This is a technology problem. Media technology (radio, recordings, television, and movies) has essentially killed live performance of all kind compared to what it was once like. Bars and hotels that used to rely on gig musicians can now play a Spotify playlist over the speakers. Repertory theatres once existed in every small and medium sized city in the country, each supporting several actors earning salaries sufficient to raise a family—all wiped out by television.
It would have once been unthinkable for even a small city of <=100,000 people to lack multiple live entertainment options 7 days a week. No more—we’re all at home, watching our particular chosen thing, listening to our particular chosen album, playing our own chosen game.
Some will claim this has been an advancement. “How lame,” they say, “it must have been to have to go to the Local Entertainment Venue and just listen to whatever act was on that night. Nowadays I can listen to Acid Techno Super Hop, my particular chosen favorite, as much as I want.” But the losses in communal behavior have been significant. Most critical is the disappearance of dance. Dance is a fundamental human behavior, stretching back to Paleolithic times. It is nowhere to be seen in many cities today, because no one has any occasion to do it except weddings, at which it is very common now to stand around awkwardly after the bride and groom have fumbled through some rehearsed step.
Dance wasn’t critical. It was something people did at night when they had nothing to do sitting around the communal fire. It’s not critical.
Critical are the communities and communal activities. Those have disappeared. We need to live in environments where people eat in communal environments not centered around nuclear families. That’s the critical piece that is missing and making everyone feel empty.
Music and dance is but an aspect of this.
Generally humanity evolved to live in tribes and that is where we are most content. In modern times the closest where I’ve seen this is living in dorms or places with shared kitchens and communal eating areas. This promotes the type of communities that make humans happiest.
There was a wave of business plans and startups that tried to tackle this problem by building apartment communities that are more “social”. One that exists nowadays is https://www.flow.life/en/. But these businesses get it all wrong because they lack the communal kitchen and eating areas. The environment needs to have a forcing function to make people form communities not have it as some optional social event. The former makes people much much much closer and the bonds much stronger. Anyone who’s lived in such an environment can attest to this.
Respectfully, I am not interested in apartment buildings that are more social. I already live in one where laundry facilities are shared and a court yard is shared as well between everyone.
Despite the fact that there are signs everywhere in the laundry rooms with a list of tasks that need to be done at the end of the session, from my experience, 50% of the time, none of the tasks such as sweep the floors, clean the filters of the dryers are done.
Most people simply don't care.
Same with the courtyard, people let their kids run free in it and at the end of playtime, the kids just leave all their toys, bikes, pushbikes everywhere so much so that if you want to go in the courtyard, you basically have to move things out of the way.
The parents are there watching their kids during playtime but it doesnt come to their mind that someone else might want to use the space. They have no consideration for anyone but themselves when it would take just a few minutes to gather all the toys and put them in a corner somewhere.
Then there is the noise, people leave their dogs alone and the dogs start barking for hours because it's scared and when you suggest that maybe they should take the dog with them, they act all offended as if you suggested something truly horrible.
Not to mention, the guy who decides that 2am on a Wednesday is the perfect time to blast music with his windows open.
So, no thanks , I have had enough of communal living. Most people just don't know how to behave in a community and I am tired of picking up the slack of other people and being see as the bad guy on the block because I ask people to follow some basic rules so that we can all live together peacefully.
No this is stupid. Dance is super important, because it allows one or two people or just a few to form an instant social pod and enjoy themselves for a few hours.
I have a friend like you who wants everyone to live in "communities" with "communal living". He is just ultimately bossy and alienates all his friends (including me to be honest).
Try and force me to get to know my neighbours -- I simply will not. The last thing I need is someone trying to borrow "butter" or "dropping by" from 603 interrupting my desperately needed self time after working a 10 hour day.
Let me find my own friends and leave me alone to go out DANCING! And I'll find my friends no problem!
IT IS THE CARS. All of our communal space has been gutted to make more room for cars, which do the exact opposite of community building, as they abstract the human away from the world and you're left with an extremely dangerous, noisy, and angry public space.
>The former makes people much much much closer and the bonds much stronger. Anyone who’s lived in such an environment can attest to this.
I lived in this kind of kind of setup in school. And with all respect, no. Not even close.
My lived experience was that of someone that was the target of said groups to bond over bullying. The verbal abuse I could take. The spitting on my face, the punches to my gut that left me bruised for days on end, fine. No permanent damage.
But I had my throat strangled more times then I want to remember; hands, wires, cords, rope cutting the air off from my lungs and seeing the gray take over my vision. Blacking out over and over again as they derived whatever joy that they took in having my body slump still between their fingers.
And that was every moment I of my existence. No escape. No safety. No relief. I just had to endure and bear it, because what other choice was there? Who was going to help? Who'd believe the word of the wierdo over that of the model students? And they for their part, insist that that what they did was nothing wrong. I didn't die or was maimed, ergo, no foul.
Maybe what you describe is great if you're part of the in group, and if so, great! Go and live in these arrangements then. But what you describe is a living hell for the people that become the target of torment for those groups where no where to run.
Says you. For me it is. I suspect for many others it is. I have restless legs syndrome. It’s a neurological disorder that makes your legs and feet feel like they have to move. A lot of people have it. Doctors prescribe drugs for it. What actually helps me? Dancing. This is just one of many good effects I get from dancing. My legs and body need to move. I’m not a good dancer. I look like an idiot. But I absolutely have to dance.
> There was a wave of business plans and startups that tried to tackle this problem by building apartment communities that are more “social”. One that exists nowadays is https://www.flow.life/en/.
> But these businesses get it all wrong because they lack the communal kitchen and eating areas.
The problem as I see, given a choice, people rather eat/do/listen/feel things that they want, not the things they’re being forced on. In the past, you didn’t really have a choice and was forced to do what everyone is doing. Now, to live in such communities, you’ll have to get rid of the choice. Which also sucks.
Same. I live in a small/medium Canadian valley (about 76k spread between three towns in a rural district 3ish hours from anything that could be called a 'real city')
I regularly see live music accidentally just by showing up at various bars and breweries. We have several groups doing local theater. We have two multi-day music festivals in the summer, and at least a dozen more within a few hours drive.
There is plenty of live entertainment for those who want it. If I had to guess, I would say that there is maybe two nights per week where there isn't live music, but if you add in trivia nights, rec center activities, etc. You could easily fill your schedule any day of the week
I play in bands in a large metro area. 90% of our gigs are in smallish towns in the surrounding areas. I live in the center city and there are gigs one can attend, but compared to the population it's a really low number. Just in my immediate area almost 3/4 of the small venues from 20 years ago are gone.
It's probably demographics to a large degree. A lot of people have families and family-related activities and they largely drop out of random socialization.
Where do you live??? In my area is totally dead 30 miles in every direction. I would have to travel 45min to the city to find a place playing live music.
Australian city here and yeah you just have to know where to look. There aren't anywhere near as many indie/original artists as there were back in the 80-90's, but those were the heydays. Heaps of cover bands still if you want to dance to older stuff, and I notice some of them get a younger crowd. Then there are the music festivals etc.
Some teen dancing on a streaming service is very different from a venue charging admission and beverages for a couple hundred people spending an evening out.
it looks more like complex twitching or precise execution of an acrobatic program but lacking the soul which would qualify it as dancing. more like little robots trying to dance.
> This is a technology problem. Media technology (radio, recordings, television, and movies) has essentially killed live performance of all kind compared to what it was once like.
Not sure I agree, or maybe just partly. Radio has been around for over a hundred years. Movies too. Bars and hotels have been able to play recorded music on cassette, then CD, now streaming, for at least 70 years.
This decline of the working musician is a much more recent phenomenon.
Radio and TV have not had the addictive effects that 'social media' has on many. So many people of all ages struggle to put their phone down for an extended amount of time. So many choose to scroll or swipe instead of socializing outside/with others.
What is that idea that people don't dance? How and where people dance change, but people still dance. Example are:
- Professional dancers, and other performers with a dance component
- Partner dancers, who usually do in in some sort of club
- Partygoers, going to night clubs, music festivals and raves
- Fitness, doing aerobics or whatever name the latest "dance as exercise" thing has
- People in house parties, dancing with friends for birthdays, new years,...
- People dancing in front of a camera, for some social media
- Street dancers
- People just dancing alone at home
Maybe there are less balls with live musicians, but there are new trends related to dancing. Remember flash mobs? Where people just get together, dance for a few minutes and leave. And TikTok, one of the most popular social network today was built on people doing silly dances, and it is still a major component.
Technology definitely plays into it. As an aside, I stopped in an a old bar recently that was long known for regularly having live jazz and the bartender mentioned that they hadn't had live music since the covid lockdowns.
Organised dancing is no more "critical" than cursive. Every generation thinks their version of entertainment and social bonding was better and what the kids are doing is inferior and dumb.
And the reason young people are doing less in-person socialisation is less because home entertainment has gotten better and more because in-person socialisation has gotten worse, especially in America where people have nowhere they could socialise in walking distance, can't afford a car (and would get arrested for drunk driving if they could), can't afford to get molested in a techbro fake taxi, and if they tried to cycle they'll get run down by a boomer in a giant truck who was playing candy crush.
There are some great recordings of music out there but fundamentally their sum is worthless up against a society where there is music and dance being performed all the time.
Maybe modern medicine and food abundance is worth it but the imitation of art is a poor substitute.
I can assert that on the European cities I move around, there is usually some kind of Salsa club, eventually extending to other themes like Tango, Bachata, Kizomba, Zouk,...
This is all true, but irrelevant to the article linked above, which is specifically about gig musicians in bands in the early 21st Century—long after the change you’re talking about.
Bands are actually playing more live music today than they did back then, to help replace the revenue they used to get from recorded music.
Regular dancing (Tango classes, practicas and milongas 3-4 times per week) has been an indispensable contributor to keeping my sanity as a single person.
When I stop for more than a couple of weeks my vitality and zest for life clearly diminish.
I don't think this is it. At least, you're not pointing your ire at the right tech.
Instrumental acts aren't as popular as they once were. In the cities recorded beats make up more than half the gig. These are performed by a musician on a laptop. They might have dancers, for some entertainment. So the gig pool is lessened. The article so much admits the stars, as they call them, made the most money off of Band People. They had more gigs, so they could cobble together a career. Music has always been a precarious living.
Then add in the downturn of nightlife in general. Restaurants and bars tell the same story: young people aren't drinking. Businesses built on already slim margins are getting squeezed beyond break even. Is an indy band going to make up the difference in admission or cost-to-perform to a struggling bar? Dubious. If they have a following maybe; but then those artist aren't struggling anyway.
Young people are also making less money at a time when prices are sky high. A night out drinking even just a couple of beers can easily surge to over a hundred or two hundred dollars depending how hard you go. When I was in college that would've been ~$30-40. For every 3 times I went out with friends, they can afford only 1.
Live music and performance offers an experience that passive consumption, like TV and Radio, just can't emulate. If the prices come down the economics of music will make sense again. Until then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Having lived in NYC, Broadway, off broadway, off off broadway etc. look like they are thriving. I don’t think recorded media comes even close to the novelty and spectacle a theatre production is. Have small towns really lost all their theatres?
New York City is the greatest concentration of wealth on the planet. The continuation of theatre there should come as no surprise.
I am speaking of the cultural shift in entertainment, from a variety of local live options on most days of the week to just television in most places across the country.
I should also emphasize that the persistence of community theatres that mostly recycle the classics (endless Shakespeare, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and The Crucible) is not a substitute for actual thriving local entertainment, but a shadow and a memory of what once was.
It's not that they lost all of them, but that they make far less money, while the top performers in NYC do well.
It's not unlike what happened to soccer as television got cheaper and cheaper: You can go watch your town's third division team, or you can watch Real Madrid play on TV. In 3rd division nobody can be professional, in 2nd division you make less money accounting for inflation than 30 years ago, but the top players in the top teams are even bigger stars, now that the entire world can watch them play every game.
And on theater, let's not forget that many parts of the spectacle are almost impossible to take on the road. You aren't going to feed a production of Phantom of the Opera in a small town for 3 months: National tours rely on 2 weeks per large-ish metro. And when you are only going to stay there for 2 weeks, there are things you just can't get away with, economically speaking. The equity Hadestown tour would need to remodel way too much to accoout for the lift on broadway. The non-equity tour, which plays even shorter windows, can't even rely on the turntable on the floor. The car in Back to the future isn't going to fly over the audience, do half as much movement, or get fire effects on the scenario.
And even if you look in Broadway itself, many don't recoup their own costs. For every Hamilton or Lion king there are many shows that don't last 6 months.
I think it's more accurate to say it became a "premium". I could probably find some live music at a rinky dink mom-and-pop cafe in a far out suburb even as late as the 90's if I tried.
By now, that prestige of a live music seems to only really come from a bigger joint, or as more of a passion project than as an expected way to get customers in.
>Have small towns really lost all their theatres?
It's mostly a thing regulated to colleges. So it will depend on that. I haven't seen a smaller town without a college that still has traditional theatre around, personally. Though I have seen forums where that scene would obviously have hosted such events, abandoned.
The increase in real estate costs severely limits the opportunities for musicians to play live. I've seen some cover bands randomly at bars, but it's rough out there.
I also remember in my youth in Miami there were numerous clubs just for different genres of music for Hardcore, Ska, punk and everything in between where people would play local shows. It's all but dead now.
The town I live in has 6000 people and there's a play or live music event in the town hall every couple of weeks, maybe more often in summer. I don't go to many, one or two a year, but presumably enough people turn out.
> Have small towns really lost all their theatres?
Yes.
I spent the first half of my life as a working actor, and this has been a decades-long process. By "my day" ('90s - '00s) I looked at CVs and heard stories from older actors and said "there was a theatre [by which I meant somewhere that offered paying work] there?"
Summer-stock, where I did a lot of gigs in my twenties, is nothing like what it was then, and I'm sure I would get that response from young actors now, if they heard my stories. Even the larger venues are on life-support. CalShakes closed down this summer. OSF is struggling.
Many places have community theatres, but those are like garage bands: hobbies, pursued for recreation and socialization, where no one draws a wage or has professional aspirations. (And, you know, the vast majority of the attendees have personal ties to the cast and crew.)
I do improvisational comedy, which is a form of theater. it's a niche thing where I will see basically the same faces around town, and that's in a major metropolitan area.
One of the most culturally developed and wealthiest places on earth has lots of live spectacles..
Color me shocked.
On the other hand, I my 150k people city in southern Poland there was no shortage of entertainment, theaters, dance halls and parties 50 years ago under the communist regime.
My grandparents partied all of the time, their pictures are an endless collection of parties, literally people bringing a sausage, a potato salad, few vodkas to some elementary school or industry plant warehouse and having fun from 6 pm to late at night. They went to see live boxing, soccer games, theater, concerts, movies.
I'm 37 none of my friends lives like that, none. There are many more restaurants, probably 20 times as many.
I'm strongly convinced that people used to have more fun once.
My grandma thinks 100% the same. She constantly wonders why are people much better now under any measurable metric like education or wealth, yet they seem to really do nothing in their life.
wow oh wow what a great comment. I think the reason dance went away is a lot of men engaged in predatory behavior while drunk, that is that would approach the woman from behind and "grind" himself on her which is really just sexual assault.
I often think about how we replace things with technology and say it's better. Bread is another example in my opinion. Towns used to have bread makers, well respected and well paid. Now, at least here in the USA we replaced the bread makers with machines. We got rid of the bread makers and ultimately replaced them with engineers who design the machines and repair men. Even they've been replaced, once designed there's no need for the engineer and it's often cheaper to buy than repair so the repair man too went away. What we're left with is subpar bread. How is any of this progress?
I suspect you can make better bread more consistently with machines.
But that would requires trying to make good bread. Not trying to make something passable for an American (and barely edible for a French) with the highest profit margin.
Most people who make a living as a musician these days do so by being a "renaissance man" of sorts, where they make their money doing a multitude of different things. This includes playing live, but some other examples live sound, stage tech, lighting, promoting/booking events, instrument trade shows, and composing music. You can think of this as being "T-Shaped" in the software industry, except the difference is in the music industry, you need to be "T-Shaped" just to survive, not simply to excel. The "long part of the T" is what you generally want to do most of the time, and it's usually how people identify their job when asked. But really, most of us do a combination of many different things to get by, almost none of these jobs pay enough or are regular enough to do it on their own.
This was, and still is, a HUGE shift in the way I live my life after moving careers from software development into music composition...
Even as a film scorer, who has jobs that last for a long time and include many personal conversations with the film makers, you're not guaranteed to get back-to-back gigs, so when you're done with one score, what's next? It's not like there's always someone handing you jobs if you're doing this by yourself. But that's my preferred angle, because the jobs do last longer and there's a more regular (and higher) payout. It just takes a lot of back and forth with the people making the film, in order to get the vibes just right.
From what I have seen as an occasional musician and running sound is that these days most musicians are not willing to make the sacrifices and put in the time, they will not take that poorly paying weekly gig and spend a year or two refining their performance and learning to read the audience which is a major part of making it in music.
I know a good number a professional musicians who have made it to the point where they can live off of music without constantly working, every single one of them started out the same way, playing every single show they could regardless of pay or location. This started to change around 2010, the venue I used to do sound for primarily targeted musicians who were starting out either on the local scene or national scene (just starting to tour and trying to make a name out of their home town), by 2015 music was mostly done there because the 19 year olds who had only played a few shows were not happy with $25 and a meal to sit on stage with their guitar for an hour, they wanted $100 and expected to play to a full room.
The boom in home recording also probably played a role, the starting out musicians are often resistant to it because they see it as pedestrian and not for serious musicians, musicians record in studios, not at home. Record on anything anyway you can and bring a few dozen copies to sell at those poorly paying gigs.
>they will not take that poorly paying weekly gig and spend a year or two refining their performance and learning to read the audience which is a major part of making it in music.
they literally cannot afford to do such things unless they are already homeless. It could have been an okay side hustle as recent as a decade ago. But today you're not gonna do much more than grab grocery money without being in a very specific scene. That meal you mention can easily cost as much as what they were paid for the gig.
It's been declining for decades, no doubt. But when the economy starts getting hard, "passion projects" dry up. being paid $100 a week is much closer to a passion project than a side hustle at this point.
That is entry level for people who have no audience, the musicians equivalent of a paid internship and pays better than most entry level jobs with a bar so low, three chords will get you through the door, two if you are good. Beyond the flat rate there is often a tip jar and merchandise sales, a $50 gig can easily bring in a few hundred. And you make connections, get more gigs, develop an audience, make a name, etc. Once you develop a name you get paid better and even start getting a cut of cover and bar sales. The weekly house band gigs are pretty much being paid for band practice.
Unless you are working two full time jobs or the like it is easy money and affordable, broke teens working 30 hours a week washing dishes manage it. You may only make $50-$100 a gig starting out but you make it in an hour or two and as soon as you start drawing a crowd you will start getting better gigs.
What gig? For that matter, what audience? I was in a band in the 90's and we could find poorly paying gigs to a relatively full venue on a semi-regular basis. I took a long break to raise some kids and just got back into it in the past couple of years and... there's nothing out there any more. Nobody's hiring musicians because nobody's listening to them.
Yeah definitely. I’m a musician but I don’t have an interest in being heard, but I’ve noticed that those who do want to be heard don’t want to put in the effort to be heard.
There was a brief period in history when Being In A Band was a big deal. That's bracketed by, perhaps, the British Invasion and Myspace Music. Before that, musicians were low-paid background music systems. After that, anybody could do it at garage-band level. In between was the brief era of the Rock Star. The nostalgia here is for that era.
Josephine Baker was a star. Bach and Mozart were stars. Pythagoras was more famous for music than math, during his lifetime (well over two thousand years ago). The decline of a particular business model is a legit observation but it doesn’t change this fundamental aspect of music.
They very much were; there is a reason why the vaudevillians were all poor immigrants and why much of the modern entertainment industry was established by entrepreneurs/conmen running away to California to escape Thomas Edison.
Yeah. There seems to also be the implicit assumption that (recorded) pop music, whilst only a relatively recent phenomenon, is here to stay. It isn't. It had a golden age after recording and reproduction technology became cheap enough to own and before streaming services came along, gave us too much choice and siloed our tastes. I don't think I'd change much — I mainly listen to 'weird' stuff that probably wouldn't have existed, let alone be discoverable, without such services — but the pop era does seem to be over. No one cares about 'the charts' anymore. In my parents' day it was a primary cultural reference point that seemingly everyone followed; now almost no one I know would be able to tell me what's in the top ten at the moment.
Tastes may be siloed but they're also a lot more concentrated. Recorded pop music is bigger than ever. In an environment where recommendation services drive a lot of discovery, music is more winner take all than ever.
I've played music my entire life (picked up a guitar at 6 years old and just never put it down). I actually just released a new record last Friday (https://open.spotify.com/album/6JU0jmz537a6r2xrTvCcmn?si=eg4...). I joined a band when I was 15 (~2004), and we had some long tail success. We were able to tour, play huge shows (the Gorge in Washington, sell out the Showbox in downtown Seattle, an arena here or there). After high school I went to school for audio production, and even then I knew it was going to be tough to make a living. I ended up pivoting, studying math, now I'm in machine learning.
Music is the thing I love more than anything. I love writing it, releasing records, playing shows, and connecting with people on an emotional level. Never once have I considered it possible to have a fruitful career as a musician, despite seeing more success as a musician than most can ever dream of. Additionally, the industry (like many others) has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. In many ways, it has put much more power back into the hands of artists: you don't need a huge studio/record label/promotion to release a record. You can just release records, and promote them yourself. The flip side of that is there are SO many more people releasing music these days, which makes it really difficult to cut through the noise if your music is halfway decent.
Finally, recommendation algorithms have truly transformed the landscape of content creation, likely irreversibly. I get messages _daily_ from people who have "hacked" the TikTok algorithm, and can get my bands plays. There is an entire cottage industry of algorithm "hackers", some of them actually have results too.
One odd anecdote: I love Alex G. I've been listening to him for over a decade, and have flown out to see him play in places like New york/Austin TX. A few years ago he played in Seattle, and the entire demographic of the audience seem to've changed overnight. Way younger, more "mainstream" looking kids, filled the Showbox in Seattle. The strangest part was that no one seemed to know the words to his songs anymore. I did some digging, and he'd gone viral on TikTok. A few of his songs went absolutely bananas on there, and it completely transformed his fanbase. They knew the words to those songs, but not his entire set. Is this bad? I have no idea, but the trimming down of content into bite sized morsels _feels_ bad to me, and I believe it will dramatically alter this next generation's baseline attention span. Again, not a moral judgement, just a factual claim.
>The flip side of that is there are SO many more people releasing music these days, which makes it really difficult to cut through the noise if your music is halfway decent.
I think one thing important to consider here is that part of the experience of enjoying music is not necessarily how good the song is, but how much, and how many, other people are enjoying it. People often listen to (mediocre) music simply to have a shared emotional experience with others.
Imagine bonding over gruel, because everyone else is eating it and you can’t connect with them unless you are able to discuss the consistency and mouthfeel of the gruel.
> They knew the words to those songs, but not his entire set.
This has always been true for recorded music. Originally people would buy mostly singles after hearing a song on the radio, then maybe listen to the B-side too.
Listening to complete albums was only popular for a short while before streaming brought single songs back to prominence as the main way people consume music.
Don't disagree. I'm merely commenting on the dramatic change in his audience, which IMO opinion was driven by TikTok virality. Going from a crowd of people who were singing along to people standing around waiting for the "TikTok hits" was really strange.
Not for alex g. He has had a cult following as the best songwriter in rock music for a decade plus. Up until he took off on tiktok everyone at his shows knew almost all his songs. I guess really the complaint here is just that he went from cult musician to a having more pop appeal.
Man the tiktokification of alex g absolutely blows. Same with mitski, unbearable live shows now. It is a bit difficult for me to be mad about it though because at the end of the day the complaint just boils down to being mad that these artists have become more popular, pop sets have always been like this. More popular = more money for them which cheers me up a bit
I don't know if it's good financially, but do you have a bandcamp? I like getting cds / mp3s there usually and it doesn't need a sign in to listen to the song.
We don't. I probably should make one of those, but as a solo act, the number of platforms I need to keep up with is ridiculous. Reddit/Spotify/Instagram keep my time occupied, it's brutal honestly.
I live in a small town in a rural area near the centre of the UK.
I was recently told by a guitar shop owner that he sold more PAs than anything. Why, I asked, is hard to get gigs now?
"I'm playing 3 nights a week", he said, "1 with my Beatles cover band, 2 general covers". His band was a twosome with backing tracks. £350 a night, split 2 ways. I was suprised you could do that well in such a remote area, but it would be a good start towards a living.
the endless need for ever-increasing profits is what kills any creative profession.
You see this in Hollywood with the stremaers now underpaying the people that make TV shows and movies possible, offshoring to save a few dollars, reducing the number of writes on staff and so on.
I'm not surprised to see the same forces at play for session musicians and so forth.
This is a systemic problem. Companies will happily kill an industry to increase short-term profits.
What holds this system together is that too many people believe that they will ultimately benefit from the exploitation built into the system plus people who love the creative skills they've spent years honing willing to work for pennies to stay in that industry. You see the same dynamic in the video game industry.
Why do you think that are so many willing to work for pennies, instead of changing profession? Or so many willing to pick a profession that is known beforehand to usually have low wages?
> the endless need for ever-increasing profits is what kills any creative profession. You see this in Hollywood with ... Companies will happily kill an industry to increase short-term profits.
From my understanding Hollywood is being killed by the outsiders - TikTok et al influencers taking viewers away from Hollywood. The corporate owners are cutting costs, but it's primarily to survive. And the reason that TikTok influencers would be killing Hollywood is simply because Hollywood has (had) the money, fame, and influence, and the TikTok crowd wanted it. It's creator-on-creator violence in a fight for status.
well at least you can make very comfortable money in games. Maybe less than half of what you get at google, but half of $300k is still far past what most people can ever hope to aspire from. Games are still tech after all.
On the indie side, I'd much rather take my hopes to transfer that talent to makig the next hollow knight than the equivalent in music to be the next Bieber. I'm not going to call it a meritocracy, but games (for now) still have a reasonable monetization model. I hope by the time I can make my own game that that's still somewhat the case.
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It would have once been unthinkable for even a small city of <=100,000 people to lack multiple live entertainment options 7 days a week. No more—we’re all at home, watching our particular chosen thing, listening to our particular chosen album, playing our own chosen game.
Some will claim this has been an advancement. “How lame,” they say, “it must have been to have to go to the Local Entertainment Venue and just listen to whatever act was on that night. Nowadays I can listen to Acid Techno Super Hop, my particular chosen favorite, as much as I want.” But the losses in communal behavior have been significant. Most critical is the disappearance of dance. Dance is a fundamental human behavior, stretching back to Paleolithic times. It is nowhere to be seen in many cities today, because no one has any occasion to do it except weddings, at which it is very common now to stand around awkwardly after the bride and groom have fumbled through some rehearsed step.
Critical are the communities and communal activities. Those have disappeared. We need to live in environments where people eat in communal environments not centered around nuclear families. That’s the critical piece that is missing and making everyone feel empty.
Music and dance is but an aspect of this.
Generally humanity evolved to live in tribes and that is where we are most content. In modern times the closest where I’ve seen this is living in dorms or places with shared kitchens and communal eating areas. This promotes the type of communities that make humans happiest.
There was a wave of business plans and startups that tried to tackle this problem by building apartment communities that are more “social”. One that exists nowadays is https://www.flow.life/en/. But these businesses get it all wrong because they lack the communal kitchen and eating areas. The environment needs to have a forcing function to make people form communities not have it as some optional social event. The former makes people much much much closer and the bonds much stronger. Anyone who’s lived in such an environment can attest to this.
Despite the fact that there are signs everywhere in the laundry rooms with a list of tasks that need to be done at the end of the session, from my experience, 50% of the time, none of the tasks such as sweep the floors, clean the filters of the dryers are done.
Most people simply don't care.
Same with the courtyard, people let their kids run free in it and at the end of playtime, the kids just leave all their toys, bikes, pushbikes everywhere so much so that if you want to go in the courtyard, you basically have to move things out of the way.
The parents are there watching their kids during playtime but it doesnt come to their mind that someone else might want to use the space. They have no consideration for anyone but themselves when it would take just a few minutes to gather all the toys and put them in a corner somewhere.
Then there is the noise, people leave their dogs alone and the dogs start barking for hours because it's scared and when you suggest that maybe they should take the dog with them, they act all offended as if you suggested something truly horrible.
Not to mention, the guy who decides that 2am on a Wednesday is the perfect time to blast music with his windows open.
So, no thanks , I have had enough of communal living. Most people just don't know how to behave in a community and I am tired of picking up the slack of other people and being see as the bad guy on the block because I ask people to follow some basic rules so that we can all live together peacefully.
I have a friend like you who wants everyone to live in "communities" with "communal living". He is just ultimately bossy and alienates all his friends (including me to be honest).
Try and force me to get to know my neighbours -- I simply will not. The last thing I need is someone trying to borrow "butter" or "dropping by" from 603 interrupting my desperately needed self time after working a 10 hour day.
Let me find my own friends and leave me alone to go out DANCING! And I'll find my friends no problem!
I lived in this kind of kind of setup in school. And with all respect, no. Not even close.
My lived experience was that of someone that was the target of said groups to bond over bullying. The verbal abuse I could take. The spitting on my face, the punches to my gut that left me bruised for days on end, fine. No permanent damage.
But I had my throat strangled more times then I want to remember; hands, wires, cords, rope cutting the air off from my lungs and seeing the gray take over my vision. Blacking out over and over again as they derived whatever joy that they took in having my body slump still between their fingers.
And that was every moment I of my existence. No escape. No safety. No relief. I just had to endure and bear it, because what other choice was there? Who was going to help? Who'd believe the word of the wierdo over that of the model students? And they for their part, insist that that what they did was nothing wrong. I didn't die or was maimed, ergo, no foul.
Maybe what you describe is great if you're part of the in group, and if so, great! Go and live in these arrangements then. But what you describe is a living hell for the people that become the target of torment for those groups where no where to run.
Now that place is work. For me playing in bands is another place.
Says you. For me it is. I suspect for many others it is. I have restless legs syndrome. It’s a neurological disorder that makes your legs and feet feel like they have to move. A lot of people have it. Doctors prescribe drugs for it. What actually helps me? Dancing. This is just one of many good effects I get from dancing. My legs and body need to move. I’m not a good dancer. I look like an idiot. But I absolutely have to dance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begich_Towers
The problem as I see, given a choice, people rather eat/do/listen/feel things that they want, not the things they’re being forced on. In the past, you didn’t really have a choice and was forced to do what everyone is doing. Now, to live in such communities, you’ll have to get rid of the choice. Which also sucks.
I go dancing regularly??
I have three tickets next week to see <$30 bands.
I can’t relate to any of this.
I regularly see live music accidentally just by showing up at various bars and breweries. We have several groups doing local theater. We have two multi-day music festivals in the summer, and at least a dozen more within a few hours drive.
There is plenty of live entertainment for those who want it. If I had to guess, I would say that there is maybe two nights per week where there isn't live music, but if you add in trivia nights, rec center activities, etc. You could easily fill your schedule any day of the week
Have you looked at TikTok? It is full of young people performing incredibly complex dance moves.
We've traded social connection for micro-dopamine hits.
And I don't think I'm being an old man shouting at clouds. I think it's genuinely worse.
Not sure I agree, or maybe just partly. Radio has been around for over a hundred years. Movies too. Bars and hotels have been able to play recorded music on cassette, then CD, now streaming, for at least 70 years.
This decline of the working musician is a much more recent phenomenon.
What is that idea that people don't dance? How and where people dance change, but people still dance. Example are:
- Professional dancers, and other performers with a dance component
- Partner dancers, who usually do in in some sort of club
- Partygoers, going to night clubs, music festivals and raves
- Fitness, doing aerobics or whatever name the latest "dance as exercise" thing has
- People in house parties, dancing with friends for birthdays, new years,...
- People dancing in front of a camera, for some social media
- Street dancers
- People just dancing alone at home
Maybe there are less balls with live musicians, but there are new trends related to dancing. Remember flash mobs? Where people just get together, dance for a few minutes and leave. And TikTok, one of the most popular social network today was built on people doing silly dances, and it is still a major component.
And the reason young people are doing less in-person socialisation is less because home entertainment has gotten better and more because in-person socialisation has gotten worse, especially in America where people have nowhere they could socialise in walking distance, can't afford a car (and would get arrested for drunk driving if they could), can't afford to get molested in a techbro fake taxi, and if they tried to cycle they'll get run down by a boomer in a giant truck who was playing candy crush.
There are some great recordings of music out there but fundamentally their sum is worthless up against a society where there is music and dance being performed all the time.
Maybe modern medicine and food abundance is worth it but the imitation of art is a poor substitute.
I think you're on to something vitally important with this. I think about it often.
Bands are actually playing more live music today than they did back then, to help replace the revenue they used to get from recorded music.
When I stop for more than a couple of weeks my vitality and zest for life clearly diminish.
Instrumental acts aren't as popular as they once were. In the cities recorded beats make up more than half the gig. These are performed by a musician on a laptop. They might have dancers, for some entertainment. So the gig pool is lessened. The article so much admits the stars, as they call them, made the most money off of Band People. They had more gigs, so they could cobble together a career. Music has always been a precarious living.
Then add in the downturn of nightlife in general. Restaurants and bars tell the same story: young people aren't drinking. Businesses built on already slim margins are getting squeezed beyond break even. Is an indy band going to make up the difference in admission or cost-to-perform to a struggling bar? Dubious. If they have a following maybe; but then those artist aren't struggling anyway.
Young people are also making less money at a time when prices are sky high. A night out drinking even just a couple of beers can easily surge to over a hundred or two hundred dollars depending how hard you go. When I was in college that would've been ~$30-40. For every 3 times I went out with friends, they can afford only 1.
Live music and performance offers an experience that passive consumption, like TV and Radio, just can't emulate. If the prices come down the economics of music will make sense again. Until then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My friend who used to make nothing today makes a lot by doing tiktok videos and offering private lessons for good money.
If you want to perform live and make living as such yeaa opportunities are less there.
I am speaking of the cultural shift in entertainment, from a variety of local live options on most days of the week to just television in most places across the country.
I should also emphasize that the persistence of community theatres that mostly recycle the classics (endless Shakespeare, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and The Crucible) is not a substitute for actual thriving local entertainment, but a shadow and a memory of what once was.
It's not unlike what happened to soccer as television got cheaper and cheaper: You can go watch your town's third division team, or you can watch Real Madrid play on TV. In 3rd division nobody can be professional, in 2nd division you make less money accounting for inflation than 30 years ago, but the top players in the top teams are even bigger stars, now that the entire world can watch them play every game.
And on theater, let's not forget that many parts of the spectacle are almost impossible to take on the road. You aren't going to feed a production of Phantom of the Opera in a small town for 3 months: National tours rely on 2 weeks per large-ish metro. And when you are only going to stay there for 2 weeks, there are things you just can't get away with, economically speaking. The equity Hadestown tour would need to remodel way too much to accoout for the lift on broadway. The non-equity tour, which plays even shorter windows, can't even rely on the turntable on the floor. The car in Back to the future isn't going to fly over the audience, do half as much movement, or get fire effects on the scenario.
And even if you look in Broadway itself, many don't recoup their own costs. For every Hamilton or Lion king there are many shows that don't last 6 months.
By now, that prestige of a live music seems to only really come from a bigger joint, or as more of a passion project than as an expected way to get customers in.
>Have small towns really lost all their theatres?
It's mostly a thing regulated to colleges. So it will depend on that. I haven't seen a smaller town without a college that still has traditional theatre around, personally. Though I have seen forums where that scene would obviously have hosted such events, abandoned.
I also remember in my youth in Miami there were numerous clubs just for different genres of music for Hardcore, Ska, punk and everything in between where people would play local shows. It's all but dead now.
Yes.
I spent the first half of my life as a working actor, and this has been a decades-long process. By "my day" ('90s - '00s) I looked at CVs and heard stories from older actors and said "there was a theatre [by which I meant somewhere that offered paying work] there?"
Summer-stock, where I did a lot of gigs in my twenties, is nothing like what it was then, and I'm sure I would get that response from young actors now, if they heard my stories. Even the larger venues are on life-support. CalShakes closed down this summer. OSF is struggling.
Many places have community theatres, but those are like garage bands: hobbies, pursued for recreation and socialization, where no one draws a wage or has professional aspirations. (And, you know, the vast majority of the attendees have personal ties to the cast and crew.)
It's grim.
Even San Francisco does not have many venues, given how vibrant a city it once was.
Previously lived in LA, even there venues were closing left and right even before the pandemic.
It's the taste in music too, high rental costs for venues.
Another reason we want to move to NYC once our kids are off to college.
Color me shocked.
On the other hand, I my 150k people city in southern Poland there was no shortage of entertainment, theaters, dance halls and parties 50 years ago under the communist regime.
My grandparents partied all of the time, their pictures are an endless collection of parties, literally people bringing a sausage, a potato salad, few vodkas to some elementary school or industry plant warehouse and having fun from 6 pm to late at night. They went to see live boxing, soccer games, theater, concerts, movies.
I'm 37 none of my friends lives like that, none. There are many more restaurants, probably 20 times as many.
I'm strongly convinced that people used to have more fun once.
My grandma thinks 100% the same. She constantly wonders why are people much better now under any measurable metric like education or wealth, yet they seem to really do nothing in their life.
Muzak was a thing long before that. So I don't see how that can be the cause.
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I often think about how we replace things with technology and say it's better. Bread is another example in my opinion. Towns used to have bread makers, well respected and well paid. Now, at least here in the USA we replaced the bread makers with machines. We got rid of the bread makers and ultimately replaced them with engineers who design the machines and repair men. Even they've been replaced, once designed there's no need for the engineer and it's often cheaper to buy than repair so the repair man too went away. What we're left with is subpar bread. How is any of this progress?
But that would requires trying to make good bread. Not trying to make something passable for an American (and barely edible for a French) with the highest profit margin.
This was, and still is, a HUGE shift in the way I live my life after moving careers from software development into music composition...
Even as a film scorer, who has jobs that last for a long time and include many personal conversations with the film makers, you're not guaranteed to get back-to-back gigs, so when you're done with one score, what's next? It's not like there's always someone handing you jobs if you're doing this by yourself. But that's my preferred angle, because the jobs do last longer and there's a more regular (and higher) payout. It just takes a lot of back and forth with the people making the film, in order to get the vibes just right.
I know a good number a professional musicians who have made it to the point where they can live off of music without constantly working, every single one of them started out the same way, playing every single show they could regardless of pay or location. This started to change around 2010, the venue I used to do sound for primarily targeted musicians who were starting out either on the local scene or national scene (just starting to tour and trying to make a name out of their home town), by 2015 music was mostly done there because the 19 year olds who had only played a few shows were not happy with $25 and a meal to sit on stage with their guitar for an hour, they wanted $100 and expected to play to a full room.
The boom in home recording also probably played a role, the starting out musicians are often resistant to it because they see it as pedestrian and not for serious musicians, musicians record in studios, not at home. Record on anything anyway you can and bring a few dozen copies to sell at those poorly paying gigs.
they literally cannot afford to do such things unless they are already homeless. It could have been an okay side hustle as recent as a decade ago. But today you're not gonna do much more than grab grocery money without being in a very specific scene. That meal you mention can easily cost as much as what they were paid for the gig.
It's been declining for decades, no doubt. But when the economy starts getting hard, "passion projects" dry up. being paid $100 a week is much closer to a passion project than a side hustle at this point.
Unless you are working two full time jobs or the like it is easy money and affordable, broke teens working 30 hours a week washing dishes manage it. You may only make $50-$100 a gig starting out but you make it in an hour or two and as soon as you start drawing a crowd you will start getting better gigs.
Or already rich
What gig? For that matter, what audience? I was in a band in the 90's and we could find poorly paying gigs to a relatively full venue on a semi-regular basis. I took a long break to raise some kids and just got back into it in the past couple of years and... there's nothing out there any more. Nobody's hiring musicians because nobody's listening to them.
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Not a new observation.
it's actually much more persvasibe and happening to pretty much all culture
I refer to the siloing of our tastes; or rather to how we can now develop rarer tastes by means of massively increased connectivity
so it's not just pop music, but all of what it means to be "mainstream culture" that's weirdly getting siloed and more rarified
Music is the thing I love more than anything. I love writing it, releasing records, playing shows, and connecting with people on an emotional level. Never once have I considered it possible to have a fruitful career as a musician, despite seeing more success as a musician than most can ever dream of. Additionally, the industry (like many others) has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. In many ways, it has put much more power back into the hands of artists: you don't need a huge studio/record label/promotion to release a record. You can just release records, and promote them yourself. The flip side of that is there are SO many more people releasing music these days, which makes it really difficult to cut through the noise if your music is halfway decent.
Finally, recommendation algorithms have truly transformed the landscape of content creation, likely irreversibly. I get messages _daily_ from people who have "hacked" the TikTok algorithm, and can get my bands plays. There is an entire cottage industry of algorithm "hackers", some of them actually have results too.
One odd anecdote: I love Alex G. I've been listening to him for over a decade, and have flown out to see him play in places like New york/Austin TX. A few years ago he played in Seattle, and the entire demographic of the audience seem to've changed overnight. Way younger, more "mainstream" looking kids, filled the Showbox in Seattle. The strangest part was that no one seemed to know the words to his songs anymore. I did some digging, and he'd gone viral on TikTok. A few of his songs went absolutely bananas on there, and it completely transformed his fanbase. They knew the words to those songs, but not his entire set. Is this bad? I have no idea, but the trimming down of content into bite sized morsels _feels_ bad to me, and I believe it will dramatically alter this next generation's baseline attention span. Again, not a moral judgement, just a factual claim.
I think one thing important to consider here is that part of the experience of enjoying music is not necessarily how good the song is, but how much, and how many, other people are enjoying it. People often listen to (mediocre) music simply to have a shared emotional experience with others.
Imagine bonding over gruel, because everyone else is eating it and you can’t connect with them unless you are able to discuss the consistency and mouthfeel of the gruel.
This has always been true for recorded music. Originally people would buy mostly singles after hearing a song on the radio, then maybe listen to the B-side too.
Listening to complete albums was only popular for a short while before streaming brought single songs back to prominence as the main way people consume music.
I was recently told by a guitar shop owner that he sold more PAs than anything. Why, I asked, is hard to get gigs now?
"I'm playing 3 nights a week", he said, "1 with my Beatles cover band, 2 general covers". His band was a twosome with backing tracks. £350 a night, split 2 ways. I was suprised you could do that well in such a remote area, but it would be a good start towards a living.
It hits you like a ton of bricks.
This is a local Bay Area band and all 3 members are exquisitely skilled in more than one instrument.
https://www.howelldevine.com/
> It hits you like a ton of bricks.
This. Such an effect... And looks like it's not only about music but more general thing - when something of quality materializes...
You see this in Hollywood with the stremaers now underpaying the people that make TV shows and movies possible, offshoring to save a few dollars, reducing the number of writes on staff and so on.
I'm not surprised to see the same forces at play for session musicians and so forth.
This is a systemic problem. Companies will happily kill an industry to increase short-term profits.
What holds this system together is that too many people believe that they will ultimately benefit from the exploitation built into the system plus people who love the creative skills they've spent years honing willing to work for pennies to stay in that industry. You see the same dynamic in the video game industry.
From my understanding Hollywood is being killed by the outsiders - TikTok et al influencers taking viewers away from Hollywood. The corporate owners are cutting costs, but it's primarily to survive. And the reason that TikTok influencers would be killing Hollywood is simply because Hollywood has (had) the money, fame, and influence, and the TikTok crowd wanted it. It's creator-on-creator violence in a fight for status.
On the indie side, I'd much rather take my hopes to transfer that talent to makig the next hollow knight than the equivalent in music to be the next Bieber. I'm not going to call it a meritocracy, but games (for now) still have a reasonable monetization model. I hope by the time I can make my own game that that's still somewhat the case.