You don’t have to be a music industry insider to know that musicians have the odds stacked against them these days, particularly when it comes to turning a profit from their music. Indeed, it appears as though it’s harder than ever to earn a buck from music.

With many musicians resigned to the seeming fact that they will never see any money from their recorded output, many have turned to live performance as their last refuge. Even industry monoliths — your Taylor Swifts and Katy Perrys — make the bulk of their income from live shows.

But if you’re not a mega-star on par with Taylor Swift or Katy Perry, if you’re a young singer-songwriter with a sparsely populated SoundCloud account or a garage band with less than a thousand likes on Facebook, live performance isn’t always the beacon of hope it’s made out to be.

Really, the situation is no different to how it’s been for decades. Young bands and musicians have always been faced with a frustrating Catch 22: you need gigs to build a following, but without a following, no booker or promoter is willing to take the risk and give you a gig.

Even musicians who’ve managed to build a following online can often find themselves butting heads with promoters over payment. With the situation seemingly at a stalemate, one possible resolution that has been proposed is the introduction of a minimum wage for musicians.

On the surface, it makes perfect sense. As Terry Noone, Federal Secretary for the Musician’s Union of Australia puts it, “There’s a minimum wage for every occupation in the country under the Fair Work system, which is now federally based. Musician is an occupation, so therefore it has a minimum wage like everything else does.”

Indeed, the Musician’s Union of Australia website does list Live Performance Award rates for musicians looking to play live in Australia. But as Noone himself puts it, the situation isn’t quite as simple as when you get an after-school job at McDonald’s and the company is legally required to pay you a minimum wage.

“[It’s] a very complicated issue, unfortunately,” Noone tells Tone Deaf. “The award-based minimum wages apply to people who are employees, as opposed to independent contractors. Now, that’s once again, a pretty complicated area, because whether one is one or the other is a bit hard to establish at times.”

“The music industry has, for quite a number of years, acted as though all musicians doing gigs were independent subcontractors – that’s not necessarily the case. You can only work it out on a case-by-case basis.”

“Most musicians tend to say, ‘Well, we don’t wanna know about it.'”

“Basically, most musicians tend to say, ‘Well, we don’t wanna know about it.’ They’d all like to get paid better, but they don’t want to stick their heads over the parapet and ask for the question to be looked into in their particular case, so it’s kind of an unanswered question.”

“As long as it remains an unanswered question,” Noone says, “then venues basically pay what they like or don’t pay what they like.” Naturally, Noone is used to seeing resistance on the part of bookers and promoters. As far as he’s concerned, “their entire model is built on not paying musicians”.

The issue of a minimum wage for musicians isn’t one of introducing such a concept, Terry says, “It’s already there, but it’s ignored. I’d like to see a lot of musicians actually be prepared to put their hands up and say, ‘Well hang on, I think this is actually an employment relationship and I should be paid’, and argue the toss.”

And though it may come as a surprise to Noone, even bookers admit there is a degree of exploitation within music’s economic model. Just ask Neil Wedd, a veteran Australian booker and promoter, who’s worked for some of the country’s most prestigious music venues, including The Palace, Billboard, and the Prince of Wales.

“The business swings between exploitation of one party or the other,” he tells Tone Deaf. “It used to be that… I suppose musicians were somewhat exploited, but they did earn a living and the idea of making a killing is for very few people.”

“The business swings between exploitation of one party or the other.”

“It used to be, certainly in the States, you got paid a scale to play with people. The person who ran the orchestra would’ve paid people a scale, because that’s what they did with the jazz bands. That was the arrangement, [the leader] did the promotion and then everyone else got paid.”

“Then along comes rock and roll and musicians mostly got paid a fee to play in town halls. There wasn’t drinking for lots of it. It was in town halls, in scout halls, wherever, and you could actually make a living out of it. You could be playing five, ten times a week. This was in the ’60s.”

“Then Lobby Loyde came along, and probably Glenn Wheatley a little bit, but Lobby was certainly the first one to change things, rest in peace. Then bands took the door, and if you see the quotes from Glenn, everyone’s paying a dollar to get in to see the Master’s Apprentices and the promoter is making five grand and they’re getting $500. And he went, ‘Not quite right.'”

“The promoters were all-powerful in America. So then Peter Grant said, ‘Led Zeppelin can sell out stadiums everywhere in America, so we want 80 or 90 percent of the money.’ So that shifted it in the way of the bands, and that’s mostly where it’s remained since then.”

But what if you’re not Led Zeppelin and don’t have one of the most notoriously shrewd and ruthless music managers at your disposal? Would placing a mandate on venue owners to pay their performers a minimum wage improve their situation and help them survive long enough to become Led Zeppelin?

“Unless you had a jazz band, you wouldn’t book it,” says Neil. “The minimum wage would frankly only apply to people who couldn’t make a living. People have talked about doing this, but you just wanna go, ‘So, how would a musician feel is there was 300 people there and they were getting paid $30 an hour?’ It’s their talent that brings people in.”

“But as a venue booker and promoter, I would go, ‘Well, I’m running a venue that actually brings people in to see things performed here.’ I actually take the risk, and what happens if nobody turns up?” There’s also the issue, as Neil notes, of when one would qualify for the minimum wage.

“If you’re in a little band, at what stage or amount of ability are you ready get a minimum wage? How do you classify that you qualify for a minimum wage? Because you play in a band that hasn’t got an audience? So I should pay $30 for you to perform?”

That said, Neil still sympathises with the plight of young musos. “The thing that needs to be taken into account is that the only people who have not had an increase in their wages are starting-out musicians, that’s still out of $5 on a door charge. I had the Smashing Pumpkins play for $20 at the Prince of Wales during the grunge years.”

“Now, if I was gonna have them play a pub these days, or whatever band is hot to trot, it’s $50. How long are you going to stay on the minimum wage when you start becoming really popular?”

We know what the Musician’s Union and venue bookers think, but what about those with the most vested interest in a musician’s minimum wage?

As the bassist for Melbourne three-piece Calling All Cars and an agent at the artist booking firm 123 Agency, Adam Montgomery is in a unique position compared to most of his muso peers. While he admits he’d like to see all musicians paid to perform, for him it comes down to a question of logistics.

“The system to put such a thing in place would be an incredible amount of work,” he tells Tone Deaf. “I think there would be potentially, because of that, there’d be some places that would probably go under.”

“When you’re starting out, people are quite happy to lose money to do shows. Say you wanna go to Sydney and you know you can’t pull a lot of heads — say you’re from Melbourne — but you wanna go do a show in Sydney because it looks good on a tour poster, but you know you’re gonna lose money.”

“If you’re in a little band, at what stage or amount of ability are you ready get a minimum wage?”

“The promoter knows it’s probably not gonna work, but they’re happy to take you on, because they can pay you 50 bucks, you’re gonna lose that option. You’re not going to be able to take risks.” And once again, there’s the issue of just when a minimum wage would apply and when it would be supplanted by more lucrative deals.

“When you’re first starting out it might be good, because you might make $100 each or something like that,” says Adam. “But once you’re doing ticketed shows, I’m not quite sure how it would work, because you generally take the money or the promoter buys the show.”

Adam also raises the issue of just who would be responsible for paying the minimum wage. Generally speaking, musicians are presented with two situations: a promoter or a venue buy their performance for a set fee, or a door deal in which bands take a percentage of door sales and then pay supporting bands out of their share, not unlike like jazz bands before the rock revolution.

“If the case was that, for instance, who’s paying the minimum wage then? That’s an interesting question. Is it the venue who’s paying it? Because the headline band booked the supports, who pays the supports? Who has to cover the cost of the minimum wage?”

“No one’s ever gonna employ an eight-person band anymore, because it’s gonna cost too much. They’ll just go, ‘Well fuck it, we’ll get the two-piece.'” Even so, Adam admits that he has a soft spot for the idea.

“I think it’s a really killer idea. It’s the best idea – musicians getting paid. That’s where we would ultimately want to get to, where everybody gets paid to perform, because it’s a worthwhile artistic endeavour and people should pay to see it.”

“But I just don’t know where the money would come from – taxes, super, all that kind of stuff. I just think, starting off, it would make it very difficult for bands to get shows in small venues, when sometimes you just wanna play. Sometimes you just have to play, you need to play.

“[It wouldn’t be good] if someone’s stopping you, going, ‘No, we can’t afford to pay your superannuation, so we don’t wanna have music on this Saturday night. It’s just easier to pay the APRA costs to have some tunes play over the stereo.'”

It seems the idea of musicians receiving a minimum wage for gigs is as much of a quagmire as getting gigs when you’re just starting out – everybody likes the idea, but nobody knows just how it would work.

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