The year that was for independent musicians

If you went to a concert, bought an album, or renewed a streaming subscription this year, then you'll know that being a music fan got more expensive in 2023. And it's not just consumers feeling the burden of added costs.

As part of Commotion's look back at 2023, rapper Rollie Pemberton (a.k.a. Cadence Weapon) and veteran indie-rock musician/activist Damon Krukowski join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to talk about all the different ways that life for an independent musician became more difficult this year.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: What seems frustrating about this, Damon, is that there is no path, right? We start talking about how Spotify is supposed to democratize people's access to music, and then Spotify comes out and says if you get fewer than 1,000 listens in a year, you're not going to make any money at all. You start to say, OK, maybe you can go on the road — and then we find out that it's more and more difficult to go on the road. It seems like any solution to boost a musician's income gets saddled with its own kind of roadblocks. Vinyl, for example, remains this really popular alternative to streaming and a way for fans to support artists directly. But then the cost of shipping vinyl also keeps going up. How has that affected you?

Damon: Oh, yeah, that's becoming a hidden problem especially for U.S. artists like myself, because our postal service is outrageously expensive for international shipping in particular. My band's always had a big audience in Europe and the U.K., and we just can't ship product over there anymore.

I think what we're getting everywhere is this split between the independent network — you know, the lower level where we all work — but when you think about it, that's the bulk of working musicians. And then you've got these corporations at the top, and it's like, OK, handle your pop stars, handle your arena shows. Fine. That's your world. I've never been a part of that world. But when they reach down and they buy up venues that are smaller and then they end up bringing their practices to Cadence Weapon touring and they treat them like they're an arena band with money to burn, and we're not — that's a big problem. So I feel like everywhere we turn, we're running into huge corporations that are controlling it again: live music, recorded music, streaming. Even pressing vinyl has gotten very hard, because the major labels got interested in vinyl and they clogged up all the plants with their limited editions of Led Zeppelin or whatever old catalog records in a million colors, and we can't get new stuff pressed in a timely way.

Elamin: Rollie, what do you make of that idea that larger corporations have taken up all the space and as a result, there's just fewer and fewer spaces for independent artists to just travel through?

Rollie: I totally agree with that. It's something that's been happening incrementally in the music industry. I feel like with streaming companies like Spotify, it's similar to other tech companies and how they're all about disrupting whatever industry they're in…. I feel like us as music workers, we're in the same fight as somebody who's a rideshare driver because these companies like Spotify, they're taking our industry and separating us from our revenue that we used to have. So I think your average music fan needs to really consider what they're doing when they're actually listening to something on Spotify.

Elamin: I think the idea that however you consume music is not neutral is a really important message to get across because you're making choices. And I understand that streaming services might make it easy for you to make certain choices, but it is not neutral in the sense that it does affect the artist differently depending on the choices that you're making. Let me ask you, Damon: I think this year is showing us that streaming isn't going away anytime soon. What can we do to at least make the streaming economy just a little bit more equitable for smaller artists?

Damon: I think we need to accept the technology. We can't go backwards and say let's just get rid of digital, because there's so many advantages to streaming. I really appreciate having access to music that is hard to get a hold of, and I also appreciate how democratizing it is in terms of reach because you can hear anything you want, even if you can't afford to amass a record collection. I really feel like that's all great positive things. But the negatives are really powerful.

I think the biggest thing is connected to a lot of other things in our culture. I think it's connected to corporate control of a lot of our decision making, of our limited choices. And I think the other side of streaming is that, yeah, you get all the music you want, but there's a limited way that you can access it and you can hear it. And for one, you have to trade your personal data for it. Things like this are really serious and have far-reaching consequences. And so I think it's more about being aware of what the trade is that you're really making. You don't have to necessarily figure out a way to pay the musicians; that's going to be our job, to figure out how to deal with this system and speak up for ourselves. But I would say think about what you yourself are trading for that free access or really low cost to access. It's not nothing. It's never really free.

Elamin: Rollie, despite all of this, you say you're still hopeful. Why?

Rollie: I'm inherently a very optimistic person…. For me, I feel like things have gotten a lot better with touring in a lot of ways, versus during the very beginning of the pandemic when there were no shows, and then it was all the seated shows and it was just terrible. We're getting back to a bit more normalcy with that. Personally, streaming is not a huge part of what I do as an artist. I feel like the excitement and engagement with music for your average fan is way up these days. It's just changing form. Maybe people are thinking of music more as something to attach to the content they create on TikTok and things like that, and I find it really fun to learn different ways to adapt to that.

Elamin: That sounds like a pretty good starting ground for hope.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.