Great news today. Citigroup is returning $20 billion of the federal bail out money. This follows announcements from other banks planning on doing the same.
We’ve bailed out banks, auto companies and what did we get? Some jobs were saved, but as for the greater good of society, bankers and auto makers basically fuel consumption and pollution.
If banks and the auto industry ceased to exist the world would survive. But could we survive without music?
Let’s take the money this time and bail out an industry that actually makes the world a better place — music.
Listen to this piano piece by a musician who knows how tough recessions can be on his industry:
Piano Duets for Christmas by David J. Hahn
What if people like Hahn stopped doing what they do?
It could happen.
“As you might expect, the arts community overall is hit hard whenever a recession sets in,” Hahn explained. “Much of our revenue comes from discretionary spending, charitable contributions and federal/local support, all of which has fallen in the past two years.”
While it’s hard to assess how bad things have gotten for “the working musician community” because it’s “so diverse” he offered some examples:
Classical music institutions have been hit most publicly by the recession. Symphonies from Salt Lake City to Charleston have had to take wage reductions in the past year. Even some of the most elite orchestras - like the Chicago Symphony (2.5%), Milwaukee Symphony (9%), St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (12%) - have signed new contracts with wage reductions for their musicians. In one of the most extreme cases, the Honolulu Symphony was reportedly unable to pay it’s musicians for much of 2009, and finally filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in November.
Broadway musicians also took a major hit when 11 Broadway shows closed within several months of each other. Between the closings of Xanadu on September 28th, 2008 and Hairspray on January 18th, 2009, 150 musician jobs were liquidated from the New York City theater industry. There are shows that opened or are slated to open in the 2009-2010 season, of course, but that kind of sudden reduction in jobs had a tremendous impact on the theatre musician industry. It was as if everyone on the ladder dropped a few rungs all at once. Musicians that were working their way up from off-Broadway gigs and hoping for a Broadway chair were knocked our of competition for even the off-Broadway work once the market was flooded with all of the elite talent.
The regional orchestras in the New York area also began to have trouble around the same time - ultimately ending with the Brooklyn Philharmonic closing it’s doors early on the 2009 season. These regional orchestras often use the same pool of musicians that the Broadway pits use, so local musicians were hit from many different directions.
The domino effect of the recession showed itself in other ways. The temporary lock-out of musicians at the New York production of Tony ‘n Tina’s Wedding this fall was blamed on a difficult economy - and this kind of thing was not limited to New York alone. An uproar in Texas resurfaced this Christmas season when the Texas Ballet Theatre Company decided, for a second year in a row, to use pre-recorded music for their annual production of The Nutcracker.
I’ve also noticed that local bars are getting smaller turnouts, and that’s been bad news for musicians who do the club circuit. And even DJs are getting hit hard.
“I have seen a lot of companies not make it in the last yr or two,” wrote Pete C. Rodriguez Jr, a professional DJ from Arizona who tweeted his response to a question I posed on Twitter last night about the music industry. “It has been really hard for the Wedding industry.”
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m worried when I hear the people who make music in this country are struggling. Where’s the panic? Where are the rallies to help these people?
According the the Bureau of Labor statistics 264,000 musicians, singers, and related workers sustain our nation’s music industry.
Under job prospects for the occupation, noted the BLS:
Growth in demand for musicians will generate a number of job opportunities, and many openings also will arise from the need to replace those who leave the field each year because they are unable to make a living solely as musicians or singers, or for other reasons.
There is something wrong with this country. We shower certain professions with gobs of cash and deny others a livable wage.
Many of the banks that are returning the bailout money are doing so because the top dogs at these financial institutions balked at having to keep their annual pay under $500,000.
I assure you, there will be no such protests if we spread some of that bailout money to the music makers struggling to survive in this economy.
Will there be such a bail out?
Hahn doesn’t seem hopeful: “There are people talking about it, there just doesn’t seem to be anybody listening.”
Please listen to this and tell me why we shouldn’t bailout musicians. It’s Hahn rendition of Auld Lang Syne.
December 14th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Unfortunately, there are problems in the music industry that go far beyond the recession, and current (and proposed) copyright issues are a significant factor. Throughout the history of music until relatively recent history, musicians borrowed themes and melodies from each other and music was shared (culturally), modified, expanded, and shared again. It is a cycle as old as the ages. Now, music is being chained to corporate profits and the practices of the music companies, and policies they pursue, do more (in my opinion) to harm the industry than any economic downturn. Check with bar and coffee shop owners who now must be concerned about their local performers who must be properly licensed for all of their cover tunes. Some coffee shops near me have changed their policies either to allow only musicians who perform their own original music, or to stop allowing live performances altogether.
Outside my day job, I am a musician and a songwriter. I understand the desire for copyright protections, but I believe that copyright protection should be severely limited. Copyright protection (again, in my opinion) should focus on preventing people from making an economic gain from the music I write/compose without paying the appropriate copyright fee(s), and should free up most other use under the fair use doctrine. In other words, if I wrote the song, no one else should be able to record the song for inclusion on their own recordings without paying a copyright fee. Honestly, I don’t care if Joe Guitar-player strums it out and sings it in the local coffee shop. In fact, if that were encouraged, more musicians might find that their audiences are actually expanding. Now, if Joe Guitar-player is going to go from providing occasional music at a coffee shop to organizing his own stage shows and gigs, then permission should again be requested (and a fair fee paid) for the inclusion of a song in that artist’s stage show.
Okay, nevermind. It’s not as if most here will care much about my little rant. I don’t believe the economy is killing off the future of music. If anything, it is going to push music back into the arts scene and away from corporate music houses that try to control everything. I hope more musicians will start marketing themselves online, apart from big recording interests, and I’d love to see a return to community bands and orchestras, rather than relying on the big municipal orchestras in our major cities.
December 14th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Thanks for your article. We at the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) couldn’t agree more that musicians, like many workers, have been hit hard by this recession. And study after study have shown that arts spending has an enormous positive impact on the economy — directly creating jobs and stimulating related industries.
In additions to the problems you cite, the catch-all phrase of “the economy” is often used as a convenient cudgel against musicians. Employers (otherwise known as arts organizations) will invoke the recession to justify draconian cuts to wages, benefits or even replacing musicians with taped music. Every situation is different, but it’s important to take into account the views of the musicians involved — no one cares more about the future of the arts than artists themselves.
December 14th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Hey Matt,
We need to support the arts and musicians. Canned music is not live-performance music. We recently took our 7 and 10 year old to the Delaware Children’s Theater’s production of Scrooge, the musical, and there were live musicians there. It made the production much more magical for all of us.(http://www.dechildrenstheatre.org/)
December 15th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Musicians are among the highest paid artists at any production - musical theater, opera, ballet, etc. In many cases, they are paid 2 or 3 times as much as their fellow artists who contribute as much, if not more, to the overall production. In many cases, musicians are also under long-term contracts that provide better benefits and retirement. If anyone deserves a bailout, it is the actors, singers, dancers and other artists that earn far less than any union musician.
December 16th, 2009 at 2:20 am
@No Fan of Union Musicians:
That’s just not true. On Broadway contracts the minimums for the actors and the musicians are the same. Furthermore, the actors unions on stage and screen (EAE and SAG) are much stronger unions than the musicians union, so there’s no reason to attack the AFM like it’s the UAW.
Anyway, how could you possibly support the idea that musicians are over-payed? According to the U.S. census the median income for American musicians is $22,600. That’s not even a living wage.
I don’t have a long-term contract anywhere, I don’t have benefits or a retirement fund. Where do I fit in this narrow definition of “musician”?