Music becoming a hobby for the 1 per cent makes sense when you consider just how financially unsustainable it has become, due to exploitative streaming economics – Spotify typically pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream – and exorbitant post-Brexit touring costs, which have doubled overheads and decreased average tour earnings by 45 per cent.
“I was looking at a budget earlier on where we have run the same event every five years, and our cost overhead has doubled from £1.6m to £3.2m,” Stuart Galbraith, of KMJ Entertainment Group, tells me. And, considering up to 40 per cent of a musician’s tour budget will be spent on transport, the US-Iran war’s impact on fuel prices has just made things worse.
“So when gas prices increase by 10 per cent, it’s a massive hit,” says tour production manager Jake Berry, who has worked with Beyoncé, Metallica and the Rolling Stones.
Although, paradoxically, the live music sector is booming, it is only at arena and stadium level, where superstar names such as Harry Styles can make an easy fortune. But for smaller artists, the numbers barely add up, with 43 per cent earning less than £14,000 a year from music, forcing them to juggle other jobs. One very well-known artist told me, off the record, that she couldn’t even afford the £10,000 it cost to play a small stage at Glastonbury.
According to music historian Ted Gioia, whose Substack, The Honest Broker, counts more than 296,000 subscribers, a compounding problem is that record labels are no longer as interested in launching new stars, preferring instead “to buy up the rights to old songs” as a faster, less risky way to generate cash.
Without the major-label advances of recorded music’s golden age (which used to range between £50,000 and £1m, but now average around £30,000), Gioia says that “young musicians are forced to invest huge sums in launching their careers, much like medical school students who take out huge loans. But with this difference: the money made by doctors justifies the borrowing. But is that true for music? Very rarely. So that leaves one other pathway to success, namely connections.”
While the “nepo baby” label first started getting thrown about during the pandemic (which either halted or sank the careers of most jobbing musicians), it wasn’t until 2022 that it exploded in popular culture, when New York magazine ran a cover featuring eight stars – Dakota Johnson, Maude Apatow and Zoë Kravitz among them – with their heads superimposed on illustrations of incubated babies. The headline: “She has her mother’s eyes. And agent.” Internet trolls delighted in unearthing fresh nepo babies for sport, while journalists started adding a requisite “check your nepo baby privilege” clause to most celebrity interviews, prompting a wave of indignantly defensive answers that only added fuel to the fire.
“Nobody rips on a kid who’s like, ‘I want to be a doctor like my dad and granddad,’” Gwyneth Paltrow (herself a nepo baby, the daughter of actress Blythe Danner and director Bruce Paltrow) riposted to Bustle about her and Chris Martin’s daughter Apple, now a model, and the “ugly moniker” aimed at her.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.telegraph.co.uk ’
