PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic More bad news about music sales

Truer words have never been spoken.

In the late 1960s I was making $400/week doing two 45 minute sets on two days as an opening act for the majors. That was a lot of money back them (4 times as much as a plumber).

To me that was riches. I talked to the leader of the Association backstage and he was making $2,000 per show. We never got there.

In my experiment in being "normal" I was a Field Engineer for a Cable TV manufacturer. It paid well, I basically worked 3 days a week (Monday and Friday were travel days but I could take the red-eye out on Monday and the red-eye back on Thursday so I could still gig on the weekends).

If I stayed there I would have made a lot more money than I made as a full-time musician which I've done for most of my life so far. But they did me a favor when they laid off everybody who had less than 15 years and I had almost 5.

I realized 2 things (1) being normal is over-rated (2) I'm happier making less money but enjoying my life a lot more by gigging for a living.

I'm not rich and don't buy as many possessions as many other people do, but I find I prefer experiences to possessions. So it works for me. I've traveled the world, bought new cars but drove them a few hundred miles until the became undependable, don't wear jewelry, but feel I am one of the luckiest people I know.

I get up in the morning, and if it's a gig day, it's the brightest day of the week and I can't wait to get to work. And we have plenty of gig days. Tonight is the fourth one this week.

People on the gigs ask me if I have a CD for sale. Since my home is not acoustically great for recording, I would have to rent time at a commercial studio. That would cost me a lot of money. And how many will I sell? My fans are a limited market, and once they have the CD, there is no need to buy another. So I doubt I would cover my expenses.

Live music is gone immediately, and then they need another dose.

I've was a 'sax for hire' at a local studio for a long time. It's no longer there thanks to home recording gig. But when I was doing it, I played on self-produced CDs in the smooth jazz, country and pop genres. None of them have gone viral and none of them are stars. The competition is fierce and getting noticed is very difficult.

In the few months of Summer when the gigging is slow, I make new BiaB aftermarket products in my spare time. I sell multiple copies of them because my 'audience' is global. And the work with BiaB helps me make better backing tracks for my duo (I don't buy them, but do my own). http://www.nortonmusic.com/backing_tracks.html -- I play drums, sax, guitar, bass, wind synth, flute, and keyboard synth, took arranging in school, and both BiaB and my backing tracks help me improve my arranging chops.

But for me the biggest demand is playing live, and that's great because playing live in front of an audience is the most fun I can have with my clothes on.

Of course YMMV.

And although I am of retirement age now, I have no plans of retiring. As long as I can fog a mirror and get gigs, I'll be gigging. And I have an early gig today, so I better quit 'yakking' here.

Notes

Notes, if you chose to, couldn't you travel regionally and fill those summer months?

The busiest band I was ever in played a house gig on Tuesday, rehearsed Wednesday, played a house gig Thursday night, played regular local bar gigs on Friday and Saturday, and a Sunday night house gig.

In summer though, when it was nice enough to play outside, it got crazy. Thursday night, Friday happy hour outside, then a bar gig after that, Saturday afternoon outside, a bar gig after that, Sunday afternoon outside, then the Sunday night house gig. 7 shows in 4 days. Every weekend.

Monday we stayed in bed all day! And nobody was allowed to call each other so we did not have to speak. The throat is not meant to sing that much.

We got to the point where some of those doubleheaders were so far apart that we would have a rental PA dropped off, send our PA system to the night gig, have crew guys set it up, then come back to the first gig to pick up the rental PA, take it to the rehearsal hall, and come back to the night gig for load out at 2am. We moved and set up our own stage gear.

Not about sales at all, but expanding on Notes comment.

Regionally, no. The tourist season in South Florida dies at Easter and gets buried on Mother's Day. Like everybody else in the hospitality industry, we make more than 3/4 of our yearly income between Halloween and Easter.

When we first started, we did Cruise Ships from the beginning of April to the beginning of December, 3 years in a row. That was nice, but after 3 years it was enough, Too much time on the ship, and not enough time in the ports.

By our 4th year out we had enough local reputation to work all summer, so I declined to renew the Cruise Ship contract.

I happen to really like Summer in South Florida, so if I traveled to Georgia or Jacksonville (South Georgia to a Floridian) I'd have to pack up and leave the home and live in a motel.

I'd rather stay here and enjoy the rainy season. So I choose to stay and work perhaps 4-6 gigs a month instead of 4-6 gigs a week.

And by having slow summer gigging seasons, it gives me a chance to work on new Band-in-a-Box aftermarket products. I like making styles for BiaB because it gives me a chance to play drums, bass, and other instruments. I record parts live into a MIDI sequencer, and then take snippets of what I play and import them into the StyleMaker. I have to figure ways to work around the limitations of BiaB and when it's all done I have something I can listen to and be proud of.

Sometime late in the slow season I'll block out a few weeks to take a vacation. I like to travel, and I've been to 49 US States, much of Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico and down to Costa Rica in this hemisphere. I've also been to over a half dozen European countries and a few in Asia and Africa. I planned to go to Madagascar last summer, but they are having an epidemic of the Bubonic Plague so we drove to Idaho to see the eclipse instead and hit a few parks on the way back.

As much as I like traveling, being on the road with a lot of gear to schlep myself isn't appealing to me. Get off the gig, haul it all into the motel room, put it back in the van in the morning, set up, gig, tear down, and do it all over again.

I'm very happy with my life. I get to make a living doing music and nothing but music. Most of my money comes from gigging, and the Band-in-a-Box moonlighting gig is satisfying and makes a few bucks while I am having fun.

I wrote my first styles for myself. Being a guy who played drums, bass, guitar, keys, sax, and flute in working bands, I wanted styles that sounded more like what working bands did. I figured it would be a short-cut to making backing tracks. I had no intention of making a business out of it.

I gave away my styles to my musician friends who were into BiaB, and they all told me they liked them better than the PG Music styles (Aren't friends great!). A guitarist I know who used to teach jazz guitar at the University of Miami told me I should sell them. The idea mulled around in my head for a while, and I put a set up for sale via classified ads in EM and Keyboard magazines.

In a few months I found myself with a second business. I learned to be a mail order businessman, then when the Internet arrived here I embraced it, learned how to write web sites, and now it is decades later and the challenge is to come with new products that are both useful, and not similar to ones I've already released.

The gigging season is almost over, Easter comes early this year, and I'm actually looking forward to making new styles from the short ideas I've recorded during the busy season.

If I like what I do this summer, and feel proud enough to put my name on it, I'll release new products next winter.

Plus I'm also selling products made by other BiaB creators, David Bailey, Roy Hawkesford, Sherry Mayrent, and Jim Wedd. I send them a check 4 times a year and make them smile.

I do all of this instead of watching TV. I disconnected the cable in the late 1980s, never bothered to put up an antenna, and never got a digital converter. I'd rather live my life vicariously by doing things instead of living my life by watching actors pretend to do things. That's just me, and fortunately Leilani is the same way. Perhaps being weird together is one of the things that keeps us close.

And on every gig day I'll say to myself how lucky I am to be able to do this for a living. I could have been a printer like my dad or an insurance salesman or a 9-5 at a desk. Instead I get to pick up my sax, flute, wind synth, and guitar and play them to a live, appreciative audience over my self-created backing tracks, stick my face on the mic and sing, and tell bad jokes on the mic, and get paid for it.

What could be better than that?

Insights and incites by Notes

Never having relied upon being paid for music in any fashion, what is happening in Music incomes for artists appears to be a squashing of the hill on the left end of the Pareto chart and pushing it out to the right.

For me, it has never seemed more positive at all of the opportunities to make a little bit of money making music, with tools that yield higher quality than I ever thought possible for next to no money invested.

That said, I have yet to step over that line to make a serious attempt to make money making music.

I found this article very interesting. It appears that CDs and vinyl isn't dead yet.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/finance/technology/cds-and-vinyl-are-outselling-digital-music-downloads/ar-BBKA30n