The Death of the Middle Class Musician (feat. Tim Pierce)

SOBERING

Hey muso's, do not be afraid to sign up for Neighbouring Rights with a company like NRG. I did and it ain't chicken feed.

Awesome video! Two awesome guys! 👍👍😎😎

And the times, they are a changing.
A friend of mine used to play in orchestra pits playing bass in west end shows. He can still remember the day he turned up for work to see most of his fellow musicians gone, to be replaced by a guy on a synthesizer. Only going to get worse with the advent of AI. 😢

I started playing professionally in 1976. Many times i played 6 nights a week. Rock clubs were built like concert halls. Huge crowds! Many bands were playing material like Jethro Tull or the early Chicago. If you made a mistake people noticed right away.

The whole social environment was completely opposite of today. It was the golden age of Rock and many new ideas for Rock Music had just been invented. New ideas and concepts all the time...until New Wave took over and during that time bands like Happy The Man were dropped by Arista while others like Dixie Dregs seemed to be struggling.

I was a young guy playing the theater circuit specifically at a point in time when record companies were pressuring prog bands to be commercially viable. One of these bands being Renaissance who used to play Club Bene. It was awful being 22 years old and witnessing these bands go under. Watching the industry neglect them for new artists.

Decades later i ended up playing in bar bands...in the 90s the club owners sold their business and bars took over. They payed next to nothing, most of the bar bands were amateur sounding, and people no longer cared wth you sounded like.

Open mic was insulting. It was like something stupid youd participate in...in high school. Money wasnt that important to me. I accepted the inevitable. The difference between then and now was ridiculously moronic. In the 70s i made between 5 to 6 hundred a week at casinos and Rock Clubs. When i was opening for Doc Severison i sometimes made a grand. In 2017 I'd play 3 sets in a packed bar and be lucky to make anywhere between 60 to a hundred bucks and regarding money that was the difference.

The music was just a form of redundancy. Entertainment...however not comparable to what i experienced in the 70s and 80s. I had to get away from it and i did. I viewed this kind of compromising as a waste of talent and time. It wasnt fun.

I'm one of those musicians in the middle getting screwed by the way the industry is going, rn. Feel like to get noticed by any notifiable labels I have to have my own record, and live stuff in my press kit, as well as what i've done on independent works

The technology companies are destroying the middle class. Wait to see what they do with AI. . .

Great interview. Great to hear how people got paid in the past. This seems to illuminate (somewhat) how studio musicians might get paid nowadays. That being said, perhaps we could have another interview with Tim P talking about how it works today.

Banks are in control .

We do have a couple of very good amp guys in Atlanta. He’s worked on both my DR Z and my Mesa.

Who ever bought Bob Dylan's music is going around to small clubs telling them they have to pay a royalty fee to play his
songs in public

It was a history lesson regards the LA music industry in recent decades. Sadly at the end I felt quite empty, even sad.

How about some advice for young musicians or is the situation today so dire?

Walter

Great video! Very informative and quite eye opening to how things have really changed for working musicians. Lots of good information, very helpful to me as a working musician. Thank you so much!!

Isn't wonderful to live in a country where ALL producers (i.e. workers) are treated equally? In other words, there is no producer who is NOT getting screwed!!!

I grew up wanting to live this kind of life and gave my all to music. By the time I became an adult, none of these opportunities were available anymore and I had to resort to busking - years of being exposed to the elements and harassment from crazies. I finally decided to leave that life behind after spending 4 hours at a police station last month from a random complainant for singing near a restaurant.

It hurts so much to give 20+ years to have nothing to show at the end of it. Time to move on I guess :(

I had a customer coincidentally named Steve Stevens. He was an electrician, but he had been a dj at Milwaukees first album oriented radio station. For most of the time I knew him he was receiving statements from the music industry I think for pension deposits for Steve Stevens. Not him, but the great guitarist Steve Stevens!!! We always had a good laugh over that. 😂

You guys with real hands down knowledge of the music industry, should write a book or books on how the biz works, how touring works, copyright, etc all.

Great conversation! Those were the days!

Just yet another example of how anything the rich people get their hands on will eventually be parted out for shareholder profits.

In one of these interviews I recall Mr. Pierce mentioning a good sounding ODR1 clone ?

Which one has died now??

I experienced a similar learning and career process in Denver, CO from 1999-2011. The drumming community was extremely gracious to one another. We wouldn’t hesitate to throw a pick up gig to our fellow drumming brothers and sisters if we were booked. Lots of Blues/R&B/Pop gigs to go around.

Interesting. I think I'd agree it's not limited either to musicians or to the US.

so i should just quit. nice time being alive

As a musician I got paid better for gigs in the 1990's than in 2020's. I get zero gigs now, yet I still keep playing. It's so boring and cold out there. I also spent half my time in Europe and half my time in Montreal. 95% more gigs in Europe.

Here is my take on this:
Take any industry/company/group of people involved in the same value-producing activity. Each individual will have a tendency to set themself and the part of the system they can influence in such a way as to direct more of the value towards themself.
But that tendency is curbed by the simple fact that every part of the system depends on the others to function properly over the long term.
Now bring in outside investors. People with money but no interest in the actual craft, nor in a long term career with it. The natural curbing mechanism falls apart and the system gets ever so slightly lop-sided towards directing value to those people. It's then only a matter of time until the entire system collapses.

I came up and got on the scene professionally in the late 90's just as making $ to live from records was a few years away. Now, its not that we "can" do everything ourselves and save a buck. Its that we have to do everything just to have some left to invest, save or just pay bills after taxes. I even lived out if the country for 6 years and olayed in Asia making a good living. Now I'm learning cloud enginering to go into IT. I'm a jnion member and I have a pension with not much in it now, Only theatre gig and some corporate events pay well but no theatre work this season, all shows self contained....

Going to be doing music only as a hobby from here out

"Money for nothing and your chicks for free" MTV

President Joe saved your pension! Joe CREATED that Inflation Reduction Act, and Many, many more middle class stimuli.

Can you imagine how AI will eliminate all the paper shuffling middle management jobs.

I did that as well. The groups got smaller & smaller ... till - Solo. Learned a lot & kept the fiction going for a few more years.

My dad came out of the NY jazz and big band scene of the 1940s. He was a total middle class musician his entire life. My dad did a few sessions, some TV, and he was in the background of a movie once, but mostly he made a living playing live. He played the Catskills and Vegas for awhile in the 50s and then ended up in South Florida in the heyday of the big Miami Beach hotels. He gigged usually 6 nights a week even into the late 90s, and taught lessons out of our house here and there. There were enough retirees in South Florida who wanted to keep dancing to the music of their youth that he had plenty of work. The musicians union helped us have health insurance. We were never rich but he made enough to support our family. He bragged until the day he died that he never did an honest day's work in his life, lol. He felt bad for younger musicians because people weren't hiring live bands as much over the years and there just wasn't the work available.

Inflation "reduction" act, did nothing but increase inflation!!!!

I've been in a "cartage" company for my entire career

Great discussion!

❤❤❤❤❤❤I needed to hear this episode for sure and I thank you 🙏 both. Great 👍 content as always. Peace and love people peace and love ❤️ Chris Villano

I sometimes feel like I'm beating a dead horse, bringing this fact up on most of Rick's vids he posts about this subject (the decline of the music industry) -- the music industry in the US, according to the RIAA, makes about 40% less revenues than it made in 2000 (accounted for inflation). This 40% decline happened after ITunes and the MP3 killed the CD album, and streaming finished the rest of the big money off. As most musos know, streaming pays little. 100,000 plays earns around $400 on average, slightly more or slightly less, depending on streaming platform. The money isn't there like it used to be. A 40% decline in revenues will choke any industry, the music industry (an all the sub-industries surrounding it) included. Peace out to everyone.

Fascinating. Love Tim's story telling.

Can anyone tell me who played guitar in the combo that played the title song for the TV series The Rockford Files?

A few years back I was in an elevator (in Chicago) and was talking to a maybe 60ish fellow who was a software engineer, some how the conversation got onto music, and he mentioned he'd played guitar professionally in bars back in the '70s - '90s, but because of changes in the music scene, he had to find another way to make a living. I know many people in the Chicago music scene (before the Covid Lock-Downs, I'd photograph many bands), and many great musicians I know call their music careers "expensive hobbies".

financialization of everything. hyper-capitalism. quantity over quality. humans as monetary transfer functions. process without content. the death of virtue. join the club.

These days, Tribute Bands pay more than generic cover bands, and are especially popular at street fairs, county fairs, and corporate events..All girl bands playing hard rock classics originally done by young male musicians is actually preferable to middle aged males doing the same thing ..I hear a lot of established musicians bitching about AI, but it all started with the Linn Drum, as you accurately stated ...I used to play with AC Reed (Chicago sax man) and he told me that back in the 50s, if you could play , you worked ..He had a steady club gig for a number of years in Texas that paid for a house and a new car every other year.. He turned down road gigs with Fats Domino and others because he made more money being the house band in a club..

Epitaph: "They paved paradise, put up a parking lot"😮

I love you both. But I feel that you are speaking too politely about something so absolutely catastrophic.

Its just capitalism run rampant. the working class is being obliterated, the only thing we can do is unite against the capital owning class to claw back a life for ourselves.

👍👍👍Really nice to see how things have changed.... 🥹🥹💪💪💪

One other place that is forgotten is the duplication industry and support staff. I worked for several years as a tech for a couple of local studios as well as a couple of duplication houses. When high speed cassette duplication went to a digital master, I designed electronics for the duplicators to take advantage of the digital bin loops. We also had the high speed cassette loaders - worked for the company that made the cassette loaders high speed. All that was support industry that is gone. About mid-life I had to get a real job.

AI will never be truly aware of what music FEELS LIKE.
Speaking of "Don't Dream It's Over," which features on the show, Wolf Like Me, the final scene of the first season features a song by Queens of the Stone Age called "Fortress." The scene rides on that song, and it's emotional and meaningful. AI will never duplicate something like that.

There is one major problem with this video. It's not an hour longer.