<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 Spotify typically pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream \u2013 and exorbitant post-Brexit touring costs, which have doubled overheads and decreased average tour earnings by 45 per cent.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was looking at a budget earlier on where we have run the same event every five years, and our cost overhead has doubled from \u00a31.6m to \u00a33.2m,\u201d Stuart Galbraith, of KMJ Entertainment Group, tells me. And, considering up to 40 per cent of a musician\u2019s tour budget will be spent on transport, the US-Iran war\u2019s impact on fuel prices has just made things worse.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo when gas prices increase by 10 per cent, it\u2019s a massive hit,\u201d says tour production manager Jake Berry, who has worked with Beyonc\u00e9, Metallica and the Rolling Stones.<\/p>\n
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 \u00a314,000 a year from music, forcing them to juggle other jobs. One very well-known artist told me, off the record, that she couldn\u2019t even afford the \u00a310,000 it cost to play a small stage at Glastonbury.<\/p>\n
According to music historian Ted Gioia, whose Substack, The Honest Broker<\/em>, counts more than 296,000 subscribers, a compounding problem is that record labels are no longer as interested in launching new stars, preferring instead \u201cto buy up the rights to old songs\u201d as a faster, less risky way to generate cash.<\/p>\n Without the major-label advances of recorded music\u2019s golden age (which used to range between \u00a350,000 and \u00a31m, but now average around \u00a330,000), Gioia says that \u201cyoung 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.\u201d<\/p>\n While the \u201cnepo baby\u201d<\/a> label first started getting thrown about during the pandemic (which either halted or sank the careers of most jobbing musicians), it wasn\u2019t until 2022 that it exploded in popular culture<\/a>, when New York<\/em> magazine ran a cover featuring eight stars \u2013 Dakota Johnson, Maude Apatow and Zo\u00eb Kravitz among them \u2013 with their heads superimposed on illustrations of incubated babies. The headline: \u201cShe has her mother\u2019s eyes. And agent.\u201d Internet trolls delighted in unearthing fresh nepo babies for sport, while journalists started adding a requisite \u201ccheck your nepo baby privilege\u201d clause to most celebrity interviews, prompting a wave of indignantly defensive answers that only added fuel to the fire.<\/p>\n