These are unprecedented times for everyone, and that is definitely no exception to musicians. Many musicians depend on live performances as a substantial portion of their income, and in a time where such a thing is a massive health hazard, the music industry had no choice but to get creative.
One of the most common responses to the live concert prohibition is a great increase in the popularity of livestreamed concerts. Musicians thankfully have a lot of options with this direction, some putting their livestream behind a paywall, similar to paying for tickets to a real concert, and others simply giving out free online concerts, and welcoming donations of any size from the viewers. Luckily, it’s only become easier to livestream over the years, and anyone from a band playing in a garage, to a local jazz club, (Hermann’s is doing a great job!) to huge music festivals such as Lollapalooza and Rolling Loud can make their show available to anyone from the comfort of their homes.
Although this method of performance often returns a much smaller profit than live concerts, there are many other ways musicians are turning a profit in 2020. One common way is through merchandise. Nearly every artist I listen to and is still working to this day has some form of a merch website, and services such as Shopify and Squarespace have made the process of creating an online store extremely easy, and although that sounds like I got paid to put a Squarespace ad into my prompt, it doesn’t make the statement any less true. The artist I believe has pushed the merchandise game to almost depressing heights is rapper Travis Scott, who in the last 3 months has dropped no less than half a dozen collections of branded clothing and accessories, partnering with companies such as Playstation and McDonalds to sell sponsored atrocities only possible through a painfully consumerist society, such as a $90, 3-foot-long chicken nugget body pillow, which unsurprisingly sold out very quickly if for nothing more than the novelty.
But this extreme example is besides the point, any musician with a knack for graphic design (or who knows someone that does) can easily put together a nice t-shirt design that their fans can connect to, and there are more than enough resources on the internet to help along the way.
On top of the difficulties a musician faces in the midst of a global pandemic, it already hasn’t been easy for many to make a living off of selling their music alone, due to the surge in popularity of streaming services in the last decade and their insultingly low rates they pay artists per stream. But luckily, not all streaming services are equally evil. The most popular of these services that actually seems to care about their artists is bandcamp, where users are encouraged to buy digital or physical copies of the artists music, and recently, due to the pandemic, have waived their revenue share on certain occasions to put 100% of the money going through the service into the pockets of artists and labels.
Another lesser known streaming service that is making a big difference is Resonate Co-operative, a service completely owned by the artists and listeners themselves. Resonate runs on a “Pay for what you play” system, where listeners are charged progressively more the more they listen to a song, and after nine plays of a particular song, they own that song, after paying about a dollar thirty. This way listeners are paying for the music they actually enjoy, and that money is going straight to the artists they love. It’s a bit of a complicated process, but Resonate claims that for the average listener, this ends up costing about the same as the average streaming service, but the artists get paid a whole lot more. The service is still in the early stages of development, but I expect big things. You can see more on how they operate at https://resonate.is/about/
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