I’ve just watched a free livestream on Bandcamp. Allison Russell celebrated the first anniversary of her wonderful album Outside Child by performing the whole album with three fellow musicians from what looked like her porch. It was absolutely terrific. But here’s what struck me. This was an artist performing an album which was widely critically acclaimed, and made the higher reaches of various AOTY lists in 2021. Deservedly so. And, yet, according to Bandcamp, there were precisely 33 people watching. I don’t know if thats worldwide or just in the UK, but either way it makes it barely worth doing. Two of us made donations, so far as I could see, and two others bought some vinyl.
This combined with thin audience numbers at recent gigs I have been to by The Delines, and Yorkston Thorn and Ghatak (Khan not being able to get a visa) make me reflect that this feels a deeply tough time to be a working musician. Sadly acclaim, great reviews, and even the love of The Afterword, don”t pay the bills.
Is this a post Covid thing? Or a sign of something deeper and longer term? Or am I just interested in the wrong artists?
I hope she puts the livestream up online because it deserves a wider audience. But here she is meantime, singing “Persephone’, from the album.
Well, I’d love to buy Outside Child, but if I pay 20 bucks for the CD it would cost me thirty quid, with half that the shipping to the UK. Why is it so expensive?
Yes, it’s the shipping that’s the problem if you buy from Bandcamp. The CD is easily available at sensible prices from UK retailers, and worth every penny.
I’d assumed Bandcamp was the only channel. Thanks – sorted for twelve quid!
Keen to hear this – I only know her work from the collaboration she did called Songs Of Our Native Daughters, which is excellent.
Songs of Our Native Daughters is great, I agree – it’s where I first heard Russell. I don’t want to tempt fate, but I’m sure you will like this too.
I think it must be very disheartening. Make a record, get good reviews, travel to UK and play to 11 people. Such was the lot of Ray “Chopper” Cooper a month or so back.
Disheartening for any artist to play to a nearly-empty space. Particularly if they don’t get much reaction.
Generally, because of the costs involved, US artists are unlikely to come over to the UK to play unless someone is guaranteeing their costs will be covered. A solo artist plus guitar is still an expensive endeavour with hire of additional equipment, travel and accomodation are totted up. Doing it entirely at your own expense is foolhardy to say the least.
The local jazz festival gig I’ve just got home from [*] was mostly empty but the festival had sponsors to guarantee it all. The musicians will have been paid.
The sparse audience enjoyed it and were engaged. The band enjoyed playing to some appreciative people, even if there weren’t a large number of them.
[*] Sultan Stevenson Trio + Mark Kavuma.
Mark Kavuma is great, but there’s almost no jazz scene outside of That London. I looked at booking Kansas Smitty’s House Band, but we’d have only sold enough tickets to half-fill a cafe.
I’m not familiar with Allison Russel but I’d suggest that those artists that have successful live streams have a decent following and work quite hard on social media to create awareness. I have a friend who plays for a minor act and the guitarist was making £500 every few weeks during lockdown from a virtual tip jar, streaming from his kitchen on an iPad. I was involved in streaming a heritage act last year and they sold around 300 tickets for the online show plus 200 or so in the venue so it can be done. I do agree it’s tough though. I’ve been to 3 gigs recently, none of them sold out even if they had respectable audiences.
@davebigpicture yes but £500 every few weeks doesn’t pay the mortgage – he would need a supplementary income.
The problem is gigs have replaced cd sales as the primary income for most artists and there are just too many to choose from. I could go to several gigs per week and still not see all of the artists I would like to see. Unfortunately it is often the emerging artists who lose out.
Agreed but my point was that it is possible to attract more than 33 online viewers and many musicians have always needed day jobs to make ends meet. I heard one band member tell of hearing their then current single on the radio while painting the gent’s toilets in a community centre.
Even during the boom times of the ’70s – ’90s most musicians were struggling to make a living from their craft. I’m inclined to think that the likes of us have a somewhat distorted view of the music biz. The record companies made money hand over fist in the boom times but only comparatively few artists came out of it with much to show for their efforts.
That’s one of the reasons why so many have returned to playing gigs in recent years. They don’t have the savings people with regular careers accrued, so they can’t ever afford to retire completely as long as they can still do it.
I did a double-take there.
But no – it’s not the return of this, er, excellent artiste.
At the recent Rambling Roots Revue the staff felt that the attendance was 50 % of the previous event, Delines at Union Chapel was busy, but not bunged, Calexico at The Forum was pretty sparsely attended and an event which I volunteer on is also down on numbers..It seems that people are not getting back to going out in quite the same way.. Here’s hoping for an uptick..
I was at Calexico. The only UK date and the sound was a bit ropey too.
It seems the people who aren’t getting back out post-lockdown are the ones like us.
Males in their 50s and 60s are staying home, according to a survey not so long ago. All the nightclubs and bars catering for younger age groups are absolutely rammed in my town. If you’re young with a bit of cash to spend, the town centre nightlife is great.
The pubs where bands play are just struggling along or else not doing it any more.
I had much of my 40s absent from gigs due to a Crohn’s flare-up. When I returned to pub gigs in December 2017, I noticed receding hairlines, spectacles and generous girth bulked up the youthful audience, even in a town full of students like Cambridge.
Underlying Health Issues* put me in the At Risk group. Despite having had my fourth Covid vax recently, I won’t be going to any indoor gigs for a while yet. I can’t be the only one.
I’m not doing very well at this gig malarky, having only been to two years of gigs in the past decade.
(*) TMFTL
@fentonsteve Like you because of ‘Underlying Health Issues’ I too have had my fourth jab, certainly my gig going in the last few months is down as it is so much easier just to stay in.
I should have been at a gig on Thursday but it was cancelled on Monday (as was the tour, not sure why). Yesterday I had a meal with friends in a very busy restaurant and then went to buy a ticket for a gig in September which had only a few tickets left.
Booked to go to a talk next Monday, although not a gig it’s indoors. I do feel quite safe when I’ve been at recent gigs/concerts, even when flying in a plane for four hours.
It’s all down to how you feel and what you can cope with.
I’m not that bothered about the Covid itself – plenty I know have had it recently – it’s the after-effects I’m keen to avoid. For years I have avoided anyone with a cough or sneeze as, with a dodgy immune system, my last sniffle snowballed into double pneumonia. I rate being healthy above gigs, and the gigs I like best are in sweaty pubs.
I get the feeling that it’s not just those with health issues who are staying away. Brexit and cost-of-living are also obvious factors, but some have just got out of the habit of going out and are watching Netflix/Amazon Prime/Apple TV at home.
Another factor is taking that. first step.
Was very nervous about going to Sparks about six weeks back, but once I’d gone I was a lot more relaxed about going to subsequent gigs
Like someone else says down the page, I’ll be a lot more selective about what I do go to in future though
This cost of living crisis is starting to have a measurable impact on gig attendances
and is apparently not going to ease off any time soon.
The last few years have been incredibly hard on musicians.
Depressingly, the next couple of years are looking they’ll be
every bit as tough.
It depends where the ‘going out’ is. I’ve been to a number of previously postponed non Afterword-friendly arena shows over the last two or three months (don’t judge me), and they’ve all been pretty much rammed.
My kids are in Milton Keynes tonight seeing My Chemical Romance, postponed from 2020. Sold out and extra dates added.
I know from FB I know that tonight’s Unthanks gig in Manchester is sold out, along with several others on their tour. (I’ll be at the Palladium show next Sunday which is far from sold out, but it’s an ambitious venue for them to book.)
Me too @Black-Type
In fact I have had 6 gigs cancelled this year which has pissed me off.
Still June looking very good on the gig front.
The impression I get is that big names or shows where demand generally exceeds supply are doing fine, including with audiences of our vintage. The ones that seem to be struggling are the more niche ones, which have always been dependent on a combination of loyal fans, but also the musically curious who will take a chance. I sense that if it’s a ‘that looks quite interesting’ as opposed to a ‘must see’, that’s where the audience has been hit hardest.
Two things I suspect might have hurt the ‘that looks interesting’ section of the audience. Firstly, the cost of ticket. I might take a punt on something at £20, I won’t if it’s between £50 and 100. Secondly, in some of the bigger cities, I wonder about the impact of working from home. I certainly attended far fewer gigs once I stopped commuting to London each day, not least because I no longer had a season ticket.
It’s also inter3sting that many of the classical concerts I have been to, both in London and the provinces, amateur and pro, have been very well attended. The audiences were younger in London and Cambridge, older here in Dorset, but it seemingly made no difference.
One final thought. If some people are b3ing cautious because of health conditions it’s hardly surprising if attendances are down, given that somewhere between 20 and 25 million people are apparently vulnerable.
I’m seeing and hearing the same thing, Bluemeister. My pal Sarah McQuaid’s recent Irish tour (three weeks) had three gigs cancelled mid-tour because of no, or very few, tickets sold – including a well-known music pub in Galway, a compact ‘music city’ with two or three third-level education institutions. If people in Galway have stopped supporting live music, the game’s up.
I saw two of the shows on that tour, in Belfast (a music bar date within a well-established/well-promoted arts festival programme) and Portstewart (an arts centre she’s played several times before) – maybe 15 people at Belfast, around 25 at Portstewart. The day in between, at Ards Arts Centre, is usually sold out for her – but numbers were down this time. The word from all the arts centres that Sarah played on the tour was that numbers are down for every similar artist – for whatever reasons, gig-going hasn’t recovered since lockdown.
I suspect a lot of people who would have gone to travelling troubadour gigs have just got out of the way of it, though there may well be aspects of residual fear of Covid, cost of living etc.
There may also be a surfeit of artists passing through places, trying to make up for lost time – too much choice for punters, maybe? But that situation (economically) can’t last. I was speaking with one well-known 40-something English folk artist (of the multiple BBC Folk Award winning class) recently who said that a lot of communications are happening between Brit folk acts of that generation about a viable way forward – some people thinking of leaving the game altogether, others thinking of fresh ways to trade in music, to try and alleviate competition for gigs etc.
I was at Wookalily’s first gig in 2 years 2 months last night at a music pub in Belfast. Happily, it had been sold out initially (it was planned for March) though it had to be postponed (I think over lingering Covid-fears among band members) until last night – that meant that some punters couldn’t come, but it was still a good crowd for the small venue – around 35 instead of 50 – and the positive vibes from band and crowd were palpable. But Wookalily are effectively a semi-pro band – 4 of the 5 have other jobs.
With Brexit – and the significant extra costs & admin workload for UK acts touring abroad (which includes the Republic of Ireland) – it feels to me like end times for the world of British cottage industry touring acts, on a genuinely professional level.
I know from artists who’ve stayed with me for a day or two while touring Ireland how much daytime work goes into keeping the thing going – booking dates, doing PR, dealing with social media etc. – and I have to say that economically, it increasingly doesn’t make sense.
Individual cases will be different, but broadly my advice to established troubadour-level acts in their 30s, 40s, early 50s (with a solid history but not enough to have a ‘heritage’ cachet or to have had any level of success in the pre-90s era) is to work much ‘smarter’ – I dislike the word, but I can’t think of another. Accept that the pre-Covid touring ecosystem / norms have gone, with an effect on possible music-related income, and tackle it by, for instance, moving to a part-time (part-of-year) music-making life, with some other non-music economic activity for the rest of the time. This is not the equivalent of the govt saying (as it did in the early Covid period) that ballerinas should retrain as Tesco workers – it’s a pragmatic suggestion. There are many flexible, self-employed things that many musicians would be able to do (I can think of some troubadours I know who have very specific skills, from previous lives/jobs, that they could put into use – so it’s not a suggestion that everyone just ‘teaches guitar’ etc.).
The conundrum is that 21st Century Western society still loves and heartily consumes music, but does so largely for free (streaming). The economic model for music-making / just reward was broken pre-Covid and it’s even more broken post-Covid.
There is a sense of saturation that would also affect attendances. I am a big fan of Martin Stephenson – I would say that the word Troubadour was invented for him. I have seen him twice in last year in Birmingham and I reckon I could easily have seen him 4 times.
I hope all of his gigs were well attended but if his Birmingham fanbase was just the people who attended the same gigs as I did it is easy to see why crowds are dwindling.
He’s a right one for re-recording his old albums, ol’ Stephenson. Three different recordings of Boat to Bolivia and three of Gladsome, Humour & Blue. And then he finds time to record a zillion other albums and gig. Apart from those two mentioned do you have any favourites? I’ve not heard anything I like as much as the debut.
California Star is very very good indeed.