I was under the impression that while streaming was garbage for money that touring was the cash cow. Apparently it’s a loss for these artists. It makes me sad that all the profits get vacuumed up by everybody but the artist.
Those days are over sadly. Ticketing and venues are largely consolidated now.
It’s got to be the ticketing taking too much vig, right? I hear these stories about $300 tickets, I haven’t been to a concert in years but in the 2000’s touring was where the money came from. With $45+ticketmaster tickets.
They have to be sucking all the money out at point of sale
Just look at ticket prices on ticketmaster for a US show and compare it to the cost of an international venue.
When I was pricing David Gilmour it was literally cheaper to buy a plane ticket and fly from NY to Rome and go to the show there than get the worst seats in Madison Square Garden.
Because Ticketmaster and it’s venues are a monopoly. Pearl Jam tried to warn us 30 years ago.
The ticketing company owns all the venues now and they own the secondhand scalper sites so they allocate a bunch of tickets to the secondhand site and mark them way up plus they can charge whatever they want for the venue and only pay the artist what they were contracted for
Touring has always been a boondoggle. Artists could make bank if they were selling out shows, but the baseline venue prices have skyrocketed out of reach for most fans. The producers, promoters, engineers, technicians, roadies, not to mention lodging, travel, and food, a lot of people expect to be paid before the artist makes a dime.
I’ve played many shows for free after several hours driving (with gas I paid for), US’s music scene is set up to fail
I was under the impression that while streaming was garbage for money that touring was the cash cow. Apparently it’s a loss for these artists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJSp-yRMrsY
why you do this - a self documentary from car bomb on why people still make music/tour despite monetary hardship.
There are tech death musicians out there that give some classical composers a run for their money that still have day jobs, mostly in computer programming of some kind.
(side note : turns out that technical death metal appeals to the same kind of people that enjoy working on applied mathematics. who could have guessed)
For anyone unaware, the “music industry” had a brief period around 1960-1978 where they led youth culture and brought some decent artists to the fore, including [everyone]. Which was ironic as they started mostly as a goof by rich people or a front by the mafia.
A “record deal” was always a sucker’s deal because they’d loan you $300,000 or whatever and then decide how much you’d paid them back over however many years you made them money. The companies didn’t buy videos or tour buses or billboards or anything -they fronted the money and the artist paid for that, usually without knowing it.
Around 1980, in a coke-fueled bender that lasted over a decade, they decided “fuck it” and just screwed everyone they could for every dollar they could. Fortunately, they were so stupid and up their own asses that mp3s destroyed them after a decade of them trying to decide who was going to get fucked more than who else. (Anyone remember the DAT wars?)
Billions were made but the artist usually only saw a small fraction of that because record companies were “riding the gravy train” and living fat off all the money. Nothing has changed. No one is going to wake up. It was always this bad. It’s just that being a touring musician used to be at least a job and a career and now it’s pretty rare.
If it helps, think of it like this - there’s no one in any seat of real power in the “music industry” who is a musician. They don’t give a shit about what they’re selling, it could be cow pies for all they care - they’d look and act exactly like they do now because it has 100% nothing to do with music. It’s just marketing a persona and bilking them for all they can.
And it’s been that way the entire time. Yes, there are exceptions, but not many.
Back during the Napster days, Howard Stern had the Foo Fighters on. He asked them what their thought of the whole Napster vs. Metallica legal debate.
Dave Grohl told him he was 100 percent for Napster, explaining that they barely made a dime from record sales, and instead made the bulk of their money from touring and t-shirt sales. And that very few musicians were in the same boat as Metallica, actually making money from their album sales.
So from that point of view, the more people who were exposed to their music meant the more folks who might want to go see them in concert.
The best argument I ever heard in favor of Napster was that songs were already being given out for free all the time on the radio. What’s the difference if they’re being given out for free online?
I was made aware of the fact that touring and merch is the bulk of how bands make money by the documentary The Other F Word. It followed around a bunch of aging punk rockers from Rancid and Goldfinger and other bands.
And the irony was that Metallica got their big break because people were trading bootlegs of their tapes around.
Movie industry as well. People with the money don’t care about the product as long as it makes them more money.
Or if they do care, they interfere with the artist’s vision to put in their own thoughts when they have no education or experience in filmmaking.
Then we end up getting the Emoji movie in theaters.
I fear this is happening to every industry
🌈 E N S H I T T I F I C A T I O N ✨
That “fuck it” era is Reaganism. Every industry did the exact same thing at that time.
there’s no one in any seat of real power in the “music industry” who is a musician.
That’s not strictly true. A number of popular musicians started their own labels and cultivated their own talent. Dr. Dre, Hay-Z and Beyonce, Snoop Dog, NIN, The Beetles and Rolling Stones, Eminem, Madonna, Mackelmoore…
What’s really changed over time is distribution. Digital music has huge margins, but prying them out of the near monopoly of Spotify and YouTube is much harder than simply selling CD/Vinyl copies of your songs at your shows
Ouch, just like video game industry :-/
At this point, there’s no one at the wheel at all. It’s all algorithms.
Why would this be a wake up call for the music industry? This shows they are operating at peak efficiency!
Hold on, Lily Allen is on OnlyFans? That’s wild, lol, I guess a big part of her brand of feminism is embracing sexuality or something.
Power to em, idgaf.
Lily Allen, who started selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans over summer. She had the idea after seeing that her feet had a perfect five star rating on WikiFeet, a photo-sharing foot fetish website. Subscribers pay £8 a month to access her posts. In October, Allen claimed that shots of her well-pedicured trotters were earning her more money than Spotify streams – and that’s saying something, considering Allen has over 7 million monthly listeners and more than a billion streams on her top three songs.
Feet pics apparently.
Wow, what a strange world, she have any photos where she grips stuff with her feet?
Damn, I’ve had so many friends and coworkers joke about selling feet pics and here she is actually doing it and making bank! That’s utterly crazy that she makes more from OF than Spotify. I’m surprised Spotify/streaming subscriptions hasn’t just been killed off by artists/studios if the revenue stream is that awful.
It looks like it’s just crazy foot people and she’s not actually exposing anything lol.
It’s an awareness stunt. I get the point - but its also hard to feel bad for very successful music superstars who are having a few down years. That being said these music industry shills running ticketing, touring etc. Are awful so bringing that to attention is a worthwhile cause.
But who else is going to make people aware of the issue but a successful music superstar?
If me, Joe Musician who tours the regional small clubs, puts my feet on OnlyFans, no one gives a shit. Lily Allen has charted multiple times (although she’s nowhere near as popular in the U.S. as she is in other countries).
Yes that’s what I was trying to say. It’s an awareness stunt more so than I woe is me type of complaint.
To be fair, artists are one of the original intended uses for OnlyFans. While it is sexually focused now, that’s more a side effect of it being one of the very few creators subscription sites at the time it started up.
I have no idea who these women are but the music industry knows what it is. And it’s gotten worse. And it doesn’t care. The industry needs to die and art profits should go to the artist.
It needs to be illegal for record companies to get rights for anything other than distribution.
If your band is signed with Polygram you can’t even record a duet with an artist on another label without paying Polygram royalties for a song that is not your band’s and has nothing to do with them.
I think adults should be able to sign whatever contract they want.
Absolutely!
That’s why we need to regulate what is allowed in contracts because there are things that are just so wrong and predatory we as society should not find that acceptable. We do this all the time, its long overdue to extend this to the music industry.
Also please understand… individual that just started out vs multi billion dollar record label with decades of institutional knowledge is not a level playing field.
But then you have to remove ALL consumer protections on contracts. Payday loans can start charging 20,000% interest and make you sign a line that uses fancy language to put your car up for collateral. You could prohibit people of a specific race from renting or buying property.
So go that way, but also disband every government agency because if we’re sovereign then that’s it. Every man is his own government.
Or maybe we could just keep the protections we have and expand them to cover an industry that’s thrived on screwing over artists it’s whole existence.
good answer :)
I also think people should be free to sign contracts to become lifelong slaves of other people.
After all everyone’s circumstances are identical, same genetic lottery and are born with equal opportunity of money, mind, health, physical ability, family and geography.
Exploitation? Sign away.
Hidden terms in obscure language? Sign away
Forced circumstances? Sign away
Asymmetric power imbalance? Sign away.
Debt slavery? Sign away.
Selling your children? Sign away.
That’s true freedom.
/s
Good thing adults can never be coerced.
And that they all have a law degree with a specialty in contract law
So the fact that most adults read at a 6th grade level is not a problem in your world?
contracts should be standardized unless both parties have a lawyer otherwise you’re pitting lawyers against teenagers
Sure. But they ought not all be enforceable.
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I can’t comment on these specific individuals, but a situation like that is gutwrenching. Absolutely nothing against OnlyFans and other adult entertainment, there are tons of people who genuinely enjoy and take pride in the work, but if there’s even a slight hesitancy or feeling of pressure to do it just to support their real careers, the notion seems deeply awful and psychologically damaging.
Kinda sounds like a reason some people might try to preserve or widen a gender pay gap. If they can’t keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, this is their next best thing.
I’m sorry to be the asshole here but … She hasn’t been on the charts for nearly 10 years… She probably amassed more wealth than most of us will in a lifetime. If she’s unable to work a regular job now to keep up the lifestyle and has to sell feet pics… Sorry but boohoo
Her 2018 album hit #8 in 3 different countries 🤷♂️ that’s neither a decade nor anything remotely akin to failure.
Which countries?
I don’t even know who she is lol
It’s the smaller artists I feel for.
I don’t really think she “has” to, at all. I think she saw an opportunity to make extra money and took it.
Ah they posting adult content? I didn’t read the article and I thought they were using OF for their music.
A paltry few millions in networth. Please think of these starving artists
Lily Allen is not doing it to talk about how bad it is for her, she’s doing it to show how bad it is for musicians in general. No one is going to even pay attention unless a successful musician does this.
I think she’s just doing it to make more money and get more fame. This is completely irrelevant to other musicians situations.
Most of them make no money whatsoever.
… Them making no money whatsoever is the whole point.
Theyre not taking on side hustles, theyre working full on jobs. This story reads like them almost making enough to survive, they just need a little help. At this point the only way they can be full time musicians and make enough to live is UBI.
We need to subsidize UBI for artists to live with dignity.
