The realities of making a living in music have changed radically in the past decade or two. Viecelli used to counsel emerging artists to plan for a long-term career: “It might not necessarily make you incomprehensibly rich, but it would give you a way to continue to make music the way you want, while doing it as a full-time job and being secure.” In the streaming economy, audience attention is shallow and promiscuous.
In the spring of 2015, Steely Dan was hired to play a fiftieth-birthday party for Robert Downey, Jr., in a converted airplane hangar in Santa Monica. Steely Dan didn’t do many privates, but Downey had endeared himself to the singer Donald Fagen. Downey, who had built a thriving late career playing Iron Man in Marvel movies, was celebrating with friends from Hollywood. “Phones were taken away.
Ian Hendrickson-Smith is a saxophonist with the Roots, who have played privates around the world, including at Obama’s sixtieth birthday on Martha’s Vineyard. Hendrickson-Smith also releases albums under his own name, and he has watched the market change. “The largest distributor of actual physical records in the United States was fucking,” he said. “I used to get some nice checks. Now I put out a record and it gets streamed a ton, but my check from Spotify is, like, sixty-five cents.
You don’t have to be a musician to wonder if musicians are held to an unfair standard in an era when painters unabashedly sell work to barons of insider trading, when former Presidents get hundreds of thousands of dollars for Wall Street speeches, and when college athletes license their likeness to the highest bidders. Call it an “evolution in the culture,” a prominent music producer told me.
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