Grizzly Bear - Shields

just going to quote the money shot here for ref since there is already confusion

Grizzly Bear tours for the bulk of its income, like most bands; licensing a song might provide each member with “a nice little ‘Yay, I don’t have to pay rent for two months.’ ” They don’t all have health insurance. Droste’s covered via his husband, Chad, an interior designer; they live in the same 450-square-foot Williamsburg apartment he occupied before Yellow House. When the band tours, it can afford a bus, an extra keyboard player, and sound and lighting engineers. ... After covering expenses like recording, publicity, and all the other machinery of a successful act (“Agents, lawyers, tour managers, the merch girl, the venues take a merch cut; Ticketmaster takes their cut; the manager gets a percentage; publishers get a percentage”), Grizzly Bear’s members bring home … well, they’d rather not get into it. “I just think it’s inappropriate,” says Droste. “Obviously we’re surviving. Some of us have health insurance, some of us don’t, we basically all live in the same places, no one’s renting private jets. Come to your own conclusions.”

reading this makes me really sad

Yeah, and you also have to factor in that these guys are probably at the peak of a career that won't stay at this level for more than a few more years. Then what -- 40 years old with no groundwork for a career unless it's in something indie-music-related.

Kind of makes me glad I didn't try to stick it out longer with music though.

I kind of feel it doubly with GB because they're all my age or thereabouts. Think one is slightly older and the rest slightly younger. I don't earn a lot of money, but we're about to buy our second house, these guys do a great job, do it responsibly and creatively, and they can't all afford health insurance (obv as a Britisher I find the Yank system pretty awful anyway). When footballers earn more in a week than I do in a year, that seems fucked-up.

Re: that quote. Obv. the amount of money that a band at GB's level comes home with after a tour is gonna be "a pretty sweet figure" and there's no wonder dude didn't want to disclose. It doesn't take into account the cost of gear or the cost of living during writing/recording periods. Nor does it take into account that if you add up a "best case" income for an indie musician per year from age 20 to 65, divide it by 45 years, you'll get an income that's slightly less than an elementary school teacher. (This is a serious "best case" estimation, too.)

truth bomb/heartbreaker

Part of why the indie-rock world bristles at calculation is that calculating your music’s effect can seem suspiciously like pandering your way toward success. And, perhaps, money. And in these parts, at least, audiences can react badly to musicians who acknowledge a relationship with money—whether wanting more of it, complaining about not having enough of it, or really doing anything other than being immensely grateful that people appreciate the work. Even if said people are stealing it. You will rarely hear an indie act complain about piracy; if they’re successful enough to care, they achieved that success in an ecosystem built on piracy from the get-go. But Droste will say that paying $9 for a digital download of an act’s new album—the price of “a fucking appetizer, a large popcorn at the movie theater, and you’ll have it forever, and they took two years to make it”—matters more than people seem to think, and not just in terms of income. “Maybe they’ll get on the radio. Every record sold shows the industry your value.” Meanwhile, streaming the album from a service like Spotify nets the musicians almost irrelevantly small amounts.

Yeah, it's weird that I may actually earn a better living, overall, than Grizzly Bear dudes, when they're famous and loved by at least hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, and probably contribute way more of value to the world than I do.

uh that's wrong, no one owns an island

― call all destroyer, Monday, October 1, 2012 8:47 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol, one of my entertaining coworkers owns an island. It's somewhere bahamas-ish, tiny, and his family camped on it a few times. I think it cost $10-20K, worth quite a bit more now, but no one wants to buy it.

One point I would add to the discussion is that these guys live in New York (presumably Brooklyn), and it's really fucking expensive to live here. Maybe bands just shouldn't live here once they're touring all the time anyway. Not that that would solve everything.

it really is more indie to be a cool Vermont- or western Mass-based band

xp yeah i think i meant no one in grizz bear owns an island, i suppose there are some ppl who own islands somewhere

once you 'make it' of course
xp

it's more indie to be a cool own-island-based band

DIY template for success: buy cheap caribbean island, incorporate as a nation, make said nation a tax haven for own band

as if bands make enough to pay taxes, definitely the 47% and then after they make it, all profits go to the cayman islands like bono does

reading this has made me sad. going to buy this CD, the first CD purchase of this year, not that my $10 will really help that much.

How is that your first CD purchase of the year?

who buys cds?

What I read about them and what they actually sound like are two very different things.

One is very good and one isn't.

i know it's sad, just a couple of years back i bought my whole Top 30 plus. it was a combination of things like money, burn out factor and Amoeba being about an hour away now.

xxpost

http://stereogum.com/1166392/debating-the-grizzly-bear-ny-mag-story-and-making-a-living-making-music/top-stories/lead-story/

I see a former ilxor still retains his commenting style

I think one of the commenters pointed out that the debate is basically about being 25 vs. being 34, and that's pretty much OTM. Of course the 25-year-old dude is like "I don't care if I make any money, because I can't imagine doing anything else!" And it's like yeah, because you're not of age where most of your friends have kids and own houses, you've never been really sick, you don't have a sense that you're aging, the shine on life hasn't dulled at all yet, etc.

tbf, the 34 year old side of things has always sounded like that, though

34 in 7 months.

Of course the 25-year-old dude is like "I don't care if I make any money, because I can't imagine doing anything else!"

actually that sounds more like the 34 yr old's side? more accurately, "i need to make money doing music because i can't imagine doing anything else". the 25 yr old sounded much more reasonable and pragmatic to me (work a real day job, do as much music as i can on the side, why because i like it).

I see a former ilxor still retains his commenting style

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Wednesday, October 3, 2012 2:21 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

????

maybe. but always needing a day job can mean never taking your craft beyond a certain level. xp

haha, wait I just realized I was misattributing a key quote to the 25-yr-old guy that was actually the 34-yr-old guy. NM

isn't wooden wand a dude who commented on ilx? I may be thinking of someone else

no, you're right, same dude.

roger adultery

tbf it's a little more shocking that Grizzly Bear doesn't make a lot of money than that Wooden Wand doesn't make a lot of money. That's kind of a problem with these arguments -- a lot of the people making the arguments wouldn't have been making money in the old system either. It's more surprising that even getting to the relative 'top' doesn't earn you a great living.

have grizzly bear considered kickstarter

"Sing close harmony on our tour! You must send a video or audio recording of you sweetly singing 'ahhhhhhhhhh' -- we don't want just any old amateur!"

they have some old-timey incandescent globes that float around behind them, maybe they crowdsource people to move them up and down

Nitsuh is a champ for both "representing an attractive and saleable version of the band Grizzly Bear" and also "fashioning their non-committal comments re: their own income into a case to justify the scare quote-y cover".

what is so special about music that musicians should be glad to take a wage cut? like ok it is sometimes v enjoyable but so are a lot of other jobs people get payed good money for and they don't say dumb shit like "i feel lucky to be a member of a generation of scientists who work five days a week at a gas station to get by" are so ppl so afraid of seeming entitled that just asking to be remunerated for your labour is too much to ask?

musicians' labour has declined in value independent of any decline in actual demand for music, the cost of stealing music has just decreased and it turns out that was all that was keeping people from not stealing it all along; we feel entitled to all music. but we aren't (anyone making a claim to the opposite kind of necessarily also has to make some deep assumptions about intellectual/private property). yes it's true that musicians have to make a strategic decision given realistic payoffs of playing music/working part time, that doesn't mean it's a good thing that they are now guaranteed to make less irrespective of which they choose. also doesn't mean that people who bemoan the state of affairs are grumpy. saying "hey, mozart was buried in a common grave" doesn't take into account that austria was then a serfdom, not to mention the way music was distributed then is incomparable to now

it's a good thing to think about, sure! but i would wager grizzly bear make a fairly good living at what they do. maybe they should think about not living in new york city! i hear it's expensive there.

i absolutely think they should get paid, don't get me wrong.

you can't make a living these days writing fiction, either! you don't see fiction writers bitching about it. or music writers using that angle. (or do you?)

does anyone remember this article?

http://philip.greenspun.com/samantha/FAQ/wilcox.text

i remember reading it and thinking "JUST MOVE TO THE COUNTRY DUMBASS!"

or music writers writing about other writers using that angle. (or do you?)

i guess a lot of problems i have with 25 yo dude's arguments boil down to the hubris of youth (tho i am 4 years younger than him) but i also think aristotle could bust his balls p hard on deeper logical or moral flaws; seems to me his points ultimately come down to: musicians who happily work part-time are cool or real / musicians who hope to be financially supported by music are whimps

also i agree with owen that this debate couldn't possibly have been inspired by a better article

good post flops

I can't really comment on this so much b/c imo it all comes back to "universal public health care is the cornerstone of a diverse creative class" which is always catcalled as 'such a Canadian stance' although it admittedly could just as easy be described as Scandinavian/British/continental European/Cuban etc.

tbf it's a little more shocking that Grizzly Bear doesn't make a lot of money than that Wooden Wand doesn't make a lot of money. That's kind of a problem with these arguments -- a lot of the people making the arguments wouldn't have been making money in the old system either. It's more surprising that even getting to the relative 'top' doesn't earn you a great living.

I'd be curious to hear from an indie band who was at the "relative top" in the 90s - like, say, Pavement or whoever. Is there an indie band that sold 250k back then? What sort of living did they make? My impression is that all indie bands, at all times, have attained modest financial success/stability compared to their friends who got real jobs. These days it's different in that the bar for making it into the Billboard charts is a lot lower, and the internet has changed the way people consume music... but I think the ratio of indie bands who "make it" and those who eventually bounce out a la Travis Morrison is not hugely different.

I seem to recall a big story back in the late 90s all about how Doug Martsch had to battle with his label just to get health insurance (and Built to Spill was on a major!), which sort of underlines this point.

grizzly bear went to mexico for a month to "get the juices flowing", i think they're doing just fine

who knows, mexico is pretty cheap if you have a place to stay

idk, they could have spent less on food and been able to work faster due to fewer distractions, I'd bet that travel expenses would be less than a month of health insurance premiums