I've been a live musician all my life. I've done some 'sax for hire' studio work, and have been in groups with local releases, but primarily I'm a live musician.

I've toured, done cruise ships, did house gigs, schlepped one-nighters, and so on. I've made a living, paid off the mortgage, taken vacations here and abroad, and lived a happy life so far.

Musicians have for all of history made their living playing live. In the early days of vinyl, the 78 and 45 RPM disks were primarily a promotion for the artists' live performances. Glenn Miller, The Dorsey Brothers, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and their 'big band singers' didn't make money from their records, but they brought fans out to the shows. The money from recordings came very late for the folks in the big band era.

For a very, very short period of time, musicians made their money via recordings. Probably less than 1% of the total time that there have been musicians. Keep that in mind, making money from your recordings is the exception, not the rule, and that exception seems to be waning. The peak is over. Will it happen again? Who knows?

And for most, recording didn't make money for the artists, just the record company.

I was in a road band that was lucky enough to be the warm-up act for major stars in concert, Four Seasons, Association, Kingsmen, Shirelles, and quite a few others. After warming up for a few Motown acts, Berry Gordy took an interest in us.

At the time Motown had no white groups, and Bob Seger was making number 1 records on Detroit radio. Berry, who was a businessman, not a racist decided he needed a white group to compete.

Our manager hired entertainment lawyers to negotiate. They started at 4 cents a record, with so many guaranteed releases and a bunch of other terms this 19 year old kid didn't understand.

When the last offer came around, it was 2 cents a record. Out of the "2 cent per" royalties Motown was to take inflated recording costs, inflated promotional costs, and inflated distribution costs. They also wanted to control the publishing rights and take half the songwriting credits. And after all that they wanted us to change our name so that they could own the name, hire and fire whoever they wanted, and have 3 or 4 bands with the same name touring.

After all the expenses that Motown wanted to take out of our royalties, our management figured we would have to sell more than a million copies of our first LP just to end up not owing Motown any money. And in the late 60s a million copies from a new group was unheard of.

When our management tried to get better terms, they quit talking to us, and picked their second choice, The Sunliners with the Motown owned new name "Rare Earth".

The exorbitant fees for recording, distribution, plus publishing rights and other record company profits coupled with the low pennies per sale to the artist is the main reason why the vast majority of single artists and groups have been one-hit-wonders or one-CD-wonders. They became big stars for a while and never made enough to pay back the debt to the record company - who made a fortune on the recordings.

Want to do another record? You need to pay your back fees that your royalties didn't cover first. One-hit-wonder land.

But if you had a number one hit on Billboard, you got better gigs if you could work out a deal to keep your name and pay part of your live performance money to the record company.

Sure, there are the exceptions. If your first recording goes viral, you become an 'automatic' and can negotiate better terms for your next album. The 1% or so of the people that made hits got to do this and became megastars.

The rest of us make our living playing live, in front of an audience. That could be touring, or playing singles clubs, yacht/country clubs, cruise ships, show clubs, Elk's/Moose lodges, Nursing Homes or anything in-between.

Most of the money is not in touring, but all kinds of playing live in front of an appreciative audience, and other than a short period of time when recordings were king, it has been this way for all of history.

Insights and incites by Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

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