Long Beach, California
PERKS
“Bands used to tour to promote product. Now, because of what’s happening in the business, everyone’s on the road all the time. But that’s great for me—I stay busy. In the last five years, I’ve been home less than eight months. You have to deal with problems immediately. Once, at a show with 5,000 kids, the barricades collapsed and the security guys were using pipes to prop them up. I had to stop the show and tell them to get rid of the pipes: ‘ You ain’t here to impale kids.’ Fun? No. Exciting? You bet.”
PAINS
“I handle everything that has to do with the crew:
flights, catering, equipment. It’s an 18-hour-a-day job.
Sometimes we have 24 trucks and 60 crew members,
and my one rule is: You stay straight. I’ve seen guys
show up for load-out drunk, and I have to send them
home. I pitch in sometimes, and I have arthritis.”
PAY
New York City
PERKS
“You’re the closest person to the artist; you spend more time with them than any other businessperson in their life. Managers make most of our money from commissioning concert dates, and the concert business is very healthy. People are paying more than ever for tickets.”
PAINS
“You’re always on call; it’s like being a doctor. You try
to create some boundaries, but it’s a personal-service
business, so there’s an expectation that if an emer-
gency happens, you’re going to be available. Artists
have to realize they’re not going to get big recording
budgets or advances anymore, and you have to be the
bearer of bad news and help them plan. One of my
acts is at a quarter million sales worldwide. But at the
record company, the record is a complete failure.”
PAY
Northwest
PERKS
“We get to do what we want for a living. This is our full-time job, and it’ll be our 20th year in November. We get to release whatever we want, whenever we want. We get to travel and see parts of the world we’d never get to see if we weren’t in this band. My son’s in first grade, but we try to bring him out on the road as often as we can.”
PAINS
“We do 150 to 200 shows a year, and the fact that we
have to be on the road to make ends meet is a grind
at times. It’s become a bit of a struggle for us to find
the time to get together and write. We don’t have the
luxury of the downtime you need to get creative. We
don’t live near each other, which complicates things. It
can be dispiriting to see the success of others and see
how it relates to your success. But you have to play the
hand you’re dealt and either love it or leave it.”
PAY
New York City
PERKS
“When I started out in the ’90s, I was genuinely talking radio programmers into adding songs. You got free tickets to every show. Every album that came out, you got ten copies. If a label decided they wanted you to see this new band from Atlanta in front of a crazy Atlanta crowd, you got flown down and put up for t wo nights. We were treated, frankly, the way we should have been treated.”
PAINS
“I don’t lose a lot of sleep over having to push a bad
record. There’s a way to say a song sucks without saying
it. One of my lines is, ‘Here’s one you’ll hate but your
listeners will love’ or ‘ This hook is really obvious!’ The
big pains are no money and no radio slots. Radio is not
playing new music, and therefore you don’t get paid for
getting new music played. In 1998 I netted more than
$200,000. Now I’m hanging on by the skin of my teeth.”
New England
PERKS
“I make all decisions and never do anything I’m not
comfortable with. If I get a $25,000 advance, that
means I get $25,000 if I don’t spend anything on record-
ing. Each major tour I headline grosses $300,000 or
more; I own all the merch I print up, and I sell it on the
road. My albums bring in steady income, not to men-
tion the publishing and licensing money.”
PAINS
“Being in constant contact with everyone on all levels of business—fans, haters, stores—can be over whelming. The compliments never seem to outweigh the negative remarks: ‘You should kill yourself’ resonates a lot more than ‘ You are a genius.’ Also, big media outlets aren’t interested in covering artists who sell under 100,000 per album. There’s always a suspicion that you’re being written off as the footnote of a footnote in the history books.”
West Coast
PERKS
“I’ve done a bunch of other jobs, like tour management
and record-label work, and they all involved a lot of
travel. The chief perk of this job is that all of the positive
elements of being out on the road are here. I’m making
good money on a tour that never leaves town. I get to go
home to my wife and kids. That’s a fantastic convergence
of the things that attracted me to the music business.
Plus, all the superficial things—free drinks and a park-
ing spot in front of the club, which is a fantastic perk.”
PAINS
“The number of calls I get at home from midnight to
6 A.M. is astounding. The sheriffs and fire marshals, all
the things you have to pay attention to, happen then. We
discourage people from sending demos in the mail, but
groups of bearded, hairy men [unsigned metal bands]
ring the bell during office hours to get a booking. It’s
endearing, but there’s not much I can do for them.”
References:
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