by John Seay, The Seay Firm LLC (@TheSeayFirmLLC)
In the movie Almost Famous, members of the fictional band Stillwater burst into song after learning they made the cover of Rolling Stone.[1] Sure, Stillwater is happy because making the cover validates their existence, but it also—especially back in 1973—meant increased record sales and concert attendance, which meant more money for the trappings of mid-70s music industry success, which meant even more reason to celebrate in spontaneous song and shortly thereafter proclaim your status as a Golden God.
Of course, these days nothing really drives record sales, for the obvious reason that fewer people are buying records, preferring instead to either download them illegally or—slightly better—stream them online from services which still haven’t figured out how to both fairly compensate artists and avoid bankruptcy. Unfortunately, while the ways in which we consume music have irrevocably changed, our perceptions of music industry success have not. There remains a level of disconnect between the indicia of success—what we might call critical or even public success, i.e., making the cover of Rolling Stone—and monetary success. You know, the kind of success you need to feed your family. Unlike in days past, having the former doesn’t nearly guarantee possession of the latter.[2]
Last week I read an interview with the band Grizzly Bear, from Brooklyn, New York, that illustrated this point exactly. Ever since the summer of 2008, when Grizzly Bear opened for Radiohead on the second leg of Radiohead’s North American tour, music journalists and fans have sung the group’s praises. Although Grizzly Bear has been called “critical” or “indie” darlings more times than I, personally, can stomach, it’s impossible to deny the band’s public successes. They recently sold out Radio City Music Hall. They’ve appeared on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. When they released Veckatimest in 2009, it was ubiquitous on Top Album lists—even Pitchfork ranked it the 6th best album of that year. You can’t get more “indie darling” than that. Grizzly Bear’s new album, Shields, was hotly anticipated and is destined to achieve similar ubiquity on this year’s Top Album lists.[3]
Given all of that critical and popular success, you’d think the members of Grizzly Bear would be making out quite nicely. But, to hear them tell it at least, they aren’t. In the aforementioned interview, founding member Ed Droste reveals that some of his bandmates can’t afford health insurance, that they all still live in the same apartments they lived in when they were getting their start, that the band makes almost all of its money from the road, with some revenue trickling in from licensing, and that even then they barely break even when they tour. He says he worries that the buzz surrounding them now will be gone tomorrow, and that they have little hope of earning a middle-class income.
Okay, so no one likes a whiner, but whether Droste’s claims are accurate and whether we should feel sorry for him and his band are questions beyond the scope of this article. The point is that we live in an age where even if receiving an amazing rating on Pitchfork—or netting the cover of Rolling Stone—does drive consumer behavior, unfortunately it mostly drives it to free music platforms that don’t or aren’t capable of adequately compensating musicians, at least not right now.[4] Regardless, for those bands out there still making great music without receiving great monetary compensation for it, one would hope that the quality of their music and their public successes do, at the very least, still drive romantic encounters with the opposite sex.
[1] Specifically and certainly fittingly, the group sings “The Cover of the Rolling Stone,” a song written by Shel Silverstein and recorded by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show. And yes, I know that the lyrics of the song imply that the band has already achieved monetary success, even without getting their picture on the cover of Rolling Stone.
[2] I’m aware that a more complicated and probably more interesting question is the extent to which public successes ever drove monetary success, even back in the 1970s. Furthermore, I’d be interested to see statistics on the ratio of monetarily successful bands to unsuccessful bands in the 1970s versus the same statistics for bands today. If you happen to write either one of those articles, please let me know and I’ll link to it.
[3] Pitchfork already gave the album a 9.1 review.
[4] Although I remain hopeful that over time and maybe with a little help from some licensing reform, services like Spotify will start to pay out at higher rates. Also, I don’t mean to imply that making the cover of a national music magazine does nothing for a band. Anything that raises the profile of a group is at least likely to help drive some money to the band, even if the amount of money it drives to the band is less than what might have been driven three decades ago. Although, as I point out in fn. 2, the extent to which such things ever drove money to bands is debatable.
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