Hi Steemit,
I’m on a bus right now and I got to thinking how undervalued our art has become in a professional way.
Music has always been there, and will probably always be there, but at what cost for us?
How can a professional musician make a living out of producing music, when music itself has become something so accessible, something that ordinary, that we as society lost that respect we used to have for it.
It’s well known that in many, many countries, young musicians pay venues for a gig.
If we move that to another profession, a young electrician should pay us for fixing our electrical issue? A young doctor should pay us for diagnosing us?
Who goes into a new restaurant expecting to be paid for eating their food?!
What profession in this world is about paying the customer for providing a service to them?
I know the answer, and you too.
I have heard Richard Bona (one of the greatest bassists around) complain about not being provided with food at the Blue Note NY after a gig, when then you see the amount of food that they throw to the garbage, bt they are not willing to give that to the musicians performing.
People go to that kind of places to see musicians perform, not to talk nor see the waitress, still, we are at the bottom.
I’m mostly sure that for every memory you have, there’s a song for it in your mind.
Music can change your mood, make you feel happy, make you feel sad, stay with you until you fell asleep, wake you up in the morning; it can even encourage you to do things you didn’t feel like doing. But still, it’s not considered a profession like any other.
When people ask you what do you do for a living, don’t you feel underestimated when you answer I’m a musician? Don’t you feel judgement in the eyes of the other, like “poor dude, how does he make a living out of it?”.
Sometimes, I do.
I have never paid for a gig and never would.
And I’ve been super fortunate to be living a nice life, with lots of work. But I can’t help but thinking about all the others that couldn’t make it, that had to give away their dreams, and it was not because they were not incredible musicians, but because they way this works makes no sense at all. And it takes way too much time until you can see any profit.
People also don’t realize the big investment we do. We spend hours and hours studying, listening, playing.
We spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars in order to have our equipment.
We spend hundreds of hours travelling from one place to another for rehearsal, for perfoming live.
And still many consider we are the only professionals that should do this for “the love of art”.
Even music distribution has become an issue now, people don’t buy CDs.
Well, for instance, I’ll start publishing all my music in @steemsongs , I’m tired of getting so little money from iTunes / Spotify when they get to keep most of it.
I’d love to hear your experiences or if anyone has come with an idea to start fixing the way this works.
