I'll give you a little idea here actually, as people often say to me "well it's live where the money is right now".
So let's take the example of an up and coming artist like Fable who is playing in Bristol next month. 20 years ago, she'd have been signed on a nice deal by now which would have supported her touring and recording. Because of piracy, nobody will do that yet until it's a complete no brainer, and she's built up enough of a fan base that they know anything she does will sell a certain amount of units/tickets/merchandise. To get to that point, really she needs to be playing live a lot in front of people who don't know her in order to build a fanbase.
Normally she/we wouldn't get paid for playing a gig right now, but Bristol is unusual in that we're getting paid £85 in order to play the songs that we have recorded for her debut EP (which we managed to do very cheaply and cost about £6,000). So we're feeling lucky that we're getting paid £85 for this one. Our booking agent will take 15% of that £85. Her manager (me) would normally take 20% of that too (but I won't). We'll have 3 rehearsals before the show at £50 a pop, so that's £150. Then add on to that the cost of getting there and back from Brighton. So you're already looking at the fact it's going to cost us money to play this gig. We're doing a run of 500 pieces of vinyl at the moment in order to sell at these types of gig to help cover costs, and potentially put us in a position where we can get back into the studio to record some more tracks. Those 500 bits of vinyl cost just over £1,000, but I've managed to wangle a deal where we pay the manufacturer back as we sell them, but for us to make anything at all on these, we first need to pay back the £1,000.
As I say though, this is unusual to be paid for a gig. We did also get paid £60 for the recent show at The Old Blue Last. Nothing for Shepherd's Bush Empire, nothing for the Prince Albert gig next week. Nothing for Great Escape and nothing for Blissfields Festival.
She's also very lucky in that we've been able to cobble together the finance to be able to get this far, but it's (being very honest) getting to be a bit of a struggle right now. She's flipping burgers during the day and I'm having to do external consultancy work in the construction industry to all get by. All in the hope that we can get to the point where the record companies thing she's impossible to ignore. Most young bands won't even get this far - so imagine just HOW much talent and great music is getting lost, because people don't think it's their problem to pay for art right now....
There's a lot more I could put to that example, but I hope that gives at least a little idea on it. You might not like her music, that's cool, but the press are calling her the female Thom Yorke etc, and she's a monstrous talent for a 19 year old (or any age really) but realistically we can't do this for very long because of the circumstances of the industry right now.
