Ha, I had also flagged this to post.
The obvious solution is for America's universities to introduce a Master of Indie Arts program, allowing MIA credential-holders with at least one released album to receive health insurance and a living wage by teaching the fundamentals of indie craft to workshops full of MIA aspirants. I predict soaring enrollments!
Make sure your kids go into finance.
Can't. We're gentiles, but not WASPs.
Best of both worlds, work on the financing of the Keystone Pipeline. Profit!
I'm sure all the oil rushing through that pipeline will make a range of sounds that can be sampled and constructed into beautiful songs.
It's actually an ambitious performance art installation.
One thing I don't know is to what extent the Internet-enabled creative-class-as-starving-entrepreneurs model has skewed the earlier model of Steve Albini's trench of shit.
I couldn't believe jack conte was the person behind patreon in addition to all his other hustles. I cannot believe how productive people with inspiration can be. It is basically incredibly depressing.
I couldn't believe jack conte was the person behind patreon in addition to all his other hustles. I cannot believe how productive people with inspiration can be. It is basically incredibly depressing.
I think I was once one of them... I'm really having trouble figuring out when it all started to go away.
So, am I just too old for Pomplamoose and associated acts? Anyone want to advocate?
The name is familiar, but I can't thing of a song.
I'm the person who never heard of Feist until she was on Sesame Street.
And then somebody had to explain to me that she wasn't a children's singer but apparently wrote a song called "1, 2, 3, 4" for adults.
I really enjoy [Pomplamoose's] covers, and like about 2 in 7 of their originals. Associated acts? Eh. I play Wade Johnston's Christmas Spectacular from 2008 for the kids; they love it.
17.cont'd: Okay, so do I. The only Christmas songs I like.
My Terrible Friend's got like 3 songs, all of which are competent-to-excellent. Most of the rest are too twee even for me.
band you've probably heard of
Nobody told you that your blog audience got old?
This blog's audience was always already old. But that band has been discussed here before.
I was into the first handful of Pomplamoose covers but everything seemed to go downhill later. It's one of those things where the band has skill set A that you like and skill set B that's, meh, but as time goes by they go all-in on skill B. (in this case A = clever instrumental arranging, great sense of rhythm, B = quirky deadpan acting skills)
Maybe what I actually like is shoestring budgets and artistic stasis.
The two headliners came out behind on their tour, but part of that is that they paid their hired band decently. The musicians they hired came out ahead on this tour. So, like, three of five musicians did fine by touring. Just not Pomplemoose.
I have a friend who was in a band you've probably never heard of, but was reasonably successful. They toured cross country, opened for some really major acts, and sold out every concert. They broke even, which made them a viable band. Interestingly,* my friend's father, a former hippy, wanted him to drop out of his Ivy League school to pursue music, but my friend decided to leave the band and finish his degree. He now performs locally with a different band, and they get booked at some pretty serious venues. He still has his day job roasting coffee.
*Interesting in that the adults in my life are more counter-culture than their children.
Speaking of different social mores, I am pretty sure I'd be disowned if I went into finance. Having a well-paid job supporting the status quo is well below building cob houses or being an organic subsistence farmer in the hierarchy of acceptability. Things like lawyer are only acceptable if you're working for progressive causes.
Pomplamoose seems ok but I watched a few videos and saw the commercial where they did Christmas songs and the singer's hipster affectless facial expression thing really struck me as deeply annoying.
22: And then, of course, they got a bunch of comments saying "Of course you lost money, you bothered to pay your backup musicians decently."
I don't understand why they didn't get those musicians to work for free. Don't they know about the value of exposure?
Let me be the first to suggest they not pay their backup musicians.
I didn't realize Pomplamoose had started doing original songs. I was aware of them only for doing covers on YouTube.
As per TFA, I know, or am at least acquainted with, several successful or semi-successful indie musicians. I used to have a pretty good idea how much at least one of them made, because we shared a flat, but I could probably hazard a pretty decent guess on how much some of the others made, too, based on where they lived, and what their places looked like, etc.
I don't think any of them were/are making more money than they would have made if they'd come out of college and gotten 'proper' jobs, and a surprising number do the odd bit of casual or part-time work to bridge gaps between tours and albums. But at the same time, I expect given a choice between making, say, a teacher's salary and being a teacher, or making a teacher's salary and being an international touring/recording musician, they would all be pretty happy they've chosen the latter.*
* with the downside that music careers can be fairly finite, or tail off.
The other version of "they lost money because they paid their backup artists musicians" would be "they lost money because they decided to tour with six backup musicians, which they openly admit is an awful lot of backup musicians given the music they play." The fact that they lost money is significant, but they also straight up say that they spent a lot of money they didn't actually need to spend because they viewed the whole thing as an investment in future earnings.
I assume "investment in their future" is true, but they wouldn't have minded turning a profit.
I production-managed one of the shows they mention in their essay. They seemed nice enough, a touch amaeteurish but basically together. I have no memory of the music at all. This comment has added minimal value to the discussion but what can you do.
I was chatting the other day with the mom of one of the members of a local band, they've released two albums and have a contract, play gigs regularly. Adorably, they have to hang out outside when it isn't their set at most gigs because they aren't yet 21. The mom was mostly worried about when was it time to pull the plug on the full time music thing and go to uni, but she seemed to have it in decent perspective. Their a pretty good band, we have both their albums.
I know one of the three lesser Decemberists pretty well and they needed money from their parents to buy a house. And the Decemberists are at about the top of the indie world. The top two guys get the writing royalties and various invitations independent of the band and they've probably have got it made, in a solid middle class sense but not more.
I thought your son was a Decemberist. Did I get completely confused, or was he in a different band?
Do bands named after successful revolutions do better on earnings?
So, you'd look at Paul Revere and the Raiders... anyone else?
Depends. Has Delaware been destroyed?
On the Her Majesty album. He got pretty good money but not enough to live on. He left the band before it got famous. He's the Pete Best or whatever.
Jethro Tull, unless we're restricted to political revolutions.
And the Decemberists are at about the top of the indie world. The top two guys get the writing royalties and various invitations independent of the band and they've probably have got it made, in a solid middle class sense but not more.
I think I remember reading somewhere that the top guys in TV On The Radio were making $150K-$250K/yr at their peak. And that has to averaged out against the many years before that when they weren't making enough from music to pay rent.
So, enough to buy a house, if you happen to be in one of the most successful indie bands of the decade.
That is, enough to buy a house so long as you're not in or near an expensive city.
For example, in ND -- away from the oilfields.
3 BR 1 bath, $27,900, $103 / month. Why isn't ND full of Indy bands?
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1234-Western-Ave-Grafton-ND-58237/2104564990_zpid/
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Will this lure the heavy metal fanboy into another thread?
Ruben Bolling does "Richard Scarry's 21st Century Busytown Jobs ." The pig is a "content aggregator" caught in the act of ripping off a "content creator."
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44: Maybe it is.
But none of us have probably heard of any of them.
I just realized the last sentence of my 33 should have been "And then they made $5." Dammit.
The line item I was most surprised by was light rental. Bands at Fillmore-sized venues don't generally have notable lighting design (that's, like, an arena show thing). Between that and hauling their own amps, they probably could have made a small profit.
Actually, a lot of bands touring venues that size carry lighting packages, to set on the ground around the band. With all the fancy moving lights these days, you can carry very compact, efficient packages that add a lot of consistent production value. All the more so because some venues at this level - House of Blues, Fillmore - have a lot of lighting already, but many venues at this level don't, so if you want a good show you have to bring it. If I remember this band's evening correctly, the notable thing about their lighting package was that it was kinda homemade and funky, not what most bands at that level carry. But I imagine that's a function of them financing everything themselves.
Super interesting freight train.
After ten fucking years reading this blog, I finally see it touch on my field of expertise. You bet I'll go on about this all night if I can.
What's funny is I've been to the venues you mention and others and honestly? I'm a total philistine and never noticed the lights. That's me, though. I'm given to understand that I'm pretty idiosyncratic about music in some ways.
43 - and, pretty much by definition, successful musicians have to live/work in a few expensive cities - London, New York, LA - or else factor in travel to those cities as a major cost.
(Am sure there are people who don't fit that. But it's pretty hard to make it in the culture/media industries from North Dakota.)
Portland has been the home of a lot of musicians who flew into LA to work. But now Portland isn't cheap any more.
Nobody ever notices the lights, or if they do, it's some momentary flashy thing that's a byproduct of something else. The only place the "correct" light show exists is in the lighting designer's head, and no one will ever know if it's achieved, or care. Yet tour lighting designers will insist on great and unrealistic effort and cost to achieve that show, even if the day's parameters are totally unsuited to it. Sometimes I think it's just a racket. NB I am totally objective about this.
Maybe the really good lighting is the lighting you don't notice at all.
I'm so glad you said more, freight train! Having people pop up with pertinent and personal information is one of the best things about this blog.
They had the best blacklights ever in Winterland.
Nobody ever notices the lights, or if they do, it's some momentary flashy thing that's a byproduct of something else.
*Ahem.*
When I was seventeen and my sister was fourteen we went to see the Arizona Opera do Das Rheingold. The only comment my sister had about it afterward was that she loved the lighting design.
The lighting design at The Old Woman was really good. Better than the adaptation, I thought. (In the program notes Willem Dafoe wrote "I heard Bob Wilson say recently that one thing he's learned through the years is 'to enter the rehearsal room with no ideas, with a blank book.'" Guess what: when you do that, you end up with Standard Robert Wilson Play #19, a sort of colloid in which bits of Kharms are suspended, but somewhat smothered. Great lighting, though!)