How I Earn A Living

During a blog exchange Billy Bragg asked me how I financed my recordings. This was my reply:

Billy, Here’s a bit of my story. I’m a musician who’s been making music recordings a long time. I’ve made thousands of them while providing a mix of services which include producing, engineering, programming, composing, arranging, performing and offering studio facilities. I have made a career of this. I’m not wealthy but I survive by being fully committed to the medium I love which is the recorded work.

My clients are virtually anyone who wants a recording – i.e. other musicians, writers, composers, record companies, publishers, radio, television and film companies et al. Most of what I do I get paid for but I also do speculative work (a label currently), some pro-bono jobs, and some just for the love of it. Modesty aside for a second, I’m sufficiently good at what I do to have a problem accommodating all the work that comes my way.

In my world copyright is a non-issue. No one ever discusses it because it has zero bearing. It may as well not exist for any difference it makes to me and those in my circle. If people copy what I do my first reaction is to be pleased. It might be tempting to peer into their lives and see how much money they’ve made from my creations. But frankly I can’t be bothered with the negativity of that. I’d rather work on music, develop new projects, doing what I do, than become a royalty chaser.

Most projects over the years which involved record deals earned me little beyond small token advances. If I ever get a royalty cheque I will frame it as a historical document. The same goes for all of us where I am. The idea of receiving royalties from our hypothetical copyrights belongs in another place. We have always had to do things differently. It now happens that these differences seem to be running in sympathy with the sweeping changes in the creative industries. That pleases me.

I welcome the new possibilities because they offer the prospect of something genuinely new and something one can make a contribution towards shaping. From a self-interested view if copyright were abolished tomorrow it would make no material difference to me. What would do would be new structures which have an imaginative eye on the future and ones that stay fixed on the possibilities for musicians to earn a living commensurate with their worth.

This is a huge up-hill and requires a cultural mind-shift. It means getting away from the old ideas of unit commodities, statutory licensing, big deal contracts and the rest which were mainly structures around trying to find an artist who would lay a golden egg. It means people like us going into the community and asking those with money (there is no shortage of them) to invest in us. Doing this is, of course, only for the entrepreneurial few. But they are the trailblazers who will shape the future. It will be a future with a different spirit where artists are financed by their communities because their communities want what they’ve got.

I understand that I am an odd beast and no model necessarily. I use studio technology to express myself in recorded works. But my particular experience gives me an unusual perspective and some insight into possible ways forward. The emerging options through which creative people can engage the world feel natural to me. They open doors to a great untapped potential.

I have a label in the making which is being financed cooperatively by me and the other artists I work with. I have five new products waiting to go. It is a daunting prospect but an exciting one. I have no idea if our initiative will earn a penny. Given most recorded works earn nothing for anybody then the odds are against it. I remind myself that the vast majority of those party to a traditional copyright agreement never received anything from it anyway. It was never a good system for helping musicians make a living other than the privileged few. Most of us have always had to find other ways of earning from our talents.

I am confident my project will do something. I can be sure now with the distribution door being wide open that people will get to hear the work. Even in the worst event, with no financial return, the recordings will remain in existence as a form of expression. And that is what artists do – express themselves and hope to resonate. At one level the art is its own reward.

Billy, I applaud you and your colleagues for putting energy into getting a dialogue going here. I suspect it could easily be a full-time job. I imagine that you inhabit a different world from me, one that still has substantial interests in how copyright pans out. Although I agree with Crosbie Fitch that it is time copyright left the stage, it hasn’t yet and still exerts a powerful influence on motivations within the business. My experience in contrast is more in-keeping with the invisible majority of music-makers who have never been heard. I think I am easily tuned to how values and events will develop in future.

So the short answer to your question: I finance my recordings from the pockets of the people I work with. Sometimes one of them has written the song and they pay me, sometimes I have and sometimes I pay them. I just finished a session there today with a pedal-steel player who travelled fifty miles to come and play on a track. He had only recorded professionally once before and that was with me. He played beautifully and I paid him for his good work. Just as often people forgo payment happy to participate in a happy enterprise. And there is the crux: music shows no signs of losing its vitality and its importance in the lives of everyone.