Omicron and the Dismal State of the Arts

To recap:  even for those of us who weren't on a record label and never got commercial airplay, for several decades millions of musicians made a pretty good living from making their own recordings and selling them on concert tours.  Even if the gigs might not all pay well, a decent turnout pretty much guaranteed hundreds of dollars of CD sales at every show.

By 2013, when Spotify started their free tier, this income stream was basically eliminated for millions of us artists, some more than others.  For artists in places like the US, Canada, Australia, England, Ireland, Germany, and elsewhere, this loss of income was combined with the cost of housing skyrocketing.

With gentrification also affecting small businesses tremendously, music venues were continually disappearing or moving into smaller and more expensive spaces.  This has meant paying gigs have become less and less common in countries without significant public arts sponsorship, like the US.

The ranks of artists still touring over the past decade in the US have gotten increasingly people with advantages that allow them to minimize expenses, such as an inheritance, or home ownership, or artists who are exceptionally good at crowdfunding to make up for all the lost income and increased expenses.

Any profession this precarious involves cutting corners whenever possible.  No need for a tour van when you can pack into a small rental car.  No need to spend money on hotels when you can stay with people on their foldout couches.

When the pandemic hit, and all the touring stopped, some governments had programs in place to support unemployed artists.  In the US, it lasted for a year, before they cut us off again.

As vaccines were spreading, prior to the new variants, and things were opening up in many parts of the world for a while, many music venues were staying closed.  This has probably been especially true in the folk and trad music scenes, which tend to be an older and more vulnerable age group.

Along with venues still often being closed, many people are more hesitant to go out to gigs, and more hesitant to have house guests or host house concerts.  This all further restricts already precarious economics.

I don't know what the future holds, but given how much advance planning is involved with organizing tours and other things involved with the arts, I know this, unequivocally:  2022 will be another devastating year for working musicians.

The only way I can imagine organizing a tour that won't run into major problems is if I were touring with a camper van and doing outdoor concerts beneath a portable canopy.  And a functioning camper van has been outside of my budget ever since I first wanted one, when I was three years old.  

I even wrote a song called "Daddy's Camper Van," despite daddy not having a camper van, which appears on my first album of children's songs, but the power of positive thinking did not cause a camper van to materialize.  It's probably a stupid idea anyway.