Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.

This one’s a Monday special! I don’t think a lot of us were focused on newsletter-reading last week, and this one matters. This may mean I change up how it’s timed for a while going forward, but we’ll see.

For now, take a moment to remember you’re here. This is an easy time to do what I think comes naturally to most people in creative work and bury yourself in your chosen hustle. But you’re needed by others, and you need others. (Skip to One Thing You Can Use Today, for more on that.)

Today, we cut right to the core issue I see facing most of the music world as we speak. It’s been echoed to me in nearly every conversation with pros over the last few months, and it deserves to be explored.

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Music’s Shrinking Middle Class

My main intention, with the work I do, is to build a healthier middle class of artists. That especially goes for musicians.

For the sake of defining it, what do I mean when I talk about the middle class, in terms of music?

I talk about this enough that it deserves deeper exploration. And it’s important to discuss what I see as the “upper” and “lower” classes in the music industry, first.

“Upper class” musicians would be either people who make an entire comfortable living off of music, or people who already have such significant resources that spending on growing a music career is not an object. Musicians who also work in the industry are not necessarily upper class. If you can stop work completely for a year, do nothing unrelated to music, and keep a roof over your head, this is you. Notably, being an upper class musician does not necessarily mean you don’t do an obscene amount of work. It also doesn’t necessarily mean you’re rich.

If you’re an upper-class musician, you might have a job that pays well and can be done fully on the road, or a job that directly benefits from your work as a musician. Sometimes, the “upper-class” part of this is because you’re at no real financial risk from your music activities. Other times, the “upper-class” part is because you make enough doing music only to live comfortably.

“Lower class” musicians would be musicians who are severely struggling to make any money at all from music, when that is their intent. This qualifier matters. Musicians are not served from thinking in this way, in my opinion, when monetary gain is not a goal. Hobbyists and those who make for the sake of art alone should not have to define themselves in capitalist fashion. But if you’re an artist, you have monetary gain as a goal, and you aren’t already in possession of significant resources, the lower class is where you start. This might also be qualified as an “emerging” artist, depending on who you ask.

“Middle class” musicians are people who play music professionally and at least break even doing so. They may be able to carve out a modest living through music only, or they may break even doing music and then support themselves through non-creator jobs. A lot of musicians who people see as successful fit this mold, and they are often bigger names than you think. I have personally known at least one Grammy-winning artist who fit this definition at the time of his win, relying largely on income from weddings and session work to pay his rent.  

If you’re a middle-class musician, you might have a totally separate day job, or the kind of job that’s gig economy-based (bartending, producing, for-hire service work, etc) and allows you to tour without much issue. 

These are my definitions of what the upper, middle, and lower class of musicians all look like. Here’s the hardest part of it:

My version of “middle-class artist” still makes what most occupations would consider to be a below-middle-class salary. Upper-class goes all the way up to Taylor Swift, but it goes all the way down to what most non-tech occupations would consider to be a “pretty good” salary for someone with 5+ years of experience.

If you can just barely pay your own rent doing music in a music town like NYC, Los Angeles, or Nashville, that’s my version of being a middle-class musician. Which, notably, is a close cousin to slightly-better-than-minimum wage. So, all of this requires tenacity, to the point of stubbornness, if you’re a musician and not already loaded.

And that means there just isn’t a whole lot of pie left to cut. It’s harder than ever for managers, labels, venues, distributors and nearly every part of the industry ecosystem to make money when dealing with both lower-class musicians and those who are coming up to middle-class status. Increasingly, the advancement is on the musicians themselves.

But I don’t see this as a race to the bottom. I see this as partly symptomatic of a broken system, and partly as something to adjust for. I prefer to see the classes as things you can advance through.

What are the basic steps to advancement?

First: get to break-even. Everything you do as a musician costs time, or money, or both. This isn’t easy, but people like myself do work in this business specifically to help accomplish this.

Next: get a good accountant, or learn to do this yourself. In the US, most of your activity can be written off as a business expense if you keep good records. I have known artists making sub-$30k a year on paper who could stretch this considerably through tax breaks. This makes a huge difference.

Finally: use the skills and strategy that got you to break-even, and then scale your work up. Easier said than done, but doable.

This allows you to do something that’s hard to replicate in any other way: know your market worth. (Be careful not to tie this to your human worth.)

Getting to break-even, in the music industry, makes everything possible.

If you know you can make, say, $10K on merch in a single year, the temptation to take a low advance from a label, distributor, or (more common in Europe) a publisher that can’t be paid back easily decreases. A bigger advance with better terms becomes easier to negotiate for, and you become more attractive to industry partners. And furthermore, income streams can be scaled up as your brand awareness builds. 

Hitting break-even means you can get better deals for yourself. It gets harder for people to take advantage of you. And as we’re seeing now with companies who want your work to populate their sites to sell subscriptions and ads while doing everything they can to not pay significant royalties for the use of that work, this is powerful.

Owning your audience, knowing how to reach it, and then knowing how to grow your revenue is the key to everything that comes after. You can do this on your own as an artist for longer than you once could. However, you will need a good team around you to get to the next stage.

I’m here for a lot of things. My endless compulsion toward creative energy is one of them. But the core of what I aim for, every time I work with a musician on their marketing strategy and set goals for the months ahead, is to help grow a larger middle class of musicians. It’s the same when I work in a longer-term way on project management and team development. I find myself stuck on the simple injustice of our current system, and then I dig in harder.

Music’s shrinking middle class is its biggest problem.

We need to keep talking about it.

One Thing You Can Use Today

I have spoken before about the importance of community in your social media strategy, no matter what kind of creator you are.

However, the importance of community in your day-to-day activity is even greater. Especially right now.

Reach out to anyone you haven’t heard from in a while. Use now to get back to people who were languishing in your inbox. Do it this week.

You need community on two levels: in your life, and in your work. This does not have to be a complex operation.

You might be surprised at how quickly you hear from people who have been away for a moment. Right now, I’m finding conversations that have been dead for months roaring back to life.

And in any tumultuous time, I always find that most either need to commune with other people, or need a meaningful distraction.

I have seen some artists posting to the effect of, “Well, this is a weird time to be playing a show or promoting ourselves, but…” No. It is not. Stop that. This kind of thinking needs to be squashed.

If you’re in any sort of creative work from any angle, people need you.

And if you’re a person, you will need people around you, even gently.

Just go say hi, especially to people who are a little quiet right now. Everyone will benefit.

Track of the Week

GEL - “Worms of the Senses/Faculties of the Skull” (Refused cover)

Lyrically, self-explanatory.

Musically, there are very few tribute records that add much of any note, and a lot of them that try too hard and misfire. The new “obliterated” official tribute to Refused’s legendary The Shape of Punk To Come has a few misses on it, as you’d expect. But, wow, does GEL ever open it with a direct hit. All the ferocity of the original, distilled to its confrontational core.

Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

List of Clubs

This issue, anywhere where people you care about are counts as a club. Any show you are going to is a club I’d like to be in. Coffee shops? Game nights? All of it is the club.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of a third place, read this. This is the perfect week to find yours. Maybe it’s down the street.

For those of you who were hoping for the usual show listings, I’ll be at the early Kiasmos show at Elsewhere tomorrow, and probably a lot of other places after that.

Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…

The Club List is a newsletter from MeInTheClub.com. All issues are available at TheClubList.net. To inquire about marketing services for your work, contact [email protected] and include "Services” in the subject line.