Everything Is Free Now
Why People Keep Trying To Make Music Their Job
Photo courtesy of the author.
“It’s not set up for us to win.”
My friend is sitting at her kitchen table with a cup of tea. It’s the morning after our sold-out, reduced capacity show at a great, well-respected venue that we really love in our town. We’re doing the maths of what each band member gets paid, even from a show like that, and in short, our conclusion was “not much”.
We’ve covered the well-trodden ground of bemoaning what various streaming giants do to artists (which we’ve concluded is the absolutely finessed version of the “paid in exposure” nonsense that plagues independent musicians).
This was meant to be the end of a run of festival shows booked throughout January and early Feb, and instead it was the lone survivor - the first show of the year.
It’s been a great time to prove you’re not in music for the money.
Photo courtesy of the author.
By her own account, folk songstress Gillian Welch wrote her 2001 song “Everything Is Free” in tears. At that time, the tech giant dismantling the systems through which artists got paid for their work was Napster, and her record deal had just expired; she was a worker whose labor had just been slashed in value. Nashville, her hometown at the time, was going through a stage of being a ghost town after 10pm.
“Everything is free now/That’s what they say/everything I’ve ever done/I’ve gotta give it away”, she sings.
All of it feels familiar — similar ashes from a different fire.
Photo courtesy of the author.
Sydney, my current home city, here on the beautiful land of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation, has been having something of a ghost town moment itself. We had laws come in during 2014 that closed bottle shops at 10pm, bar lockouts at 1am, and the city center became absolutely deserted at night even pre-pandemic, as a flood of venue closures sent musicians and performers scurrying for other cities, and nightlife was ankle-tapped for a long time.
With great comedic timing, the last of these laws was repealed in February 2020.
So what do we do? What do we do when the venue closes? When the show is rescheduled for the third time? When the streaming giant won’t pay you for your work? When a group makes NFT’s of your property and says that they’ll figure out how to pay artists for it eventually? When all the barriers that were there pre-pandemic persist for marginalized people and communities?
Why do new artists keep throwing themselves at this?
Photo courtesy of the author.
Because, frankly, there’s something “beyond-us” about it. Philosophically, there are plenty of takes on why, but something ties together being sixteen and breathless at a One Direction arena show and hearing a friend’s band play in a suburban backyard. It links those things to all the generations of artists doing covers of Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, and being a kid learning every Taylor Swift lyric I could from the CD I borrowed from the library.
It’s the thread that links it all, and it’s powerful, hard to define, and doesn’t need money to be sustained, so, naturally, it’s exploited by companies who are happy to profit off this spring of creative output that shows no sign of ever halting.
“Someone hit the big score/figured it out,” Welch’s chorus laments, “That we’re gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay”.
Ali Flett has been running independent venues in Sydney since 2014, with a knack of transforming unusual spaces into creative community hubs. My band and I played our first ever headline show at her iconic Newsagency, and her new venture has transformed an old building which housed “The Alexander The Great Greek and Macedonian Social Club” into “The Great Club”, a go-to spot for international acts and up-and-comers alike.
Her description of the last two years in the industry was succinct; “Absolute shitfest.”
Photo courtesy of the author.
“Feel like my sheer determination and my hard working team are what’s kept me going,” she said, when asked how she’s managed to get through the past two years. “Other than that, fuck knows how.”
Independent venues like The Great Club are essential to the ecosystem of music and creative community wherever they crop up. It’s these, alongside house shows, church halls and hand-made merch, that have been the things that have paid, from my experience, more of the bills, and also watered the seeds of wanting to keep going.
Despite the deep well of creative force that makes people sing in their bedrooms, and scribble lyrics in their notes apps, it’s depressing to never get paid for the work of doing it anywhere else.
It takes creativity and solidarity for the labour of the trade to result in people getting to make a living.
Maybe it’s time to make some “support your local house show” t-shirts.
That post-gig morning debrief was followed by us planning a night to get some songwriters we know together to share what we’re working on. Another friend dropped an album this week (on bandcamp as well as across the various evil streaming giants) that is one of the best I’ve heard this year. The omicron wave is subsiding so Ali has thrown the doors of The Great Club back open. I recently accidentally showed up an hour early on a public holiday at my non-music job, which meant I was walking across the grass to watch the sunrise over Sydney Harbour in my uniform.
It’s no surprise, despite it all, that I wished I had my guitar.
Photo courtesy of the author.