The Bleakonomics of Live Music

I remember seeing the great downtown jazz group Sex Mob play a show in New York back in 2000. At the time, all the members of the band were well known in the scene, and they completely packed the club (Tonic, R.I.P.) with enthusiastic fans. It was an amazing show: they played with the sort of creative recklessness and playful pomp characteristic of great live jazz, but still not exactly a daily phenomenon. At the end of the show, when leader/trumpeter Steven Bernstein was drunkenly thanking the audience, he opened his mouth and started ranting about the economics of being a (semi-famous) jazz musician. "Do you know how much each of us in the band made tonight? Playing three hours for a full house? Guess... (silence) $40 each." He then proceeded to pull two grimy twenties from his pocket and flash them for the audience.

Watching this spectacle was a bit of a slap in the face: I had always assumed that guys like Bernstein, who are popular and well recorded, made good money and lived in medium-sized houses in the suburbs. In fact, their gigs were paying them peanuts, just like the motley ensemble of club dates, restaurant gigs, and corporate shindigs that were sustaining me through college.

It's certainly not easy being a gigging professional musician in the US. In all honestly, it was this experience and others like it that eventually steered me away from a career as a jazz bassist and towards more regular sources of income. As Nolan has chronicled in this blog and a few of our other writers have experienced as well, playing music for money is a strange and frustrating proposition. And the phenomenon of lousy and unpredictable pay isn't limited to jazz either, a genre with admittedly negligible market appeal - indeed, this seems to be a live music universal for 99.99% of American musicians. Barring Madonna, J-Z, Springsteen, and a handful of other leviathans, we're all in the same boat here.

In my experience, I have come to learn a few things about the bleakonomics of live music. Let's begin with the most obvious and simple explanations. On the surface of this equation, of course, are the same market principles that guide any commercial system - the "invisible hand" connects supply and demand. Therefore, each scene is very different. I made far more money playing in Portland than I ever did in NY, and it wasn't because I was that much of a better player during my two year tenure in Oregon (quite the contrary!): New York is flooded with great musicians. Of course, there are also a lot more places to play there than in Portland, and a lot more demand, but still - the scale tips in Portland's favor. That's why musicians from all over the country are flocking to the City of Roses right now. On the opposite end of the spectrum is a city like Boston: with mobs of students scrambling for gigs, the market value for live music is kept really low. There is more supply than demand.

This is the textbook, simplistic look at why we poor musicians get paid so pathetically. But underlying basic supply and demand are a few other principles that can't be reduced to economic modeling (well, I guess this post is an attempt to supply a "bleakonomic" model). And the most important principle here is the Principle of Fun.

Work sucks. That's why it's called work - we perform tasks in order to make money to support our worldly lives. Of course, many people find great reward in what they do, but on the weekends and during their vacations, you can bet they're not doing their jobs. So the principle of labor in many ways is based on exchanging time doing what you don't want to be doing (ie. work) for money that will enable you to do what you want (ie. eating, having a roof over your head, taking trips, drinking whiskey every night to numb the pain, etc.).

Musicians disrupt this labor principle. We have fun playing music, and we voluntarily do it all the time without getting paid. It is a recreational activity. CEOs, the line goes, get paid the big bucks because they are under constant pressure and are micromanaging a million things at once - no "fun" in the traditional definition of the word. Musicians, on the other hand, get paid peanuts because, really, we're just getting up there on stage and having a merry ol' time. Why should the restaurant manager pay us fairly - if not well - when we're having such a good time doing what we're doing while he's running around making sure the shipment of tomatoes came in on time?

I'm going to break this down into two entries lest this turn into one of my obnoxious novels of a post. Stay tuned for more BLEAKONOMICS!