The NY Struggling Artist's Struggle Just Got Worse: An Audio Report
- Kelly Bright
- Dec 8, 2020
- 7 min read
Updated: Dec 9, 2020
For a city that never sleeps, the musical scene in New York has been pretty quiet these past few months...
A family of five squeezes into a restaurant booth, lines of shoppers stack up outside a mall entrance, crowds of thousands fill a stadium in Texas for a college football game, but the Alice Tully Hall Theatre at Lincoln Center remains vacant, a blanket of dust collecting on its wood veneers.
Claire Melchert ushered there for two years before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the venue to close indefinitely back in March. She now spends her days as an administrative assistant for Ruchelman P.L.L.C., a tax planning and legal firm based out of Manhattan. Not exactly the path she envisioned after graduating NYU Steinhardt with a B.M. in Vocal Performance and Music in 2019.
The story started out so classic. Small town girl moves to big city to make a name for herself. For Melchert, the trek began in Waconia, Minnesota and led her to New York where she hoped to pursue a career as a professional singer. She earned her degree, picked up part time jobs and made music; a recipe used by many to reach the pinnacle of the industry. Everything was right on track, until a global pandemic knocked an already risky business completely off the rails.
“It threw a wrench in my plans.” Melchert said, “We closed, and it took a big tole on my income and all the artists who I knew who worked there.”
The music industry, like many others, is in a world of hurt right now. Cancelled concerts, postponed tours, closed venues and record stores keep all artists, but especially independent ones, from bringing in the revenue they need to survive. A 2017 New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) report found the city’s musical sector supplied approximately 60,000 jobs, resulting in almost $5 billion in wages and contributing $21 billion in total economic output. The same study pointed out the total music ecosystem’s jobs and wages were growing at a faster rate than in the broader New York City economy, 4 and 7 percent annually respectively over annual rates of 3 and 5 percent respectively.
Although making up 38% of music-oriented jobs available in the area, local and independent artists and musicians incur the lowest rates of wages out of any sector in the industry. The median wages for these types of artists may fall around $30,000 a year, and that was before coronavirus. According to the April 2020 Income and Expense Study compiled by the NYC Rent Guidelines Board, the average annual rent for an apartment in Manhattan is $33,276.
Laura Bright, a New York City based actor, singer, and musician is one of the thousands of young artists whose struggle to pay the bills worsened during the pandemic.
“Because the majority of my jobs were at performance venues, which are still closed, it’s been a little rough,” she said, “I’m on unemployment. To add with that, I’m babysitting almost full time…which is not as artistically fulfilling as I would like. It’s not as flexible, so I’ve personally had a lot less time to devote to being creative.”
Although this pandemic has sidetracked many artists, others have found ways to use their newfound free time productively. For Claire Melchert, it meant writing music, producing songs, and ultimately finishing her first album. On September 25th, Melchert released “Like Trophy” on Bandcamp, an artist-based online music company started in 2008. Melchert chose the platform over other major streaming services initially because of the support its shown lesser known musicians throughout the pandemic.
“Supporting band camp is, in a way, also a donation to artists everywhere even if it’s not going straight to my pocket,” Melchert said, “They’re really great at supporting artists, especially artists who aren’t huge or who are trying to build their way up in the industry."
Although Spotify and Apple Music are the standard household names when it comes to digital music consumption, Bandcamp has its place in the business. According to the Los Angeles Times, the company sold 5 million albums on the platform in 2019. In the last 30 days, Bandcamp’s website reports paying their artists $17.8 million, adding up to $604 million in total. Despite these high payouts, the company has been profitable since 2012 and as of September 2020, their year over year sales increased by 122%.
Shortly after the closing of theaters, venues, and concert halls across New York, Bandcamp announced a one-day waiver of all their sales commissions, resulting in $4.3 million in the pockets of creators. On May 1st, they deployed the same tactic, giving their artists $7.1 million in fan-generated revenue. Since then, the company has continued this trend of relinquishing their normal 15% cut of digital sales and 10% cut of physical sales on the first Friday of every month.
Even before taking additional relief efforts during the pandemic, Bandcamp’s revenue model favored the artist much more than its bigger competitors. CJ Ziarniak, a jazz musician and saxophonist also based in NYC, uses the platform to share his work because of its financial practicality.
“It works so that the artist can get more of a cut of the purchase. If you’re album is priced at ten, you’ll receive $8.60.” he said, “You don’t have to pay a subscription to upload music and you can advertise on social media or other platforms like that to get people to have interest in your music.”
While Bandcamp divides 80-85% of sales out to the artists whose music they host on their platform, Spotify’s pay-per-stream model guarantees, on average, .0006th of a cent per listen back to the contributors of a given track (meanings its split among the artist, the producer, the writer, etc.). If an artist lost $10,000 from tour cancellations during quarantine, fans would have to stream their songs over 1.4 million times in order to cover those damages, assuming a higher-tier $0.007 per-stream rate. However, with 130 million paying subscribers, aspiring musicians like CJ Ziarniak find using an app like Spotify might be a necessary evil.
“The business model is similar to what Staples is versus the Dunner Mifflin Paper Company,” Ziarniak said, “You can’t compete with the price, but you need it. It’s the cheapest and most convenient option for you.”
For many like Ziarniak, who traded in his saxophone for a real estate license after all his gigs for the foreseeable future were postponed or cancelled, digital streaming is quickly becoming the best, if not the only, chance of being discovered in the music industry. When Zach Fortin, a junior at Fordham University and part-time music producer, first got interested in the music industry, he and his friends uploaded their first song to SoundCloud, another free-to-use music sharing site with an emphasis on independent artists and creators.
“We posted one night and the next morning we woke up with over a thousand views and we were really taken aback by that,” Fortin said, “That’s like nothing to a popular artist, but for us it meant a lot. It gave us a way to see potential in ourselves.”
In 2018, while Spotify boasted its 87 millionth paying subscriber, SoundCloud was hovering around the 100,000 mark. Today, Spotify 286 million active users (paying and non-paying); SoundCloud has 175 million. For those who want their music heard by the most possible potential fans, it’s hard not to choose the former.
“By putting music on SoundCloud you’re losing revenue, it’s more of an exposure thing for you,” Fortin said, “You have to also put your stuff on Spotify or Apple Music.”
Even Claire Melchert, who originally chose to use Bandcamp as the location for her debut album eventually put it up on better known music platforms, regardless of the fact she’d receive less of a cut for it.
“The reason they’re able to do that is because they realize how important they are in helping artists get themselves out there and known among more people. It’s very mixed emotions,” she said, “I don’t really have enough presence to do anything about it, so I still use both of the platforms.”
Around the country, the arts employ 4.9 million people while contributing $763.6 billion to the U.S. economy. That’s 4.2% of the gross domestic product, more than both agriculture and transportation. Outcries to reopen businesses, restart sports leagues, and go back to schools have been prominent in today’s news media, but support for the music industry has been relatively quiet. Laura Bright, who minored in Music Education at NYU Steinhardt, believes the arts have been widely neglected in the conversation for public pandemic relief.
“What do you do when you’re at home? You watch Netflix…you stream music...listen to podcasts. Those are actors, those are musicians, those are artists. It doesn’t always occur to you how big art is to your life” Bright said, “So many people are gonna be out of work... I strongly believe there should be government funding, especially now, for the arts, especially artists who can’t return to work.”
With most entertainment venues in the city closed indefinitely, and career opportunities limited for all kinds of musicians, the only flow of income from their craft most of these artists can hope to see in the upcoming months is through the digital streaming industry. While most platforms have made modifications to their services to help creators during this time of need (like Spotify’s Artist Fundraising Pick or SoundCloud’s ‘fan support button’), independent artists like Melchert, Bright, Ziarniak, or Fortin need all the auxiliary support they can get. Streaming or sharing their work on popular platforms is always advantageous, but without government commitment to financial aid, taking one’s support to a monetary step (like buying the product on a platform like Bandcamp) could be a crucial step to helping someone make ends meet.
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