
short.
 

Thankfully, some people still buy CDs and vinyl records (and T-shirts,
posters, etc.). And merchandise makes a profit, eventually. But in
order to make that profit, you have to sell about half of the merch,
and once you sell half of the merch, it’s time to order more merch!
Really, merch is more like a revolving loan. Meanwhile, we also have
to pay for marketing. Marketing budgets vary widely and can be spent
in all sorts of ways (music videos, ads, radio promotion, publicity).
I’ve spent between $5,000 and $25,000 to market my albums.

Altogether, my cost to make and release an album falls between $50,000
and $90,000. And while some of that money eventually makes its way
back to me from sales and streaming, most of it doesn’t.

2. PERFORMING LIVE: Touring with my band has been one of the most fun
and rewarding experiences of my life and has resulted in many of my
closest adult friendships. I wouldn’t trade it for $200,000.
Apparently.

But I have lost more money touring than on every other part of my
business, combined. There was a tour a few years back that cost me
$15,000. Imagine you have just done six weeks of grueling, physically
and emotionally demanding work. You’ve been sick. You’ve been
grabbed. You’ve sat in a Texas parking lot all day, waiting for AAA
to come change the tire on your trailer. And at the end, you get a
bill for $15,000.

During my mid-pandemic crisis, I made some new rules about touring.
Now, I pay the band a living wage, pay myself as a member of the band,
cover all our expenses, and break even. If there’s a significant
risk of going into the red on a given tour, we stay home.

In the small venues we play, it’s pretty hard to make that happen.

Depending on the number of flights, band members, and shows in a given
tour, I need to be paid between $2,500 and $6,500 per show to break
even.

It’s difficult to fathom how expensive touring actually is—which
is how I lost so much money doing it. I won’t bore you with a real
budget, but here are a few of the headlines: My booking agent and
manager take a commission off the top (usually 20 percent, combined),
and then I pay three or four band members, plus flights, hotel rooms,
van and gear rental, and more.

We used to tour on a shoestring budget, and we still probably could.
But in addition to the economic risks involved, it turns out that
what’s fun in your 20s isn’t always fun in your 30s and 40s. After
more than a decade seeing the “romance of the road” together
(touring in my station wagon, sleeping on floors, playing for 12
people in Sacramento), the band and I agreed that it was time for a
change. As adult professionals, we no longer want to go out on the
road to get “life experience.” We want to show up to our job,
perform excellently, get a good night’s sleep, and go home with
enough money to pay rent.

3. FANS ON THE INTERNET: I have about 700 subscribers on Patreon
[[link removed]], plus a few thousand fans who
preorder my albums or donate to our livestreams. Last year, my fans
also covered over $10,000 in lost income due to Covid, canceled
flights, and a van break-in. These fine folks are bridging the gap
between the money it costs to make music and the money that music
makes.

Of course, there are many other sources of income in music (record
labels, commercials, corporate events), but all of them come with
their own drawbacks. The drawback I chose is this: In exchange for
total creative freedom, I have to periodically craft a fundraising
pitch, like a public radio station—or a progressive magazine.

It’s worth mentioning, too, that the perks of this job are off the
charts.

We get to travel the world, work with our best friends, and experience
joy and purpose at our place of work. And despite the financial
challenges, we don’t usually _feel_ broke—fans have provided my
band and I with lavish meals, empty vacation homes, even a post-show
mobile oyster bar.

Even if I die in debt, I wouldn’t trade this for another job. But we
are quickly approaching a world where the only people who can afford
to be artists are the ones with considerable access to credit. Does
that sound like a world you want to live in?

A SERVICE INDUSTRY FOR THE SOUL

Obviously, I could do all of it cheaper. I could make albums alone in
my bedroom, and tour solo. But the less money I spend on albums and
tours, the fewer musicians I employ. So while “do it cheaper” may
be a good plan for me as an individual, it isn’t a good plan for the
industry.

There are hundreds of jobs and hundreds of thousands of people making
their living in music. And like many industries, ours has taken hit
after hit over the past 20 years (Napster, Spotify, Ticketmaster,
Covid), while the opportunity to earn a middle-class income has all
but disappeared.

As musicians, our job is to bring meaning and joy to people’s lives.
We are, as Roseanne Cash puts it, “the service industry for the
heart and soul.” And like most jobs with any social, spiritual, or
humanitarian value, this one doesn’t pay very well.

BECAUSE THERE IS ONE INSURMOUNTABLE PROBLEM WITH THE MUSIC BUSINESS:
MUSIC IS NOT A BUSINESS. IT’S A VOCATION.

Music, like health, education, and democracy, just doesn’t make a
very good commodity. If we want it in our lives, we have to find a way
to fund it.

Most countries as wealthy as the United States provide dramatically
more public funding
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artists. But we can’t trust Congress to provide support, or to stand
up to corporations like Spotify and Ticketmaster, without significant
“pressure from below.” That means all of us—music workers and
music listeners—demanding that they do so, in a strategic and
organized way.

Unions like UMAW
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pressuring venues to stop unfair practices like keeping a cut of
artists’ merch revenue (#MyMerch). The National Independent Venue
Association (NIVA [[link removed]]) has helped secure
pandemic funding for small venues, and the Music Workers’ Alliance
(MWA [[link removed]]) just won a campaign to
include New York musicians in a $200 million Covid relief program.
Federal programs like universal health care would help lower the cost
of living for everybody, but especially gig workers.

So if you want to help your favorite musician, buy a CD, or subscribe
to them on Patreon. But if you want to help _music_, get involved in
the struggle for workers’ rights.

_[CARSIE BLANTON [[link removed]] is a songwriter
with hooks, chutzpah, and revolutionary optimism. Based outside of
Philadelphia, she has been touring and releasing albums since 2006,
and is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation
[[link removed]] and the Philly Liberation Center
[[link removed]].]_

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Please support  progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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to The Nation for just $24.95!_

* Music
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* Musicians
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* music industry
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* singer-songwriters
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* Artists
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* public funding
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* streaming
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* music streaming
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* Spotify
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* Ticketmaster
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* Musicians Union
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* AFM
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* American Federation of Musicians
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