On The Record: The rise of the part-time pop star

Making a living from music is an increasingly difficult goal to achieve, especially for musicians not lucky enough to already be on the higher rungs of music’s new caste system.

You don’t need to read rakes of reports to know that the traditional way musicians made money from their labours of love does not yield as much income as before. And if you are a musician who doesn’t want to tour, well, best of luck with that one.

For bands starting out – or bands who’ve started out and stalled – diminishing returns set in quickly. You may have ambitions to write songs and play music to pay for your supper, but the chances of being able to do so are becoming increasingly few and far between. The burst of energy and enthusiasm in the early days does not always pay off.

Leaving aside the fact that you may need to write some decent songs in the first place, you also need some way to subsidise the inevitable waiting around until the big time beckons. Unless you’ve access to large sources of cash, you stick with the job – any job. Musicians may well be one of the very few groups content with those short-term contract jobs Carl O’Brien wrote about in this newspaper during the week in his series on the precariat.

All of this means we’re going to see more and more acts who’ll have no choice but to be part-time musicians. There are doubtless some who will combine careers on and off the stage and who are content to see music as a hobby, yet there’s a far more sizeable number who’ll want to go for the big one.

But there comes a time when music has to take precedence over the job if you’re serious about what you’re doing. Alabama Shakes’ guitarist Heath Fogg describes it thus: “We were trying to balance the band and work and then it got to a stage where it was like, ‘I don’t think I wanna do this any more’ and then I quit.”

Fogg left his job painting houses, singer Brittany Howard stopped delivering the post and drummer Steve Johnson handed in his notice at the local power plant to concentrate on the band. Yes, they had support from the Rough Trade record label, but that doesn’t mean it was all plain sailing, and their description of their early period as a full-time band with debts and bills sounds precarious.

Yet this is the risk that had to be taken. When acts have to work tours and releases around jobs, problems and conflicts arise with scheduling and commitments. But when playing music does not garner enough to pay the bills, there’s an understandable reluctance to take the great leap and do nothing else. No wonder many are concerned that music will become a middle-class pursuit, taken up only by those who can rely on funds from elsewhere. Now that’s a scary scenario to contemplate.

YOU'VE GOT TO HEAR THIS
Ghostface Killah/BadBadNotGood
Sour Soul
(Lex)
Ghostface is easily the most prolific dude in the Wu-Tang Clan these days, with three albums already in the first half of 2015. This collaboration with adventurous Toronto jazz trio BadBadNotGood zings, as Ghost's storytelling nous finds much scope and texture against the trio's cinematic landscapes.