crunchysteve

There's a myth in modern music marketing that is pervasive and toxic. That small time local artists aren't as good because their pockets aren't as full as Ye's or Tay-Tay's. Any musician, internationally famous or locally an "also-ran," who can hold a band together and keep getting gigs is a competent artist. Undeniably, somebody like Taylor Swift is a great musician and songwriter/producer, but that band or artist at your local pub, especially "the one you don't much like because they do originals and you don't know the songs," is also an accomplished musician. Musicianship is measured by talent, dedication and staying power, not by bank balance.

I've never been much more than a songwriter who could play well enough to get gigs in local covers bands. I switched from guitar to bass in the 80s because Tasmania was full of bad guitar heros and short on dues paying rhythm section players. I've been in maybe 15 bands, but 5 matter, The Never Dead, Cryptic Posters, The Breed, Alex Cappelli's The Collectables (Mk II) and The Secrets of The Hand. The latter is an studio-to-online-only outfit. Of the total 15, all bandmates were talented, some even gifted, all of us were broke and working day jobs. Of the 5 "that matter", none were famous, but we were bands of brothers (and a sister, well, my sister's schoolmate, in one case), we had a passion for what we were doing.

We worked hard on the music, rehearsing up to 3 nights a week, gigging on average 2 nights when the work was there and working our day jobs. Then there's the practice time at home, the years of lessons, the cost of instruments, strings, guitar setups, the amplification gear, endless demands, endless bills - and playing for exposure doesn't pay he bills, playing for exposure is bullshit. The two things that keep a musician going are passion for the music and the audience reaction when they play well. Ego doesn't last, it takes commitments to keep playing music for 40+ years.

And along comes the record industry hype machine. Musicians get the internet and democratise their music, the labels call it piracy. Independent artists and local artists were who they were targeting, but kids sharing a bit of Metallica was great brand imaging for music on the internet. I have an old external drive somewhere with 100,000+ songs on it from that era. The commercial, music industry sourced stuff on it, literally all of it paid for on iTunes accounts for about 2% - bought and paid for. The rest was from musicians like me, some downloaded with full permission to do so, from all over the world, some bought side-stage from local pub artists selling CDs and cassettes at gigs, some bought from Bandcamp.com. The world never saw so much music in that era between all the online musician-run music archives and the rise of streaming. And streaming killed it. Stone dead. Quicker than Mortein kills a fly.

The streamers looked attractive, they scared us with tails of unpaid music files roaming the internet, stealing our paydays. They blew a little "leakage" into wholesale music theft. Label music prices were too high for the fans because capitalism applies wage pressure hardest on the poorest, so label artists were losing money to piracy, but the streamers whispered special versions of the lies about piracy into the ears of unsigned artists, people already having their paydays stolen because venues had to pay royalties for live music played there - choose play originals for exposure and never see a cent of those royalties because it's really hard to let a commercial, record industry-owned music registry get $5 a song from a pub gig, and the rights owner get 2c of that, if they even have their registrations right... and in Australia, the pubs just pay a fee, they don't do song returns, so unkowns never see a cent. Don't get me started about the insider trading between radio, TV and record industry, and the 80s push to make radio stations pay for all music that was registered and have their playlists chosen for them by expert consultants "from the biz."

When I started playing in bands professionally, it was 1982. In Northern Tasmania, AU$100 per band member a night wasn't a hard ask. You had to be good to get it again. You had to be clever how you threw the originals in, the pubs only ever wanted cover bands, but $300 for 4 sets from a 3 piece band wasn't hard to sell. By the early teens of this century, in Melbourne, even really popular local-level artists "play for exposure." And pubs don't like bands selling merch and music between sets, they want a cut of that, too, if they'll let you. Not to mention, "Our soundguy is $100 to mix your set, that comes out of the door." The door was below the payout minimum. My response to that publican was, "Oh, shall we pay your bar staff, too? F*** OFF!" We weren't invited back, c'est la vie, their loss. The punters loved us!

So, the shadowy hand of the record business feeds this idea that only their artists are great artists. I saw Heart and Def Leppard at a major Australian Venue a few years back. Def Leppard were the headline, their sound was shit - saturated, they'd have blown the equipment bond on the touring sound hire it was so badly pushed. So loud it was just a mush of noise. I could have mixed it better. My mum could have mixed it better! Heart had been fabulous - plenty of volume, especially on Barracuda! My ears were ringing in the break. Def Leppard sounded like a bad pub band. Before that night I had equal respect for both acts. Heart were artists.

If a pub band did a show that sounded like Def Leppard that night, they'd never get a gig again, especially not a Def Leppard tribute act! Music is not measured in money, it's measured in production values. The art of music is not measured in streams, tickets or platinum records, it's measured in the balance of tones, the memories it evokes and creates, the soul, the heart, the feelings make the music, not the venue, not the label, not the starlet.

Artistic music can sell platinum numbers in its own right, but platinum numbers mostly speak more of monopolistic business models than of art. The art of music happens just as often in pub gigs for 50, or the dreaded less than 10 people night. A musician "playing for exposure" puts their heart and soul into every gig because they love playing, not because they might make it big. There is no "exposure," "exposure" is a lie told by a Satan in a Sunday hat.

Pay the f***ing artist! Try asking 5 plumbers to fix your flooded bathroom on a Saturday night for less than several grand. Likewise, virtual bandmates, it's better to not work, to spend time with those you love or rehearsing or writing, than to pour out your soul on a half empty dancefloor for a BUSINESS that won't pay you for the work you are doing and an audience that just want "Louis Louis" or "Mustang Sally" over and over again!

And this brings me back to streaming. Spotify, Youtube, Apple, it doesn't matter, they're stealing from you. Just like some sh**c**t venue owner offering you "exposure" the streamers are locking you out of the big nights because the label boys are in their ears. No, really. Try putting one of your own songs on Youtube, then get a friend to search for it by title, artist and your channel name. A dozen label artists based on Youtube's knowledge of your music tastes will sink your tune without a trace.

This is deliberate. Spotify will stream your song 999 times in a month and not pay you a cent. "Yeah, what a shame, we didn't quite get there, oh well, next month. We'll poster the entire city." And you'll get some random number of streams just short of 100 in a months and they'll stop counting them. Try asking them to show you the actual stream logs - nope. Maybe they're not cooking the books, maybe you are "shit." always 999 streams shit? Probably a randomised 666 to 999 each month so that it looks like that's all you're getting.

I have done a thing where I sent 20 or so streams a month on spotify from a randomised rolling fake metadata thing that literally looked like different requests from different places in the world to the recipient server. Maybe they traceroute every single request... They're not that slow. That would really slow down your music requests. Really slow them, especially these days. Not one of those streams showed up. After 3 months I put the experiment to bed.

It's not proof, like I say, they might be tracerouting. I suspect they don't need to. The labels got in their ears (watch "The Playlist" if its still online) and the streamers all weight the searches, feature the artists the labels tell them to. Radio "payola" is alive and well. Nobody outside can prove it - can't, that's for sure. But what corruption humans have made money from in old systems, they rejig for new systems. Humans are as much the thieving ape as they are the thinking ape and artists are more often naked in the snowstorms of lies and deception from middlemen.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not bitter. I love my time in music! Would you like to hear some of mine? You can, for free, I put my heart into my music and, while I'd love a payday, I love just playing. What I am is angry at the lies and deception the entertainment industry has always traded on. I'll play my guitar until I reach that crossroads at midnight, now much closer than my birthday. I don't really have the health to play a night every week, nor really the under pinning income to keep my gear gig ready. I maintain it, but it's not at "battle stations" readiness.

So, look at the music business and ask yourself whether you want to play. If the answer is "yes," do you want to play so badly you want to swim in shit, sell out musicians like yourself, or do you want to play for love, sharing, value in your community? Then do a number like these...

• Collect old CDs in hard rubbish or in the discard bins at thrift stores, then when you have a shoebox full, add one of your own CDs of your own compositions, and take the box to one of your local thrift shops...


• Post a copy of one of your CDs of original tunes to the local radio station with a short note pointing out that, if they don't play it, they're lying about their commitment to local community...


• Give random friends a copy of your original music on CD or SD card as gifts, birthdays, christams, easter, no special occasion...


• Or any other thing you can think of to put your music out there.

Cheers,
Crunchy