Five Degrees of Separation in Music Income

After reading too many posts by non-musicians about how musicians should give their recorded music away for free and then make their money selling something else, I decided to create a "degrees of separation" chart. If you create music and also have an income stream from something, you are likely to fall somewhere along this continuum.

At one end, you make music and profit directly from it. And at the other end, you make music and don't make any money from it. Both of those options, and everything that falls in-between, are acceptable.

If you look at your two goals (to make music and to make enough money to pay your bills), you can combine them into a variety of different ways. Ask yourself (1) what allows you the most time to make the music you want to make and (2) what allows you to make the most money. What mix of skills can you bring to your career planning which will provide you the optimum level of creative activity and income?

And if you have a spouse and kids, you've also got to factor in those obligations. Maybe you would love to travel the country to expand your fan base, but if you aren't making enough money to take your family along, you may find the sacrifice is too great. So between music, income, and personal goals, you've got to combine them in some mix that works best for you. More than likely, you'll compromise somewhere, but that's what this blog post is about. It's okay to compromise. Most people do.

Here's my chart:

No degree of separation: Sell your music.
This includes selling your recorded music, performing live, working as a studio musician, and so on. You are being paid directly as a musician.

One degree of separation: Sell stuff related to your music.
A lot of people talk about this as a way to make a living in today's music environment. The idea is that your music will make you a brand. Then you'll use that brand to sell goods and services around your music. If you are popular enough and good enough at marketing, this might work for you.

Here are two examples:

Jimmy Buffett’s Business Empire

Sammy Hagar's Tequila Dreams

Two degrees of separation: Use your existing music to sell other people's stuff.
Using your music for marketing doesn't have to be limited to items you're selling directly to fans. After all, a lot of musicians don't want to bother with developing a line of products to sell. An alternative can be letting your music sell another company's product. Often what happens is that you have a song already out, the company likes it, and you make a deal. But you could also approach a company and work out a partnership where you provide the music and they provide the goods and services to sell.

This level of music income covers everything from licensing your music to having corporate sponsors. But in each case, you've already written the music for your own use and then you use it to market someone else's goods and services.

Some examples:

Olympics GM Commerical with Brandi Carlile

"Bacardi approached us and, we found out later, they had tried so many songs for that commerical. A slew of tons, and songs, and knew 'Daylight' was the one which stood out and worked more than any others." "Interview: Matt and Kim," Alter The Press! 2/6/09.

More stories of bands whose songs have been used in commercials: Selling Out to Survive.

Three degrees of separation: Write music specifically to sell other people's stuff.
While people have gotten used to artists having their music licensed for ads, it's still not as common for artists to write music specifically for commercials. Of course, there have always been people who do this for a living (one of the more famous musicians who was also a jingle writer was Barry Manilow) but it's not nearly as common as just having a pre-written song in a commercial.

Two examples:

Robert Schneider, singer/songwriter for The Apples in Stereo, also does commercial work-for-hire.

For Schneider, who's worked both sides of the fence, he relishes the opportunity to release his inner Tin Pan Alley songsmith and write on demand. "It's like, 'Oh, now I have to write a song about having fun in a new pair of shoes!'" he laughs. "To me, that's a legitimate song topic. Fun in the sun? I'd write a song about that anyway.""Songs that sell," 'boards, 6/01/08.

Recently the band Franz Ferdinard was commissioned to write a song for an elaborate promotional campaign by Dior.

Four degrees of separation: Play music. Use your visibility as a musician as a way to promote your real profession.
Now we are into the grey areas of new music business models. Some of the examples being used to illustrate how musicians can make a living are stretching the connection between music and income rather thin. I mentioned some of them here. Musicians are auctioning off their possessions, selling lunch dates, and so on.

Basically the concept is to use music as a way to generate attention and relationships, but then sell non-music goods and services to fans. Given that concept, why stop at selling your time as a lunch date or selling stuff out of your closet? A lot of goods and services are fair game. If you have skills as a lawyer, or a plumber, or a caterer, you can use your music as your positioning and then sell services and items that people want to purchase anyway. Instead of just being a singer, or just being a plumber, you become the singing plumber. Plumbing, after all, is something people need more than having lunch with you or getting an extra t-shirt. This way you are selling something of real value, and making it more distinctive because it is coming from you, the popular musician.

Examples:

A musical doctor.

Carl Ellenberger, who has managed to combine a successful medical career (as a neurologist) with enough musical skill to have been principal flutist in several orchestras, beginning when he was preparing for medical school. As a student of Joseph Mariano at Eastman School of Music, Ellenberger never thought of giving up flute for medicine or vice versa. Medicine, he says, allowed him to avoid teaching music to “indifferent students” (among other things musicians do to pay the bills). And music helped him survive the stress of medical school.

In addition, he has told me, “As a tenderfoot doctor at the bottom of the medical hierarchy, when the vast universe of medicine seemed overwhelming, regular calls for my services as a professional musician did wonders for my self-confidence.” "Musicians with two careers: Pro or con?" Broad Street Review, 12/22/09.

A musical priest. "Baton and Sacrament, Tools of Dual Career"

Blair Tindall, who interviewed a number of dual career musicians, points out, for example, that "mathematics and proportion learned through musical form may plug directly into another field, such as architecture or computing. Other musicians find more abstract uses for their musical training, citing the competitive nature of performing, the discipline of practicing and flexibility learned from irregular scheduling as among their professional assets."

"Counseling is much like playing a symphony," says Rae Ann Goldberg, a Bay Area violinist who is also a certified marriage and family therapist in Oakland's Early Childhood Mental Health Program. "There's a rhythm. There are silences. Intensity and release."

Goldberg completed her master's degree at the California Institute of Integral Studies after her orchestra, the Sacramento Symphony, folded in 1996. With a full schedule and increased income, she now cherry-picks only the gigs she really wants instead of accepting everything in order to survive. "Musicians add second careers to their repertoires," Los Angeles Times, 1/11/09.

Five degrees of separation: Play music. Don't mix it with any money-earning activity. Keep your hobby and your income-generating activities totally separate.
This is what many "amateur" musicians do. They don't play music for income. Just for fun. And there's a lot to be said for this approach. If you don't play music for income, you don't make decisions about music based on money. Which also means, you may be more realistic about your day job, too, if that's your sole means of financial support.

The reason I want this discussion out in the open is to get us past the idea that today's musician needs to concentrate on fan purchases for financial support. It's certainly one way to survive as a musician, but not the only way. If you can find a non-music day job that pays well, it may be far more time and cost-effective to do that than to jump through hoops looking for music-related projects you can do. Don't assume that being a musician means everything you do for money somehow has to point back to your music.

To illustrate where I am coming from when talking about the "new music business model," let me point you to some comments I made on this MediaFuturist blog post, "Content 2.0: New Ways to Monetize," which was looking at ways to make money if you are giving away your content (which, for musicians, is usually recorded music).

I have several thoughts in regards to music:

1. Labels are in the content business because they already own content. But for individual musicians, it isn't really about the content business anymore.

2. Musicians are in a relationship or service business these days. While they can sell merchandise, all the emphasis on social media plays up their relationships with fans. However, lots of other people (the vast majority of them non-musicians) are also in the relationship business and can deliver many of the same services (e.g., community).

3. Music is a powerful force and the people who make it have something to offer. But as we pull away from selling the music directly, that means other companies can grab on to that music and link it to what they are selling. Unless there is some special reason for the fans to connect directly with the music creators, then they can have access to exactly the music they want and exactly the "reasons to buy" that they want, but not necessarily coming from the same sources.

In essence, what I am trying to say is this:

Just as it is possible to couple your music with non-music goods and services to generate income, it is also to possible to decouple your music from non-music sources of income.

And this means that while you can bundle your music with t-shirts or online fan communities, so, too, can non-musicians bundle your music with their t-shirts and communities. (Even if they don't have an agreement with you, there are multiple ways to tie your music to their stuff, which most musicians like anyway as a way to get extra exposure.)

In other words, there's no rule that says a musician's music is going to automatically be linked with the musician's source of income. They can, and often are, two entirely different worlds. And sometimes it makes financial sense to approach it this way. Don't get so caught up in what you can do to make money from your music that you fail to see what you can do to make money from any source. Don't let people convince you that if you aren't making your living from your music, you aren't a REAL musician. Do what you have to do to survive.

@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE, 2/17/10
I wanted to move one of my comments from the comments section into the blog post itself to further explain my reason for writing "Five Degrees of Separation."

Some of what is being called Music 2.0 isn't really about music. When Amanda Palmer auctions off her personal possessions, it isn't any more about music than having a day job selling stuff on eBay. True, music has made Palmer a celebrity, but what she is doing to generate income can be done by anyone, in any profession, who has a degree of fame.

So I'm trying to explain that in situations like this we aren't talking about music, we are talking about marketing and celebrity. Getting a spot on reality TV is probably a faster route to celebrity than doing music. That's the reason for the "degrees of separation." At each stage you get further and further from earning your living directly from music. So at some point it makes sense to accept that the money isn't coming from music and quit trying to pretend that it is.

UPDATE, 3/9/10
While owning a restaurant might not necessarily be a more profitable side business than music, here are some people who are doing that.
Ten Musician-Owned Restaurants

Participatory Art Is Revolutionary

In my last post (But Is It Art?) I wrote about how technology enables more people to make music. And I have done blog posts on fan involvement and audience participation. The reason I think all of this is relevant is that some are touting a wealth of opportunities for musicians today because the Internet allows them more direct access to fans than in the past. But I have been pointing out that this concept is still based on the idea that there are artists and there are fans.

But what about a world where there are only artists, and no fans? If we are going to anticipate the future of the music business, we need to think about this possible scenario. And based on what I have seen in terms of audience participation both at shows and online, artists who provide the most opportunities for engagement seem to do well. I've been taking it a step further to suggest that not only might you want to provide ways for fans to interact with the music and the artists, you may want to provide ways for the audiences to feel creative themselves.

Now I want to go into the subject even deeper because while these ideas have been an on-going discussion within some circles, they haven't filtered out to all who potentially might be affected. There are two different aspects to the topic. One is "everyone is an artist," which involves providing tools to enable creativity. The other is participatory art, which has traditionally involved a high level of social interaction. In this particular blog post, I'll focus more participatory art.

It's not a new concept. People have been talking about it for quite some time, particularly as a counter to the idea that art is to be created by a professional elite.

This paper by G.S. Evans explores the concept in depth and begins with the idea that an artistic elite has not been the norm over the course human evolution.

This alienation from art is a relatively recent phenomenon. As we shall see, the making of art was a central part of people's lives for most of human history--that is, until the relatively recent advent of a capitalist, commodity-based culture in Europe and North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At that time the emphasis in art shifted from participants, who could satisfy their own artistic needs, to specialists, who demanded a paying, non-participating audience to buy their 'products'. Essentially, the art-commodity came to replace participatory-art in most people's lives, and art increasingly became a source of alienation. ...

We live in a society where art is primarily a commodity, something people buy instead of make. Consequently, very few people are actively involved in making art. Because of this general lack of participation, many find it difficult to believe that societies have existed in which literally everybody sang, danced and made their own crafts, all on a daily basis.

Evans extensively covers the history of the arts and how societal and economic conditions transformed them from something everyone did to something mostly done by professionals. There is far too much in the paper to quote, but this is particularly relevant in light of the direct-to-fan discussions dominating music right now.

A radical monopoly [as distinguished from a commercial monopoly] occurs when pre-recorded music as a product comes to replace the making of music in society; in other words, people stop making music themselves and start buying pre-recorded music instead. A further aspect of a radical monopoly is that it becomes an entrenched and structural part of society. People who only listen to music and do not make it for themselves, for example, will normally put on pre- recorded music, no matter what the situation, rather than make their own. This is partially because of conditioned habit, but also because they will no longer be capable of making music among themselves. In addition, the radical monopoly will set up modes of performance that are exclusive to it and will push more personal modes out of style, i.e., make people like or relate to them less and less. "ART ALIENATED: An Essay on the Decline of Participatory-Art."

The idea that "everyone is an artist" has been something of a radical approach during the 20th century. There are political and economic ramifications in giving more people control over their arts experiences. Rather than excluding people for lack of talent/experience/resources, they are included as part of a community. In a paper discussing arts participation among Bay Area immigrant communities, Pia Moriarty explains the dynamics of participatory arts using a church choir model. It has considerable relevance to music because (1) church is THE live music experience for many people and (2) she points out how participatory music strengthens those community bonds. Imagine if secular musicians incorporated some of the same techniques.

Most church choirs are composed of volunteers from the congregation. This is key: the singers are already members and have entry and identity in the larger life-world. Their singing is an expression and deepening of a shared cultural goal, to pray together. To that end they are given a lot of support: physical space, a defined role in the rituals, and perhaps even microphones, songbooks, and instruments. The cultural life of the worshipping community moves forward together, and it carries the singers with it as full members. The line between audience and artistic actors is blurred, overlapping, and permeable; this is typical in participatory arts. The choir practices; it rehearses, but more importantly it engages socially as practicing singers. People learn as they go, but they are already within a living social context....

With our church choir, “audience development” means that we all learn to sing better together. The community that invites us to develop artistically is the same community that provides entry, actively recruiting us as members in a diversified web of reciprocal relationships. ...

Participatory art’s membership approach shortens the distance between “who pays” and “who plays,” and so it can develop past the self-limitations of exclusively patronage or sponsorship models. ...

At a time when non-profit arts organizations are particularly vulnerable to the economy’s protracted woes, the participatory model of “informal,” “folk,” “amateur,” or “unincorporated” artistic production is vibrant and resilient. Participatory arts offer a working alternative for non-profits that will always struggle to survive when they are forced to compete on the terms of a commercial arts model. "Participatory Arts: The Stranger Brings a Gift."

What is bringing participatory art back so prominently now is the connectivity that the Internet facilitates.

The internet with all its manifestations is transforming participatory culture, shifting its orientation from the object to the subject and more recently from subject to data. Ideas are no longer collated in sections or categories but tags. The archive has transformed into a ‘cloud’. Participatory dependent internet art is expanding exponentially. Server-side programming enables a cross-cultural, cross-language, cross-border collaboration where the ‘location’ of the artwork is accessible on demand. The reproducible copy of internet based work is one and the same as the original, albeit perhaps, as only a fragment of the dynamic whole. "Thoughts on Participatory Art," by Yiannis Colakides & Helene Black, NeMe, 6/26/09.

Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch, says:

Systems such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Hunch and various parts of the open source movement are based around small contributory systems, bodies of work in which there are incremental improvements by multiple contributors, or exposing small actions that would be insignificant in isolation, but are meaningful in the aggregate. These types of software and platforms are specifically designed for conversation and contribution. That is the point. There is no final product such as a book, movie, song or album. "Participatory media and why I love it (and must defend it)," Caterina.net, 1/19/10.

A number of people make the distinction between interactivity and participation. This distinction is also very relevant as musicians hope to engage fans and audiences. Some websites deliver interactivity to fans, but don't include the more creative, more social aspects of participatory art.

At this stage, I also find it important to differentiate between participatory art practices and the much broader term "interaction," wherein the relations established between the members of the audience or between them and the art objects are much more passive and formal (usually directed by certain formal instructions, given by the artists, that are to be followed during the exhibitions).

... I want to reflect particularly on the most recent shift of the artists’ focus: from dealing with objects and installations towards dealing with subjects and enabling their participation in art activities." "Participatory Art," Springerin, 2/2006

The author, Suzana Milevska, goes on to cite the five levels of art participation suggested by Alan Brown.

Inventive Arts Participation engages the mind, body and spirit in an act of artistic creation that is unique and idiosyncratic, regardless of skill level.

Interpretive Arts Participation is a creative act of self-expression that brings alive and adds value to pre-existing works of art, either individually or collaboratively.

Curatorial Arts Participation is the creative act of purposefully selecting, organizing and collecting art to the satisfaction of one’s own artistic sensibility.

Observational Arts Participation encompasses arts experiences that you select or consent to, motivated by some expectation of value.

Ambient Arts Participation involves experiencing art, consciously or unconsciously, that you did not select. "The Five Modes of Arts Participation," The Artful Manager, 9/14/05.

Here's another essay on the subject: Interaction vs Participation.

In a previous blog post, "Elements of Music Participation," I explored some ways to create music projects which facilitate participation by a wide variety of people with different skill sets. Henry Jenkins, one of the most important voices writing about the future of media and entertainment, gives his definition of participatory culture.

For the moment, let's define participatory culture as one:
1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. With strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others
3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
4. Where members believe that their contributions matter
5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).

Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued. "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Part One)," Confessions of an Aca/Fan, 10/20/06.

Jenkins also goes on to make a distinction between interactivity and participatory culture.

Interactivity is a property of the technology, while participation is a property of culture. Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. A focus on expanding access to new technologies carries us only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends.

Another resource on the topic of participatory art can be found here: "Participation & Participatory Platforms." This article mentions the origin of "happenings" which became popular in the 1960s. Flash mobs and Burning Man could be considered descendants of "happenings." Here's a more recent example of a participatory Burning Man-like event.

A caravan of 19 such trucks were arranged inside a vast indoor garage on the waterfront of a desolate Brooklyn neighborhood. Nothing was for sale, and you needed to bring your own food & beverages.

The key here is that the event was participatory, meaning you didn’t go simply to passively view art, you were invited to experience it.

Yet, what made this particular event so fascinating was the many inventive ways each participant completely transformed their truck from something empty and uninspiring into great fun. All I could think was how the next time I see a box truck out on the street, it might be one used here. "Lost Horizon Night Market: Party in a Box Truck," reactions, 1/17/10.

For all my discussions on participatory art and audience participation, I'm not saying that it is necessarily preferable to take down the walls between artists and fans. There are especially talented individuals who I would like to see have enough financial support in some fashion to be able to devote as much time to their creativity as possible.

Rather, what I am trying to do is to prepare the music world for what I see happening anyway. The concept of a passive fan, who happily pays money to buy whatever the musician puts out, be that music, performance, art object, or personal interaction, seems to be changing. When fans start getting more attention for themselves by what they are personally doing rather than what they are buying or who they are associating with, they tend to find their own self-expression and creativity preferable to what they can purchase from someone else.

There can still be a role for the artist in all of this, but it often involves having the artist give up some degree of ownership of the creativity. Here's one artist's take.

Patricia Reed: I’m also interested in the ways in which such participatory modes of working subvert the branding strategies of institutions by way of clearly identifiable authors and names. ... In participatory practice, it is perhaps the artist who initiates something in the form of an object, idea, interaction, etc., but unleashes it to the influence of the many for further manipulation, engagement, etc. So the artist is the one who “proposes” or instigates certain processes but the authorship is ultimately obscured—it occupies this important space of the “co-,” where a work is partially made with and not by. ...

Perhaps it’s useful to look at the distinctions in the notion of authorship involved in participatory practice that expands this “artist-as-proposer” we’re discussing. To propose or initiate something is vastly different than to author something. It’s the first step in a process—obviously an important step, but one in a potentially long road. It’s the launching of an idea—and a “hosting” of that idea throughout a process. Crucial, however, to this notion of “hosting” is equally the capacity to “un-host”—for a conventional host assumes situational authority. What I mean by “un-hosting” is not to relinquish authority completely within a group dynamic, but to view the process as a partiality—that is, both being and not being a “host” simultaneously. Throughout the process of un-hosting a certain degree of control (not all) is dispersed and it is precisely that dispersion of “control” that blurs conventional notions of authorship. "What Is a Participatory Practice?" Fillip 8, Fall 2008.

Game developers and other designers of multimedia think like this because user engagement is their goal.

For the artist, this means giving up traditional notions of authorial control. “I’m a writer, but I’ve discovered that sometimes writing has to take a backseat to gameplay to ensure people have the most fun,” comments David Varela, who helped create the successful alternate reality game Xi, designed to promote Sony’s PlayStation Home. ...

“In my work, people spend 30% of the time playing and 70% socialising. We should be facilitating that social experience,” says Lance Weiler. "Participatory Storytelling: A Thousand Authors in Search of a Character," jawbone.tv, 11/11/09.

Nina Simon makes a particularly good distinction between inviting the public to design a project and designing a project that invites their participation.

Which of these descriptions exemplifies participatory museum practice?

1. Museum invites community members to participate in the development and creation of an exhibit. The exhibit opens. It looks like a traditional exhibit.
2. Museum staff create an exhibit by a traditional internal design process, but the exhibit, once open, invites visitors to contribute their own stories and participation. The exhibit is dynamic and changes somewhat in response to visitors' actions.

The answer (for me) is both. But the difference between the two examples teases out a problem in differentiating "participatory design" from "design for participation." In the first case, you are making the design process participatory. In the second, you make the product participatory. "Participatory Design Vs. Design for Participation: Exploring the Difference," Museum 2.0, 4/7/09.

Simon's distinction gets at the heart of what is happening in music among those hoping to engage their fans. Some are letting the fans create the product, while others are letting them participate in something that has already been at least partially developed.

The reason I have been exploring this to such a degree is that I feel if popular music doesn't at least participate in this conversation, it's going to be outside the wider artist community. Certainly many artists in other fields are talking about ways to generate income for themselves, so I'm not suggesting that music is unique in its discussion of developing careers that involve sales. But I'd like to see more conceptualization about the future of music beyond what is currently being discussed at music conferences and online. The 1,000 True Fans and Tribes models, where the artist is the core surrounded by adoring fans, may not remain the norm. As Evans points out:

For the most successful of the art-specialists this hero worship has made it possible to sell millions of dollars worth of their art-commodities on name power alone, and gained them large and loyal followings that would do a head-of-state or television evangelist proud.

... the prevailing belief is that legitimate art is produced solely by art-specialists and anybody else's efforts are secondary at best. This belief becomes, then, an essentially self-perpetuating definition of art, namely that art is what art-specialists produce.

The underlying assumption is that this vast number of artistic non-participants will have their artistic needs met, not by actually making art themselves, but rather by consuming the products of the art-specialists. ...

All of this is the logical result of a commodity culture. If participatory art was a part of our everyday lives, large numbers of people would be actively involved in the making of art. This, however, would severely limit the potential sales of art-commodities and the celebrity status of the specialist. "ART ALIENATED: An Essay on the Decline of Participatory-Art."

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE, 3/19/10
"SXSW: LaDiDa iPhone App Lets Anyone With a Voice Make Music in Seconds"

Here's a video of Henry Jenkins talking about participatory culture and how most creators do it to share rather than as a way to make money.



UPDATE 9/10/10
Here you can find a long discussion about whether or not DJs and mash-up producers are artists.

Some DJs rebel actively against legal and commercial institutions, while others simply avoid them as a matter of course; in both cases, these factors have helped to break down the artificial distinction between artists and audience. As UK-based musician Matt Wand told me: “I can’t draw the line, I definitely don’t draw the line – he’s artist, she’s audience – I can’t do that at all." "Aram Sinnreich: ‘Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture’ - Book Excerpt," Truthdig, 8/27/10.