working more and creating less (my metro magazine article)
You can read it between looking for 'real-jobs' and latest rental listings on the toilet as you hide from your responsibilities.
Earlier this year I was commissioned to write an article for Metro Magazine, something that I found challenging and rewarding.
My aim was to synthesise and summarise a ‘greatest hits’ of personal insights about the struggles of creatives within the arts communities of Aotearoa.
Part of my claim about our cultural crisis is that the scope of the problem is only revealed from a birds eye view - that we regularly identify problems within segments of the industry but don’t recognise the cumulative effects spread across the sector.
This article is my best attempt at describing the chain-reaction nature of the challenges facing the creatives here in New Zealand.
Thank you so much to Henry Oliver and Metro Magazine for commissioning and publishing little old Hahko - make sure you check out Metro who publish great culture (and food) content online and in print constantly!
Enjoy!
WORKING MORE & CREATING LESS
The modern music industry is a microcosm of our changing world. The contemporary experience of musicians is predominantly one of intense instability and the entire sector from the commercial to the local community is being transformed as it adapts.
Economic and institutional challenges. Insecurity and inequality. Hyper-individualisation. Neoliberal experiments and tropes that can increasingly be found in all areas of society, including the creative and music industries.
Inside the Commercial Music Industry you find a huge population of freelancers competing in the gig economy, operating underneath hegemonic corporations like Spotify, Meta & Live Nation that have captured distribution, physical performance spaces and media platforms.
This near total corporatization pressures creatives into adopting the structures and language of business in order to interact with these institutions and commercial entities. Musicians become small business owners, entrepreneurs and administrators as they enter the bureaucratic world of contracts, applications and accounting.
These added requirements for the musician's creative journey creates a layer of middle management offering services to deal with increasing business demands for fee’s or percentage of profits.
Musicians, frustrated that their focus is being taken away from creativity, accept this in the hope of carving space for themselves and their art. Unfortunately for the modern musician, bureaucracy is not the only force bearing down on them as capitalism is a pervasive system that moves and influences all facets of our complex world.
The housing and rental crisis raises prices and limits housing availability. Musicians therefore have to work more frequently to earn money, taking away time from their creative endeavours. As energy prices increase, but public transport remains stagnant, the transportation costs associated with rehearsals, touring, working and living rise, compounding the financial pressure. Inflation post-pandemic does the same, with food costs alone being the highest they’ve been in three decades.
Simultaneously, the technological revolution which promised to make our lives easier has coincided with heavier workloads, disintegration of the professional and personal spaces and increasing mental health issues.
This, coupled with the corporatization of creatives and the obliteration of cultural media institutions means musicians are now not only meant to produce the product but market it too, taking even more time away from the act of creation.
Meanwhile the average musician is making less and less money from their music.
Royalty payouts across all streaming platforms have decreased year on year. Venue closures, energy prices and easily transmissible diseases make going on tour and playing live shows not only increasingly difficult financially, but for some out-right dangerous. Ai programs threaten both the stability of commercial advertising work and areas like mixing and mastering.
It’s no surprise then, given the financial price of entry and hierarchical corporate nature of the sector, that the upper classes are increasingly the only creatives that can afford sustained engagement.
An aspiring musician attempting to break into, and grow within, the modern music industry needs to have time to create, learn, and network. This means most creatives struggle to simultaneously hold down a full-time job. Without full-time work, it becomes a struggle to keep up with essential living costs.
This means you require either intergenerational support (living at home, financial assistance), institutional support (public funding, record labels) or both. This makes you insecure and more vulnerable to the whims of the system you’re trying to enter.
This financial pressure could create an increasingly homogenous and conservative music industry. For example, you need money to make music, so you need funding. We (through NZ On Air Music) fund the production of recorded music for radio broadcast. You make songs for radio, which influences song length, sonic characteristics, lyrical themes, production quality and stylistic decisions because you must fit the needs of the commercial radio stations.
You want to grow, which means attracting industry figures and attracting an audience. This means getting plays on streaming platforms. So you make songs for streaming, which influences song length, sonic characteristics, lyrical themes, production quality and stylistic decisions because you must fit the needs of the streaming platform playlist curators.
Eventually, creatives who can no longer sustain their engagement disengage with the Commercial Music Industry symbolically leave and become part of what I call the Communal Music Industry, or Music Community.
Unfortunately the pressures they are attempting to transcend are pervasive and systemic, and also impact the wider communities within the music community they hope to join.
At the local level, venues are on the verge of collapsing countrywide due to the same pressures of inflation, urban development, gentrification and noise complaints. Their audiences decrease as disposable income is eaten up by inflation and digital entertainment becomes more dominant.
Rehearsal spaces are also few and far between, and are becoming incredibly hard to maintain and sustain. Certain genres that rely on a traditional setup of loud instruments like drums become economically unsustainable, meaning bands get smaller and genres that require less infrastructure become more prevalent.
Less communal space forces diverse communities and scenes together into the same venues that are already at capacity, creating competition and making it difficult to grow community conscious with a lack of continuity or a sense of home.
On top of that, the spaces allocated for cultural existence are now utterly dominated by the sale of alcohol. This enhances the possibility of harm not only for the audience's health but for the musicians, who are constantly surrounded by, and often paid with, alcohol.
In the modern music industry, creatives are crushed by financial insecurity and economic pressures. Most are privately aware of both the compounding problems and the inability of individuals and institutions to engage the crisis in any meaningful way.
Yet, there are many doing incredible work against the tide, or maybe in spite of it.
Musicians, independent venues owners and operators, community services, student radio stations, DIY record labels, local and national promoters and individuals within all facets of the industry including the top end of the corporate commercial side are doing the best they can, with the limited time and energy they have. However, many admit how unsustainable what they're doing is, and fear that there won't be more to replace them once they are gone.
The music industry, Commercial and Communal, will most likely never disappear. However, alongside the wider society it inhabits, it is being transfigured under late-stage capitalism and the tyranny of market forces into something different, something more economically profitable.
The music industry will become even less habitable to both the working and middle classes due to the financial burden of entry and participation. This will decrease the diversity of creative output, as those remaining will either have to produce profitable products to sustain financial engagement or be a member of a higher class to have the freedom to express themselves.
Economic pressures on space for writing, rehearsing and performing, the plummeting cost of home recording equipment and the preferred industry product being recorded music for its ease of distribution will combine to make live bands featuring drum kits and guitars much harder to sustain. This will render the traditional genres of rock and its offshoots increasingly niche, leaving the space dominated by legacy acts and increasing the prevalence of more production focused genres and solo performers.
Rural and underserved areas of the country will continue to dissipate creatively as venues lost are not replaced. The young population who are unable to attend the R18 shows subsidized by alcohol sales experience less live music, leading to less young people being inspired to make music creating a downward spiral of diminishing returns. Those who are immovably interested in music will be forced to move elsewhere, robbing the local community of the ability to halt the negative momentum.
Of course there will still be Lorde’s and Benee’s. But will there be another Flying Nun? There will still be Six60 at Eden Park. But will there be Wax Chattels at Whammy? There will still be a Music Industry. But will there be a Music Community? I hope so.
I don’t fear that the Music Industry will fail.
I fear that music will become the cultural pastime of an entrenched elite class. No longer an accessible mode of artistic expression, or a culture to contribute to, but a product to consume.