There’s an old saying among indie music types: if you get into this to make money, you’re a fucking idiot. A contemporary update might specify: if you get into this as an artist. Arrayed against them are an ever-metastasising set of exploitative market conditions: pay-to-play media opportunities and exorbitant production budgets all to promote music to which you’ve signed away all rights in perpetuity. And yet the industry is booming: artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Fontaines DC are arena-selling superstars, the kind of breakthrough acts who even a decade ago many in indie music thought we’d never see again. So why can’t any of the middle-tier musicians I know ever afford rounds?
It’s worth explaining what ‘indie’ means here – not a genre but an economic class. An independent musician, to my mind, is an artist who either self-releases music or who is signed to an independent music label, meaning they aren’t funded, in full or in part, by one of the ‘big three’: Universal, Warner or Sony. Labels like All My Friends, who recently signed the buzzy Irish singer Dove Ellis, or Zelig Records, Mark Ronson’s label, would likely claim ‘indie’ status but are not – their money still flows to and from the big corporate coffers, even if they aren’t technically subsidiaries of those companies.
A true indie label is usually privately owned and funded. The biggest players are Secretly Group, which operates Dead Oceans (Mitski, Phoebe Bridgers), Jagjaguwar (Bon Iver), Secretly Canadian (Angel Olsen), Beggars Group, which operates XL (formerly Adele’s label), Young (FKA Twigs, The xx), 4AD (famed for its 80s/90s indie output,) and Rough Trade (Amyl and the Sniffers, black midi). But there are dozens of indie shops all over the world, which run the gamut in terms of scale from garage operations funded through Universal Credit to gigantic, well-staffed behemoths like Sub Pop, who signed Nirvana in the 90s.
Needless to say, no matter what kind of glory their label may have experienced in the 90s or noughties, very few of these artists make that kind of money anymore. The Bridgerses and XXes of the world make bank on streaming – though still earning less than their major-label counterparts thanks to big labels’ stakes in Spotify – and command extraordinarily high performance fees. Touring your way to the point of commanding said fees is also, in itself, expensive: you have to pay for a band and tour manager, accommodation, US visas and the rapidly increasing cost of flights and petrol. Add to that the sheer demand for live music, and the relative lack of availability of gear and personnel, and it becomes an outright nightmare.
So your average artist – with roughly 50,000 to 300,000 monthly listeners on Spotify – is probably making less than your average UK media worker. Artists without an ardent (and merch-buying) fanbase, or who don’t churn out Netflix-ready background songs, are left to hope and pray that their early-career debt eventually results in a lavish, or at least well-appointed, middle-class life.
At this point, I assume, you’re sold. Well, assuming you’ve got an album done, and a tour booked, it’s now time to promote the shit out of it. No problem, you think, there must be plenty of free, merit-based promotional opportunities with which to shill tunes. Wrong!
Have you ever looked at an email blast from Rough Trade’s record stores? Its weekly curated ‘Edit’ of new albums may feel like a trusted, independently curated source of new music – but it’s not. Artists can pay £350 for a standard ‘Edit’ plan, which includes placement in an email blast and social post, on a curated website page, and more. £700 gets you all that plus CD racking, a decal in the store’s window, and a dedicated homepage feature for one week. If you’re a new band, you could also opt for the separate ‘On The Rise’ package (£350). For that price, you’ll get a blog post and some social posts, among other premium scraps, but you have to produce an exclusive variant of your album, to be sold only at RT stores – at your own cost, of course. It’s another £500, please, if you want to be featured on their in-store digital screens.
This pay-to-play business model means that everyone is doing stuff with Rough Trade now – even the boybanders Blue, who played a Rough Trade show back in January. ‘They’re real scammers – if you’re looking at a record store as a tastemaker and they’re taking all this money it’s like… hmmm…’ says one indie label exec, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity. ‘Pretty shocking they let Blue do a release week show at Rough Trade East – they’re supposed to be indie champions.’
But everyone gets their recommendations from social media anyway, right? Well, if you want to be on a TikTok account like A View From a Bridge, it’ll cost you roughly £4,000. The vast majority of cool people talking into a small microphone about all these great new records charge money to be interviewed on their shows. The most egregious new-media example comes in the form of the podcast 101 Part Time Jobs, which has, at least once, attempted to charge an indie band £300 to be featured. The show, lest we forget, is about how indie musicians have to take on other jobs in order to pay the bills.
I heard about that 101 Part Time Jobs grift during this year’s Great Escape festival, a weeklong orgy of noisy parties and free-flowing booze designed to expose upcoming acts to local and international agents, managers, labels and festival bookers. It pays artists ‘nominal, not phenomenal’ fees to decamp to Brighton for a few days and play to drunk music-tech-execs who talk louder than you thought possible throughout your entire set.
If pay-to-play offends you, there are plenty of other, more above board ways to spend your money in indie music. Later… With Jools Holland often features indie acts, but they don’t provide any backline (amps and such) or production budget. ‘An artist I manage just got a Jools Holland offer, which is great, but they’re signed to an indie label who can’t cover all the costs, so I’m having to front it from my own money,’ one manager tells me. ‘A major label will be like, “we’ll just throw 10 grand at that,” and it’s fine.’
The same is true if you’re the rare indie act who manages to make it overseas and then secures a booking on Saturday Night Live, arguably one of the last outlets where bands can find a new audience. The show doesn’t work around your touring schedule, so you have to fly your band to New York, pay for lodging, pay the band for rehearsals and pay for a standard of production that doesn’t unnecessarily highlight how abject and broke you actually are.
The irony, of course, is that the artists paying to participate have all the power here – they’re driving listeners to the podcasts and TikToks, convincing punters to pay for the shows and giving legitimacy and cool-factor to otherwise deeply tacky businesses. And, oftentimes, the artists that eschew this world of greased palms and broken promises are the ones who end up ‘making it big,’ whatever that means in this economy.
In the light of all this, it seems like the best place to spend your money is also the most deceptive place: covert social media marketing. Artists like Geese and Oklou got a lot of flak for paying the social agencies Byword and Chaotic Good to seed positive sentiment about them on TikTok earlier this year, but really, it’s the best bang for your buck in terms of actually reaching your people when you consider that a Jools Holland performance will cost just as much and only reach your nan and her friends. But hey, them’s the breaks. Someone has to keep this industry afloat.
