Music is a balm right now. But there's little comfort for musicians
For the last few weeks a nightly musical ritual has taken hold of a small but growing corner of Twitter. Thanks to Tim Burgess, singer with the longstanding British group the Charlatans, each evening at an appointed time, anyone who fancies participating puts on a particular album – and, as it plays, posts their thoughts with the hashtag #tims twitter listening party. Better still, musicians who made the tracks often join in, adding their insights and recollections.
I have taken part in two events far – for the Flaming Lips’ 1999 masterpiece The Soft Bulletin and Our Favourite Shop, the Style Council’s evocation of Britain in the Thatcher years, released in 1985. Music of any kind is usually lifeaffirming: talking and thinking about it often has the same effect. This is a big part of how many of us are getting through the crisis. Moreover, as the grim effects of the outbreak become clearer by the day, what we are listening to offers a comforting reminder of the world we suddenly left behind mere weeks ago.
At the same time, however, music and its surrounding culture are being weakened. Obviously, public performances of any kind have all been cancelled, and the hiatus could conceivably last well into next year. Festival season seems to be a write-off. And in the fine details of research about how the virus spreads, there are actually suggestions that the participatory aspects of music have been in part responsible for Covid-19’s transmission: witness a senior German virologist’s claim that over the last weeks and months, “wherever there was singing and dancing, the virus spread more rapidly”.
As with the rest of the economy, over about the last 20 years the business of music has seen a polarisation between a handful of huge entities at the top – your Ed Sheerans, Taylor Swifts and Beyoncés – and everyone else. For the latter group, all the main sources of substantial income are suddenly either shut down or under threat. The temporary halt to playing live removes the one dependable way musicians can make money. Royalties from music being played in pubs, clubs and shops are suddenly in jeopardy, and with advertising revenues down, the fees paid to music publishers by broadcasters may be cut. Given the longterm decline of physical sales, that only leaves streaming – at which point, let us remind ourselves that YouTube’s average per-stream rate has been put at a princely 0.13p, and that Spotify is reckoned to pay artists an average of 0.26p per listen.
Last week I spoke to a musician I have extensively written about for music magazines and watched play to a festival crowd of 4,000. As he explained, the realities of being in a critically acclaimed band that is run – very tightly – as a small business, many things became even clearer. “I don’t think there are many bands who make a significant income from their recorded music,” he said. Instead, an annual or biannual run around venues here and abroad will bring in up to two-thirds of an act’s turnover, and the summer is often the basis of whole livelihoods: the cancellation of festivals, he said, had spelled the disappearance of “all the money we’d be expecting to make this year”. Payments from Spotify arrive every six months: the band has some songs that have amassed close to a million plays each, but their last payment was for about £600.
According to the campaigning organisation the Music Venues Trust, 556 places classed as “grassroots music venues” are reckoned to be at risk of permanent closure. Late last year, it looked like this vital part of the cultural map had finally got the attention of the government and music industry, and arrested a 10-year decline partly linked to urban gentrification and skyrocketing rents. Now, once again, venues face disaster.
In the classical music world, things are just as uncertain. Outside Britain’s big “portfolio” orchestras, most musicians are precariously employed. One conductor I recently spoke to drew my attention to an awkward fact: that audiences for classical music tend to be older, and will therefore be anxious about any return to past concert-going habits. He also mentioned his work with a choir in Yorkshire that has lost two of its members to Covid-19, and how important collective singing is to so many people’s lives. That simple pleasure, he reminded me, is suddenly reducible to “people in a room where everyone’s breath is repeatedly coming out”.
Of course, to write about this in the midst of an international emergency might seem misplaced. But beyond the superstars, a lot of musicians are actually more vulnerable than people in other professions. To help them, you can buy the odd CD and record from an independent shop by mail order. Have a look at Bandcamp, the platform for independent musicians that supports them to a much greater extent than the services hosted by corporate record companies and big tech firms. The Musicians’ Union is hosting a crowdfunder for members facing hardship, offering emergency payments of up to £200. But all of us should also think about the wider context of this cultural crisis. Amazon’s share price has recently rocketed by a third. Netflix, all of whose offerings feature an ocean of music, is in the middle of a boom. Big tech, which has built so much of its power on downloading and streaming, will emerge from this period comparatively unscathed. Somewhere in those facts there may lie the key to how we keep music and musicians going, and avoid a dreadful silence that would make this crisis even harder to bear.
• John Harris is a Guardian columnist