Rolling Music Industry into the Shitbin

I saw this posted by a local club owner:

So here's the thing, and this will not come as a surprise to many; the systems we have in place in the music / live entertainment industry are failing. They have not changed with the times, and something drastic needs to happen if people want independent venues and artists to survive. This is at no fault to the artists themselves, but rather the top % in control of the systems that they created long ago.

Here is what has happened and continues to happen: The cost of living in the U.S. is at a rate at which an industry, like live entertainment, cannot keep up with. Artists cannot live off of, let alone pay for any bills through streaming payouts. They are forced to tour, create an internet persona and sell merchandise to try and make a living. The cost of touring (gas, hotels/bnb's, food, etc.) is at an all time high.

The responsibility of this falls on club owners & talent buyers, like myself, to put up the costs to cover all of these expenses + guarantee enough money to pay out the artist PLUS everyone else involved with an artist (Agents, Managers, Publicists, etc.). All of this is a HUGE financial risk, with the hopes that we will make the money back through ticket sales.

And let me tell ya, the money is not coming back through ticket sales. "But what about the bar? You've got to be making money off the drinks." - Nope. Venues are not making the money back through alcohol sales - because guess what? - operating a small business in the US right now is also astronomical and fucking impossible. All vendors cost more, utilities cost more all products cost more, rents never stop going up and the biggest crooks of them all - insurance companies - can cost someone like me, $25,000 - $35,000 a year, and thats for a small venue (150-250 capacity).

If you're in attendance at live music events right now that have big crowds and seem to be successful, the owners of those clubs are funded and backed by millionaires & billionaires. Even if they claim to be "independent," they truly are not. These venues can operate at a loss because they have the capital to support and sustain the losses they take on. Agencies and artist prioritize these venues over all other venues because the money is there. So naturally, the most successful agencies only work with the wealthiest venues, or at least send their best selling artists their way. This relationship of the wealth only working with the wealthy further funds and grows their own companies and their own wealth. No trickle down to the true independents in the industry.

So if you're reading this, please consider buying a ticket to an original artist I am presenting at Robert's Westside or Bobby's Eastside. Even if you've never heard of them. They deserve your attention and I promise you if they are on my calendar, they are fucking great.

FWIW, this club is nothing special, which makes this call to action more dramatic.

And then related, I saw this post from Fishbone, announcing that they can no longer afford to tour as headliners:

Big ups to Shirley Manson and Garbage for taking the time at their show in Denver (who we all love and have been great to Us as well) to discuss the reality of being a working musician and band. What she says hits us too… a band for 40+ years that still struggle with the high cost of tickets, high cost of touring from transportation, gas, hotels… but we all keep in keeping on… so when we have “unforeseen circumstances” it just comes down to we can’t afford it all the time and these promoters rely on data… that means “pre sales”… so when bands like us are out there pushing shows months before the date, it’s because the numbers are being watched… when the pre sales don’t show strength… unforeseen circumstances begin to brew from promoters. Bands get a guarantee to get paid and cover touring costs. Band members in the end (if you add up the time) can make below minimum wage, so if sales don’t look great, promoters ask for “reductions” which means taking less for the show that was guaranteed… which means the people that take the hit are the band and the musicians. Why take a “reduction”? Because it’s a business built on relationships. It’s like, do me a solid and i’ll do you one later (questionable), but it’s the game… why do you tour if you are making below minimum wage? Because this is what we were out on earth to do… so when you see merch and it’s $5 more than the last time, or an LP or CD is higher than you wanted, it’s all to make up the difference to make a little extra to stay out in the road… plus, there is a cost for manufacturing, but that’s a whole other post.. thank you Shirley and thank you Garbage for bringing this to people’s attention… keep showing the love , supporting the band and we will have a lot for you in 2026. Gracias.

This is what they posted: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPxRx2WjQ_Z/

And this reports on what Manson said: https://www.stereogum.com/2326398/garbages-shirley-manson-speaks-out-against-music-industry-economics-this-is-an-alarm-call/news/

We have announced that this is our last headline tour of North America. By that, we mean it has become entirely unsustainable for a band like us to come and tour anywhere except the coasts. And it’s upsetting, but we’ve had a glorious 30-year career, and we really have no complaints. But I bring this up every night because I think it’s imperative that that we all start to understand what exactly is going on in the music industry. And it’s difficult to get your head around, right? Because you see all these big pop stars, and they’re making billions and billions and billions of dollars and they’re rich and they’re glamorous and they’re amazing. But the problem is that most of the music industry is not made of these big pop-stars. They’re made of working musicians.

This is not a pity party for us. This is an alarm call for all the young generations of musicians who are in our wake, and who we feel duty-bound to speak up for because there’s nobody speaking up for them. There is no governmental body. There’s no fucking real effective union for musicians that fights for young musicians to get paid. The average musician makes $12 a month on Spotify. They’re sleeping in their vans, they’re holding down numerous jobs, and they’re playing their guts out every night. The fact that they are not even able to sell a record and it’s taken from them by rich motherfuckers on streaming platforms who get paid royally by record labels, who get paid royally by Ticketmaster, who get paid royally by merch companies, who get paid royally — the list goes on and on and on. There’s accountants. There’s lawyers. They’re all fucking getting paid, except for the musician.

So I bring this up tonight because you are the ones who will lose out on generations of esoteric, risk-taking, creative, adventurous weirdos, rebels, agitators, and provocateurs. You’re gonna get fucking white bread. That’s it. So thank you so much for coming out tonight, for supporting us for 30 years. Our love is strong for you. Keep supporting live music when you can. Buy vinyl when you can.

And here's Jack fuckin Antonoff:

https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/jack-antonoff-corporations-monopolize-concert-industry-1236091236/

Anyway, ticket prices, royalties, cancelled tours, cost of living/touring, a bunch of shit seems to be coming to a head, so I wanted to put down a stake for stories, discussion, insider tales, and so on.

bookmarked

Yeah, we need this thread.

related

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/ice-ads-all-over-streaming-services-spotify-hbo-pandora-1235447970/

Thank you for starting this thread!!!

It’s infuriating me to think back on just how great it was being able to see independent acts on tour a couple decades ago, I lived near a very vibrant small live venue in LA and there were several really great acts coming through for a week, like you might have a week where you’d be able to see Billy childish, British sea power, Kaito, etc just to cite some examples. And it’s just not the same. So many acts get tied up in the big tent festivals or they simply don’t play anywhere these days. There are so many opportunistic, greedy motherfuckers in the world of streaming and tech, The ones who are “disruptors” who decided it would be great to make it easier to hear music, and the side effect, of course being that it destroyed an entire economic pipeline for these wonderful artists, with so much of that money making meritless dopes sitting in an office very very wealthy.

I mean, it's clear that the rise of streaming is the culprit here, though Covid certainly didn't help. As far as I'm concerned, you can trace the roots of everything shitty about the music business in 2025 directly to Daniel Ek

I for one am shocked that people's labour is being devalued and exploited

Reading the history of Spotify and how they filled their early servers with music literally downloaded from the Pirate Bay really sums it all up.

I was exceptionally skeptical to embrace iTunes when they posited that “owning data” would replace physical formats, but the business model was sustainable and that was a nice decade or so.

Spotify is pure criminality— and what sucks the most is that the front-end is fairly ideal (intrusions of AI generated content notwithstanding), DSPs present an essentially utopian listening platform that I couldn’t have dreamed of existing, 25 years ago. Too bad it was predatory from the ground up: praying for terrible things to happen to Daniel Ek every single day.

I’m a little more big-picture about it all, though— music industry is just “a fragile industry” and its workers are even more susceptible to the same things that fuck up everyone’s lives— the skyrocketing rent costs in urban centers, rampant landlordism, post-COVID spikes in food costs and fuel costs and hospitality costs.

I personally believe that the field of “live pop music” (outside of, like, actual pop music, I mean like gigs, from indie rock to electronic music to rap and everything in between) is on track to require a subsistence economy in order to survive— the same way symphonies and ballet companies and jazz clubs are dependent on funding, from private and/or public entities, so will be the future of all live venues. Already in Toronto I was aware that there were bursaries/grants being given to show promoters ‘just to get gigs happening again’— I don’t know the specifics of what was being offered, only what Dan Burke was telling me he had access to. They worked, insofar as Toronto was concerned, great to come out of COVID and see that there were inexpensively-priced well-attended gigs where the bands were getting paid-reasonably.

But yeah the problem as always is landlords. And Daniel Ek

Idk if anybody aside from ILXor Craig D. is as much of a fan/subscriber/participant in Toronto’s Tranzac community as I am, but man I would love to read a breakdown of that venue’s model and operating costs and how the board of directors function and their relationship (or lack thereof) toward funding entities. It is a shocking thing to exist, that venue, I imagine that NYC’s Tonic in the 90s is the closest comparison, it seems impossible that something to vibrant and reliably magical (and popular, but like, exactly popular enough) can exist in such an expensive and unfriendly-to-the-creative-class city as Toronto

I can Google, I'm sure, but better to hear it from someone knowledgeable / invested: Can you tell us what Tranzac and the Tranzac community is, fgti?

It’s a building that has a main concert room (abt 200 cap) and a front room (abt 80 cap) and a small living room (abt 35 cap), as well as some offices and things upstairs. When I moved to Toronto in the late 90s it was mostly known to me as a hub for traditional and folk music, like fiddle jams on Sunday afternoons and weekly open mics. Over time it became the nexus of a lot of jazz, experimental and skewed-pop and -folk music stuff. There are usually four shows every weeknight (early and late in both the large and small rooms) and up to six or seven events on weekends.

The venue was associated with bands like Guh in the early 00s but also a lot of the (broadly) “Rat-Drifting community” which directly implicates Eric Chenaux and Ryan Driver (amongst many others) and indirectly implicates Sandro Perri and Alex Lukashevsky. Around 2005/2006 the label Blocks (which I was involved in) took on a residency upstairs, next to the zine lending library. There is bar downstairs, by the way. No food except crisps.

The generation 5-10 years younger than me really gravitated toward the place and basically you can’t look at any week of events without seeing four to six shows with familiar names, basically “must see” stuff. A lot of non-locals would be familiar with its denizens through more exportable projects— Joseph Shabason through his work with Destroyer (and recent Nick Krgovich collabs), Karen Ng through her work with Andy Shauf, and the broader stable of 30 to 50 brilliant players who’ve (at least in one instance) appeared on almost every record to come out of Toronto (or Montreal), including “big tent” indie stuff like The Weather Station, and “imports attracted to the situation” (Julia Jacklin and Silvana Estrada are two recent records that immediately come to mind). Lots of supergroups abound— Eucalpytus being the brainchild of Brodie West, The Tittilators being the collaborative project of Ryan Driver, Thom Gill, Tanya Gill and a rotating cast of MVP drummers (Nick Fraser, Phil Melanson, Alex Meeks), and Craig D’s own “Dun-Dun Band”. There’s leakage into other cities and their own scenes, too— Fievel Is Glaque and Louis Cole both work with Thom Gill, Johnny Spence played with Tegan and Sara and pretty-much everyone else. My basic pitch to The Mountain Goats when they asked me to produce for them was “I’m bringing down some ringers, is that ok?” My pet name for this amorphous crowd of supermusicians is The Wrecking Cloud.

In any given month living post-COVID in Toronto’s east end (a good 45 minute commute from the place) I would attend eight to ten shows. Comedy shows, poetry shows, CD release parties for mid- to low-famous locals, series events with recurring players, solo improvised free jazz sets, touring electronic-and-spoken-word visitors, local luminary famous-adjacent guys (Charlie from BSS or John Southworth), younger newcomers. One of my favourite albums of the past five years was made by the regular bartender/booker Andrew Zuckerman and his wife Felicity Williams (their duo project is called You Can Can, well-worth a Bandcamp).

Around age 28 or age 32 I think my feeling of “community DIY music scene” kinda evaporated with age and diffusion, but Tranzac brought it back in a big way. It is an ecosystem and it’s unique and it is the biggest thing I miss about Toronto.

I haven't worked in the big-time music industry in over a decade (I left Roadrunner Records in May 2014), so all I can really offer this thread is transparency about how I run my own tiny label.

Generally speaking, when I decide to make a record, whether it's a recording I've commissioned or something someone brings me, I pay each musician involved $1000 up front. I also pay for the manufacturing of CDs, and sometimes for the studio time. And I promise them that if there are ever any profits, I will give them 60% and keep 40%. (This has not yet come to pass.)

For example, when I put out the Ava Mendoza/gabby fluke-mogul/Carolina Pérez album Mama Killa, my expenses were as follows:

- $1000 each to Ava, gabby and Carolina
- $800 to Martin Bisi for recording and mixing
- $100 to Kurt Gluck for mastering
- $4300 to manufacture 500 CDs and ship them from the Czech Republic to Montana

All that money came from my day job; I have never run a Kickstarter or GoFundMe campaign for any of the dozen releases the label has put out.

That was a particularly expensive release. Sometimes we get lucky; the Cecil Taylor/Tony Oxley album Flashing Spirits only cost me $500 for the master recording (purchased from Leo Feigin of Leo Records) and $4300 to make the CDs.

I've got two more CDs coming out in November; they're at the printer now.

Most if not all of our releases are on all the streaming services, because I use DistroKid for digital distribution and fuck it, I might as well. But I don't promote that fact ("pre-save this album on Spotify!") and I barely get any money from it. I rely on Bandcamp sales and physical distribution of CDs (I have a US distributor, one for the UK, and one for the EU).

My label loses money every single year. This year, we might lose less than usual. The Cecil CD is almost sold out, and the other half of the operation - uploading Leo Records' catalog to Bandcamp - generates a couple of hundred bucks a month. (I give him 2/3 of net revenue and keep 1/3.) But it is a very small, struggling business; I do it for the sheer love of doing it, and because every album we put out is fucking amazing.

I gd love Ava Mendoza, that is very cool. I did have a crash of optimism this year as it became hyper-apparent that Gen Z is a CD-buying generation, like in a big way. I feel a whiff of a premonition that the "album format" is going to have an upswing in its cultural importance over the next decade or two, after the past decade of people handwringing that Millennials are all about playlists and single-track consumption and that "the album format is dying". I like albums and hope they stick around

I like albums and hope they stick around

Me too; I'm very cognizant when putting together releases of making albums that work as albums. Sequencing matters; reasonable track length matters (I'll never release something that's just one hour-long track, though the Cecil disc came close); presentation matters. Our CDs are beautiful physical objects - they come in gatefold mini-LP sleeves printed on linen textured paper, with art by my wife.

I gd love Ava Mendoza, that is very cool. I did have a crash of optimism this year as it became hyper-apparent that Gen Z is a CD-buying generation, like in a big way. I feel a whiff of a premonition that the "album format" is going to have an upswing in its cultural importance over the next decade or two, after the past decade of people handwringing that Millennials are all about playlists and single-track consumption and that "the album format is dying". I like albums and hope they stick around

― We're sad to see you. Go! (flamboyant goon tie included), Saturday, October 18, 2025 10:04 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i know it's optimistic but i think there's a real grain of truth here.

Man, I wish, it would make me so happy if young people started gravitating toward start-to-finish albums, even if they did so ironically or as a "retro" affectation. For sure it seems that physical ... well, physical everything is making a comeback. I imagine for a generation taught that all art is intangible/ephemeral - streaming, the cloud, algorithm generated playlists - actually owning something you can hold might mean something special.

i see music via the internet sort of leveling out. there's a hard limit to enjoying music via rentier status imo. cd collecting is first in line for when people start figuring out enjoying audio recordings and owning them go hand-in-hand.

Unperson, you’re doing amazing work, and am grateful you’re getting the Leo catalogue into the 21st Century. Now if you could get the Emanem catalog from Martin Davidson’s heirs, I’d chip in a gofundme if you needed it.

I did have a crash of optimism this year as it became hyper-apparent that Gen Z is a CD-buying generation, like in a big way.

May I ask how you came to be aware of this? I feel like I’ve seen this statement occasionally, but it’s based on something like seeing kids buying CDs from a merch table after a show, and younger people attending indie music shows is a self-selecting group of different than your typical music fan (like if 20 years ago someone saw me and my 20-something friends buying 45s after a Sharon Jones concert and declared the youth of today were really into 7” singles, instead of just music nerds using the opportunity to pick up something after a good show).

my gen z cousin collects cds and asks for cds for christmas/bday gifts

the longest-lived local store has told me that they sell way more CDs now than they did for the last 10-15 years.

It’s partly probably simple economics, right?

You want to own music you love, but you’d rather pay $15-$20 instead of $30-$50 for a cool new release.

yep used CDs are waaaay cheaper than LPs

haha xpost

anecdotally, it's also hard as hell to find a decent single-disc CD player (not some DVD hybrid) on the used market.

There are CD collector group pages on FB and (especially) Reddit that look to be full of Zoomers showing off their collections and "hauls". The main downside to this imho is that seemingly most of their buying is getting used stuff at thrift stores or Marketplace/eBay lot buys which doesn't help record stores that much or artists at all.

May I ask how you came to be aware of this?

First, my ex-husband's godkids turned 17/18 or whatever and started asking if they could raid my CD collection and I obliged. Second, I went out on tour with Ichiko Aoba, mean-age of the audience was 23, mean-gender was enby, basically an extremely cool crowd of kids, and saw that CDs were outselling LPs like 4-to-1 both in her case and my case. Third, reports from record store owner friends have stated the same.

I don't think it's quite as big as "the vinyl boom" from 25 years ago but it's a significantly larger thing than "the cassette boom" from fifteen years ago.

the longest-lived local store has told me that they sell way more CDs now than they did for the last 10-15 years.

Sure, but are they being sold to Gen-Zers? I’m buying more new CDs now from stores because they’re half the price of the LP version, but I’m in my 40s and remember when something like the quadruple LP Speakerbox/The Love Below was cheaper than the double CD version, so I have certain expectations about costs from decades of music buying that make the current price of vinyl undesirable when I want to buy an album.

You want to own music you love, but you’d rather pay $15-$20 instead of $30-$50 for a cool new release.

But you could pay $10 for the digital files from an online store and burn the disc yourself if having a disc is that important to you. And the artists/labels would likely make more money from those sales without the overhead of producing physical copies.

I guess the whole “CDs will make a vinyl-like comeback” wishful thinking some people have doesn’t take into account that a compact disc as a musical storage unit ceased to be of any value to most people once anyone could make one at home. And when every single type of optical disc (CD-Roms, DVDs, AOL start ups, Wii games, etc.) became old hat or just plain junk and unnecessary to have, it was just another version of a past technology. In my experiences, the older end of GenZ (such as my coworkers) would never think to own any music when they could listen for nothing on an ad-supported streaming service (some may think my turntables and record and CD collection are interesting as conversation pieces, but wouldn’t listen to music that way themselves), and the younger end, the teenaged and early-20s children of my friends who were in bands/promoters/DJs/ran bedroom labels in the 90s/2000s don’t seem interested in physical media (hell, their parents don’t seem interested in physical media these days).

how many people actually have CD burners in 2025? I realized somewhat recently that I don't even have anything that can play a CD!

Oddly, I just saw this related story: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/optical-drive-demand-surges-amid-windows-10-retirement-japanese-users-switching-to-windows-11-are-buying-up-blu-ray-drives

But you could pay $10 for the digital files from an online store and burn the disc yourself if having a disc is that important to you.

actually, to my great annoyance, you can't do this with most modern digital albums, which download in 24/96 FLAC quality and thus take up double the space. you have to manually downgrade the bitrate track by track.

a compact disc as a musical storage unit ceased to be of any value to most people once anyone could make one at home.

this is also incorrect, silver CDs have a totally different manufacturing process than home CDRs

(which is more durable, I should note)

and then there's mastering, many DAT masters from the 90s have decayed so badly that they have literally used a 90s-era silver CD as a starting point for the new remaster

I'm playing a show in Chicago this week (with fellow ILXors' band on the bill too, plug plug), and it shocked me that, while keeping prices low, the ticket fees amount to more than a more than 30% surcharge. And this is at a quintessential small indie club.

Aw, I wish I could make it!

I’m in my 40s and remember when something like the quadruple LP Speakerbox/The Love Below was cheaper than the double CD version

hmm, I was working at a record store at the time and I'm not so sure about that. I'm guessing the CD was about $25 at most and the vinyl was probably $32-40.

Personally I (kinda) remember speaker boxx/love below priced to move in the beginning, I would probably not have bought my friend the vinyl for her birthday if it was $32-$40 at that time but idk

But yeah when I started buying vinyl (late 90s) it was just because it was generally cheaper than CDs, new and used

well not “just”, big covers are cool

I bought vinyl more than CDs in my early 90s college years because they were cheap, cheap, cheap.

same here, I was lucky to get into vinyl during my college years especially 2004-2005 which was a point where a lot of big collections were getting sold. you could routinely find great records in the $2-$10 range, especially huge sellers like Beatles/Floyd/Hendrix/Michael Jackson

that's when I upgraded a ton of stuff in my collection, good times.

i built half my record collection in the '90s.

also back in the late '90s and early 2000s, new vinyl was insanely cheap. i distinctly remember all the indie vinyl at Aron's in L.A. was $7.99 to $8.99, double LPs were several bucks more. major label releases were largely well under $20. all the used stuff everywhere in town was under $10. it was a glorious time! (goodfellas voice)

I remember getting Kimono my House, Propaganda & Indiscreet, plus Red by King Crimson, Fragile by Yes, two Renaissance albums, and a bunch of Gordon Lightfoots for I think $25 total

I swear I remember in the late 90s Amoeba Berkeley having brand new Kraftwerk vinyl reissues for like $8 new!!!

I also remember getting a sealed copy of OK Computer for $15.99 in 2005, I remember that price because that's exactly what most new CDs were. I never opened it because my record player was broke at the time and by the time I got a working one I wasn't really interested in Radiohead anymore. When I looked it up on Discogs I think it might actually be an original '97 copy, which sealed could be worth like 800 bucks?? But it's really hard to tell! I compared to a newer pressing and all the markings are basically the same

xp yep, those Scorpio pressings

Most of the "new" albums I own from my peak indie years are on vinyl because LPs by Pavement, Polvo, Superchunk, Versus, Lambchop, Cat Power, Helium, Sebadoh, etc were typically at least a few dollars cheaper than the CD version. Since I owned both a record player and a CD player at the time, and I was a poor college student, cost was my only criteria. Sadly, most of these treasures were sold off for peanuts long before the recent vinyl boom

Xp to fgti way upthread re venues and funding. This is something I probably know way too much about in terms of technical details that I kinda don’t want to post about because it would take a lot of time and y’all might not actually care to hear it from me.

Like, the economics of operating small-ish venues for weird music has basically shaped the trajectory of my career.

In general, from my experience, the thing that makes the difference between a long-running venue and one that closes is rich people consistently funding it. There are some outliers, like 924 Gilman … this is also somewhat true of avant-garde musicians.

why do you think Gilman has worked so far?

Things that Gilman has going for it:
1. Cheap rent - they are a 501c3 so the financials are public. The donor info I haven’t seen fyi.
2. types of labor suited to volunteers learning how to do things that appeal to them - thus it’s easier for it to be volunteer run than other types of projects or even venues
3. Programming that appeals to young people
4. A steady source of enthusiastic young people from the city and surrounding areas who can afford to be involved either as volunteers or audience

If they had to move, they could be seriously fucked though

Basically the 2 biggest expenses for an “indie” venue are facility costs and labor costs.

I wrote a blog post about buying compact discs in the modern age a few months ago. I had a hankering for Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's Mustt Mustt, which got me to thinking about the format. There was an initial vinyl release in 1990, and it was reissued on vinyl in 2017, but the reissue - which was £22.99, vs £9.99 for the compact disc - is out of print. So it made sense to buy it on compact disc. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that modern MacOS still identifies compact discs and can rip them to the modern equivalent of iTunes. I repeated the process with The B-52's' debut album. But not Brian Eno's Ambient 4 because it seems to be unavailable on CD. Presumably the reissues from a while back sold out.

It dawned on me that my nearest city doesn't have a compact disc store. Modern record stores are essentially vinyl record stores. CEx doesn't stock compact discs. CDs used to be available in WH Smiths and The Big Tesco, but not any more. In the UK compact disc sales are almost double those of vinyl, but the revenues are lower because vinyl sells for a higher price, which might be why record shops concentrate on vinyl. My hunch is that Tesco etc can put something more profitable in the same space.

I gigged a few times in the late 1990s, but that was with a laptop, which was relatively easy to move around, and I lived in London at the time. If I had to transport more equipment over a longer distance and stay overnight it wouldn't have been economically viable. One thing I remember is that a lot of the electronic artists I enjoyed at the time seemed to stop releasing music in the mid-2000s. I've always assumed that even acts on the level of e.g. Boards of Canada or Jimi Tenor didn't make a lot of money, and that the less popular artists - Plone, Arovane and so forth - either subsidised their music from their day jobs as software engineers, or they very occasionally sold a track for a TV commercial, and that was their main source of revenue.

Presumably nowadays with huge job losses in the software engineering and games development industries there are fewer people willing to subsidise their musical dream. One thing I remember is that the local city used to have a large Friends Provident office filled with bright young things earning money, and a guitar store literally across the street where they could spend their money:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/UckdBYZEZahbpg2g7

And then Friends Provident moved out, at which point the guitar store closed. It became an estate agent. Now it's a massage therapy place. It strikes me that the music scene relies on young people having spare cash. Instead of e.g. a tiny number of young YouTubers with millions of pounds, plus millions of regular people who are in debt.

"- $4300 to manufacture 500 CDs and ship them from the Czech Republic to Montana"

I've toyed with the idea of pressing some of my music to a physical media and inventing a record company. The thought of having a big pile of unsold vinyl records that just sit around unsold excites me. I would be an actual, real musician instead of a nobody. I would be a somebody. Just like Leo Sayer. He had mojo. He was a somebody. There's an interesting thread here about pressing up short runs of vinyl, including a few plants sur le continent:
https://www.modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=287956

Every time I think about wasting money like this a voice in my head says "you have wasted money before" and another voice says "don't listen to the other voice" and a third voice says "Sabrina Carpenter, in hot pants" and then I find myself compelled to look up all the cars that were used in the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman television show. Did you know that the first series was set in the Second World War? It was too expensive, so they moved it into what was then the modern day.

....

speaking of Scorpio, I was at a local store today chatting with the owner and she mentioned that their wholesale prices tripled a year or two ago, so they stopped buying from them

It dawned on me that my nearest city doesn't have a compact disc store. Modern record stores are essentially vinyl record stores.

A local store with CD in the name no longer even carries used CDs.

I've always assumed that even acts on the level of e.g. Boards of Canada or Jimi Tenor didn't make a lot of money, and that the less popular artists - Plone, Arovane and so forth - either subsidised their music from their day jobs as software engineers, or they very occasionally sold a track for a TV commercial, and that was their main

Washington DC-based electronic musician Chessie (Stephen Gardner) was working for railroads and eventually became CEO of Amtrak. https://www.discogs.com/artist/9987-Chessie

And I think left Amtrak recently due to pressure from Trump.

why do you think Gilman has worked so far?

― sleeve, Sunday, October 19, 2025 12:16 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

It is no secret that the Green Day and Rancid guys basically keep this place afloat fwiw.

And I think left Amtrak recently due to pressure from Trump.

Yes, he suit earlier this year.

Left

Rhizome in DC is an interesting example of an independent venue holding it together after being forced to move

How do they do it? Where does the money/support come from?

My daughter had her 16th birthday today and a friend,
also 16, gave her Weezer’s blue album on CD. Spotify is definitely the main thing but my kid has a turntable and a cd player and the cds get way more play. They’re just so much easier to handle.

Best place to hunt for used CDs is in used book stores. CDs aren’t their main thing so they’re usually cheap or priced haphazardly. People sell them along with book collections which weeds out some
of the dreck but there’s often a lot of classical. My favorite way to explore a new town is hitting all of the used book stores and combing through their cds and comics.

Thinking about paying for apple music. Kid uses Spotify free and I hate hearing the commercials. I don’t know if Apple Music is any better but Spotify sounds more and more evil everyday.

Xp I know I and a couple other ilxors contributed to a gofundme when they had to find a new location. They’re also non profit, but most of it is the slow community building they did for, I don't know exactly, but around 20 years. It’s been the place to see and perform experimental music of all kinds for as long as I can remember

OK, I know the place you're talking about. For sure if the community is supporting it, literally and figuratively, it's got a better chance than most, but that's a particular kind of model not necessarily beholden to the same market movements as most venues/spaces.

Oh I wasn’t trying to make a point or anything. Just praising a good one.

In fact I was gonna make a short movie about the future of concerts where some singer hauls a guitar to Elon musk’s house and Elon bumps a bunch of ketmamine and lays in the fetal position while the singer puts the guitar right up to his ear and performs a set

fyi damon krukowski (of galaxie 500 fame) writes a lot about this stuff in his substack, his top shared articles are almost all on this topic check it out https://dadadrummer.substack.com/archive?sort=top

forgot about that, thanks for the reminder. yeah, he has been very vocal for many years now.

I like this bit the “against innovation“ piece

Spotify is not a music company. This is what Neil Young’s gesture made clear to many, many more people this week. But lots of musicians have known it for ages, because the fact is that Spotify doesn’t value music. Indeed, its financial success as a company depends on the perception of music as valueless. In the Swedish academic study Spotify Teardown (2019), the authors describe how Ek and his colleagues created their business by treating music like junk bonds, or overstock goods:

“When Daniel Ek, Martin Lorentzon, and others first developed Spotify, they famously did so by building on a collection of music they did not hold any rights to themselves. The history of music streaming thus begins with an act of free riding – or arbitrage. As arbitrageurs of music, Ek and his colleagues would obtain scarce goods at no cost, with the aim of making revenue through advertising and later subscriptions, while others involved in the transaction – the composers, musicians, music publishers, artists, and repertoire owners – experienced an implicit loss.”

We can pretend this is a new thing, we can pretend that Spotify suddenly took a heel turn, but I think everybody involved in the enterprise from the start was either doing so out of calculated greed, or pretending they weren’t one of the bad guys who was contributing to help ruin the livelihood of working musicians everywhere.

fyi damon krukowski (of galaxie 500 fame) writes a lot about this stuff in his substack, his top shared articles are almost all on this topic check it out https://dadadrummer.substack.com/archive?sort=top🕸

Dad Ad Rummer

You want to own music you love, but you’d rather pay $15-$20 instead of $30-$50 for a cool new release.

But you could pay $10 for the digital files from an online store and burn the disc yourself if having a disc is that important to you. And the artists/labels would likely make more money from those sales without the overhead of producing physical copies.

This misses the other reason cds are selling these days. These are the children of KPOP and Taylor Swift, who were taught to value physical items from their fave artists. These are the same people who were buying lots of vinyl a few years ago. They want an artifact... they want to help their faves get the highest chart position they can... and they are tiring at speed of spending $40-50 on vinyl. Have run the music offerings for a regional chain for decades and we're selling more cds than we have in yonks.

I like it when I get the digital album that I can rip to my phone, but I've never stopped buying CDs.

i dunno how to solve the venue/touring side of this but on the artist side seems like patreon and related subscription models are where it's headed. although that does cause the music creation equation to change (or to use a more maligned phrase, content creation) as artists can't release an album that does well and coast on it for years while recording the new album. patreon requires a steady drip of new content.

fandom itself is also changing to be more, well, asian?

I'd love to believe that cds are coming back (and coincidentally I recently hooked up a '90s six cd changer and preamp at home so I can play cds for the first time in awhile), and I have seen more on Bandcamp, but idk we'll see.

Running an independent venue seems like an extremely hard and thankless task, I'm very grateful that we have a few in town right now (there was a dearth for a few years after Live Nation, the guise of a local subsidiary, took over everything).

i dunno how to solve the venue/touring side of this but on the artist side seems like patreon and related subscription models are where it's headed. although that does cause the music creation equation to change (or to use a more maligned phrase, content creation) as artists can't release an album that does well and coast on it for years while recording the new album. patreon requires a steady drip of new content.

maybe but I follow a number of artists who are entirely self-funded this way and it doesn't feel like any of them are doing particularly well despite pouring massive amounts of work into it...meanwhile groups that had a big hit or successful album 30 years ago can sorta make a living of it. I know a number of established artists have gone to a subscription model but most of 'em give up on it after a year or so.

Also unperson, thanks for the label transparency, I'm always curious about those breakdowns. Can I ask -- $100 for mastering is very cheap, is that because you cut a deal with that mastering engineer in exchange for consistent work (and also because I imagine for jazz records the mastering settings are pretty consistent from track to track)? Usually pro mastering is more like $50/track in my experience, which basically zeroes out the profits from an independent release (and I've sort of assumed that some indie labels who put out lots of releases must have a special relationship/rate with their mastering engineer in order to make it work).

Also curious if the artists get some cds to sell at shows, or have an option to buy some at cost. Either way it's still a great thing these days to get some money and studio time upfront to record, I'm so used to the diy world where you make the record at your own expense and then maybe try and get a label to release it (either way hoping to break even at best).

Can I ask -- $100 for mastering is very cheap, is that because you cut a deal with that mastering engineer in exchange for consistent work (and also because I imagine for jazz records the mastering settings are pretty consistent from track to track)? Usually pro mastering is more like $50/track in my experience, which basically zeroes out the profits from an independent release (and I've sort of assumed that some indie labels who put out lots of releases must have a special relationship/rate with their mastering engineer in order to make it work).

It's a combination of what you described and more - the engineer is a friend who's released an album on my label; he lives in Estonia where life is cheap; the records are jazz (or produced on the jazz model, meaning they were made in a single session with consistent levels and settings throughout). I'm basically paying him to make sure everything's ready to go, give the drums a little boost, and create the DDP files for the manufacturer.

And yeah, I give the artists a box of CDs each (25-30 copies).

The label JABS posts production costs for their releases. Here's what they have for There is No Desire by Adulkt Life:

https://www.jabsjabsjabs.com/there-is-no-desire-lp/

PayPal/Bandcamp/shipping and packaging adding a lot there.

(they also put out the great Huggy Bear book, Killed (of Kids) earlier this year)

OK, I know the place you're talking about. For sure if the community is supporting it, literally and figuratively, it's got a better chance than most, but that's a particular kind of model not necessarily beholden to the same market movements as most venues/spaces.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, October 20, 2025 5:24 AM (two hours ago

It is beholden to slightly similar market movements tbh. You are still beholden to general trends in discretionary spending and charitable giving. Let me tell you, making the case to give money to music venues and arts-related endeavors at this point in time—- is hard.

Xp table — you bring up a good point— the association with celebrity (green day & rancid guys) … it’s also what The Stone has going for it —- cultural capital.

I completely missed out on that Huggy Bear book and if somebody has an extra copy I will buy it for myself for Christmas

I’ve said this before and I can’t resist saying it again, but my response to Ek “treating recorded music like junk bonds” is to once again call for us to start treating the bodies of Spotify execs like ingredients, I cannot stress enough that the only solution here is cannibalism

And I think left Amtrak recently due to pressure from Trump.

― curmudgeon

i mean that's the thing, the sheer level of systemic failure we're talking here is off the charts

the fact that we can have in october 2025 a thread called "music industry into the shitbin" when the music industry has been collapsing for 25 years, i think, highlights how bad this is

25 years where there's less and less for fewer and fewer people and finally we've reached the point where there's nothing for anyone. nothing for anyone anywhere. can someone tell me how there's a future to any "industry"?

I’ve said this before and I can’t resist saying it again, but my response to Ek “treating recorded music like junk bonds” is to once again call for us to start treating the bodies of Spotify execs like ingredients, I cannot stress enough that the only solution here is cannibalism

― We're sad to see you. Go! (flamboyant goon tie included)

i'd agree with this were it not for the very nice cannibal fetishists of my acquaintance, who only fantasize about eating the bodies of people they _like_

the fact that we can have in october 2025 a thread called "music industry into the shitbin" when the music industry has been collapsing for 25 years, i think, highlights how bad this is

Last week I posted on LinkedIn, "I've been out of the music industry more than a decade and LinkedIn still wants to connect me with people at major labels. Everyone still in the music business (and publishing for that matter) should be using Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove as their avatar. Ride that bomb all the way to the ground!"

A friend replied, "Dude, it’s rarely been as much fun. Digital marketing has finally been embraced especially audience data and fan engagement, radio and other old mediums finally winding down, music is more available than ever, consumers not label suits pick the hits, AI is bringing on copyright reform that lawyers never did, genre boundaries have disintegrated, and you can pick the music you want to listen to, old or new. The shitty parts are the same old shit, no better, no worse."

Note that there's not a word in his response about artists getting paid. Unless that's covered by his last sentence.

Yeah I caught that comment. Whistling in the wind there, at the least.

my band's recent EP was put out by a label called Subjangle, puts out 100 copy limited edition CD-Rs, I was really surprised by quickly it sold out