Crunching the Numbers

DIY Touring in 2018

I suddenly feel compelled to do some public number-crunching, in case it interests anybody.  It's mainly for self-therapy.  Also, things are constantly changing in the indy music biz, such as it is, and I haven't done a public number-crunching in a while.

Yes, I did have an experience which led me to feel compelled to write this post, which was someone in England asking me if I could do a benefit concert for £100 ($140).  For an emotionally stable person, receiving an email asking if you can do a benefit concert shouldn't be so stressful.  Which probably is an indication that I'm not emotionally stable, because I was thrown into a morning-long wave of panicked thoughts.  Which then made me think, that's weird, maybe there's something wrong with me.  In any case, I thought, I need to explore these thoughts and feelings a bit further by writing about them.

The triggery thing about this particular email, unbeknownst to the nice man in England, is that it is exactly this sort of email that started becoming the norm in the United States for me years ago, which is basically what led to me not touring in the US anymore.  I replaced US tours with more Europe tours, and this has worked out fine for me so far.  But if things go in Europe the way they did in the US with regards to my concert tours paying the bills for me and my family, then I'll have to get a job doing something other than playing music.  (Which is a cause for panic, evidently.)

My initial response to the email was to say something along the lines of "are you kidding?"  Which then made me think, wow, that sounds a bit arrogant on my part.  Maybe rather than "are you kidding," some more well-thought-out response could be helpful, at least for someone out there.  (I always figure if there's one person vocalizing a thought like "can you do this benefit concert for £100," there are probably a thousand other people thinking it without expressing it in an email to me.)

Attempting to understand the orientation of the person posing this question to me, I thought, one thing that can sometimes be hard for a regular hourly or salaried worker to understand is the overhead involved with touring, and with being a self-employed contractor kind of worker instead of the sort who receives a paycheck on some kind of predictable basis.  If someone is thinking £10 an hour is a living wage in England today (at least theoretically, outside of the major cities) and so £100 seems like a generous amount of money for someone to sing for a couple of hours, then this might be understandable.  (Even though it's completely wrong.)

Another way to understand the person posing the £100 benefit question is that they assume I'm independently wealthy, or that I make so much money from other gigs that I can afford to play benefit gigs for £100 now and then.  While I'm not independently wealthy, a fair number of people out there are, but I wouldn't tend to assume they are, and probably this guy wasn't doing that, either.  The idea that I have enough wiggle room to do the occasional lower-paying gig is actually true, or at least I like to fantasize that it is, and I do gigs like that regularly in the US.  For reasons that I usually hope are obvious, I don't tend to do that much when I'm on the other side of the Atlantic.

But what really compelled me to write this now is that this is the Ballad of a Wobbly World Tour, and I would especially like to be completely upfront with all the IWW folks out there who are organizing shows for me on this tour.  Contract work is different from the kind of work most of us do, and I want to be very clear about the fact that all I'm doing is making a living wage -- nothing more.  (If I made more, the first thing I'd do is move into a bigger place -- not that I'm complaining.)  So what this is is a breakdown of what it looks like to make a living wage as a touring musician -- not more, not less.  At least one or two aspiring accountants out there might find this interesting, along with aspiring musicians...

And Now the Numbers

Our hypothetical working musician tours a total of half of a typical year.  During the other half of the year he's with his family, hanging out with the kids, booking the next tour, writing songs, making recordings, etc.

During that six months out of the year that he is touring, each month he is playing gigs every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.  On many weeks he's also got one or two gigs on the other nights of a given week, but for realism purposes let's say he does gigs around 4 out of every 7 nights, or between 16 to 20 gigs in a month of touring.

OK, so say he's doing a one-month tour of Europe, half of which is in continental Europe, and the other half in the British Isles.  Between the flight from Oregon to Amsterdam and the flights between continental Europe and the islands, he'll spend $1,200 on flights.  (He's got heavy, expensive suitcases, too.)  He gets a great deal on renting a car to travel with for a total of $600 a month.  (The credit card comes with insurance, so he doesn't spend extra money on that, of course.)  During the course of a month of driving around Europe he'll easily spend $400 on fuel, tolls, and parking.  Eating frugally but eating out, the musician will spend an average of $30 a day on food and drink, totaling $900 in a month.

That's $3,100 he needs to make, just in order to cover the expenses involved with leaving home.  If the musician does gigs every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the month -- 16 gigs -- then each gig needs to pay at least $193 in order for him to break even.  So presumably when someone says "what are your traveling costs," we can in this case say $193 per gig are the "traveling costs" -- the cost of leaving home.

But wait!  The musician has rent to pay back home, and a month of touring needs to pay for another month of not touring, plus he's got two kids.  So, adding the cost of rent back at home -- let's say his rent is my rent, $1,100 for a two-bedroom apartment for a family of four -- that's another $2,200 he needs to make to break even, if breaking even includes not returning home without one.

And then the family needs to eat.  Add another $600 a month (they're very frugal and never eat out), or $1,200 for two months.  Now, in order to cover food and rent back home plus traveling expenses for this hypothetical tour, we need to make $6,500.  If the musician does 20 gigs rather than 16, each gig needs to pay an average of $325.  Add in other monthly expenses like car insurance, cell phone, internet access back home, clothing that needs to be bought occasionally, and we're easily up to $7,700 that the tour needs to cover.  With 20 gigs, that's $385 per gig.

There are some ways to lower those costs, such as doing two-month tours of Europe instead of one-month, thus lessening the costs involved with air travel.  There are also frequent flier miles, so every couple of years I'm able to lower that expense significantly that way.  And of course all of this math assumes the musician is never staying in hotels.  If he were, that would add enormously to cost per gig to make it work.  And maybe this hypothetical musician also has to cover costs like health insurance or student loans.  As a college dropout I never had the student loan problem, and in Oregon my family gets free health care because we're just poor enough to qualify for it.  (So I can thank the taxpayers of Oregon that I only need to average $385 per gig.)

As you may have already guessed, even in Europe, many of my gigs pay significantly less than $385.  This is why even though touring in the US is impossible under the traditional indy model I use in Europe (I'm trying a new, from-the-tickets-up model for what I hope will be a significant US tour in 2019), the model also just barely works in Europe, even with all well-organized left groups, unions, squatters and others putting on the gigs.

Enter 2018 -- Digitization, Atomization

One of the various collection of seismic differences between touring a decade ago and touring now is merch sales.  That is, there aren't any anymore.

Pausing for a moment to look at the numbers above, and how in most cases making this happen means local organizers working their asses off night after night in town after town, on a volunteer basis, in order to get 40 or 50 people to pack into a venue that is usually just barely big enough to seat that many people, so that I can do a concert for them, it seems easy to imagine (at least to me, having lived it) that it doesn't often work out as hoped.  Crowds are fairly often not what had been hoped for, and other things can happen, too.

If you can imagine how things might not always work out so well when you're relying almost entirely on volunteers to organize almost all your gigs, and very few people have ever heard of you in the first place, then you can imagine how selling merch was the difference between survival and not-survival.  Which is the main reason why so many artists that were touring a decade ago are not touring now.

I used to sell an average of $200 worth of CDs (and other merch, but mostly CDs) at a typical concert.  That still happens every once in a while, but it's far more typical now that I'll sell more like $40 in merch on a typical night -- often less.  I sell t-shirts, but from my experience, very few people want to buy them.  People are on tight budgets most of the time, and if they can pay for a night out to hear a concert, that doesn't mean they can easily pay for a CD -- not when they can listen to everything for free on Spotify.

The new digital world is one thing to deal with -- which for me and many people at my level in the game has meant making $100 a month from streaming services instead of $200 per gig from CD sales.  You don't even need to do the math to understand what a profound difference this is in the life of a self-employed person who is engaged in what was a marginal profession in the first place.  I have personally managed to cope at least to a significant degree with the loss in merch sales through starting a Community-Supported Art program.  Unfortunately many other musicians haven't managed to make this transition, essentially from selling to begging, or they don't want to try.

Enter atomization.  The day before I got the "can you do this benefit gig for £100" email, I got a message from someone in another European country who said the local IWW chapter had not had a physical meeting since January.

This is a phenomenon that has become rife in the United States, and, it seems, it is spreading across the ocean and infecting who knows where else in the world.  That is the phenomenon of organizations essentially existing in name only, or at least on Facebook only.  They have "meetings" via social media group chat, and they get nothing done.  

Real organizing needs to happen with real meetings, which happen in real rooms with real people in them, looking at each other and talking to each other and taking notes and making concrete plans.  Or at least that's my impression, since these Facebook-only organizations never organize gigs for me, and don't seem to organize much else in the real world either.  The ones who have real meetings do.  Which, til now, has included pretty much all of the groups in Europe I work with.  I hope that continues to be the case.

I can't predict the future, but there's a little snapshot of what it looks like to be a DIY touring musician in the present day, anyhow.

Proposal: "A Penny A Play" Campaign

I was looking around on the internet today, and maybe I'm almost fifty years old and I still can't effectively use a search engine, but as far as I can tell there is no campaign happening anywhere in the US right now to drastically increase internet royalties for musicians.  But it seems to me that the future of independent musicians (and perhaps the music industry in general, not that I give a shit) may very well depend on such a law being passed.

A law, you say?  Yeah.  The good kind -- one that a mass movement forces to get passed.  It'd be very unlikely to happen otherwise, unless we had, like, a democracy or something.  A law that says all online streaming services that are making money from advertising or subscriptions must pay at least one cent per song streamed, which would go to the artist or whoever holds the rights to the song.

OK, backing up slightly, it is laws that determine how much law-abiding streaming services such as Spotify or Google Play must pay artists for the use of their music.  According to a recent article in Fortune magazine I just read, they basically have to pay the artist a little more than one-tenth of a cent per song streamed.  And according to an article I read elsewhere, Spotify pays about what they legally must, and no more.  Other services, like Google Play, pay much better -- seven-tenths of a cent per song streamed.

The problem is, it's still shit.  In many other countries it's better, I think.  (Does anybody know the specifics on that?)

Why a penny?  It's a good, round number, for one thing.  It serves, I think, to highlight just how little musicians make from their music, when people discover that we're paid much less than a penny by streaming services today.  My hope would be that it could become a meme as much as an organizing campaign, that works its way into everyday consciousness, like the $15 minimum wage campaign, or the successful farmworker campaign a while back to make companies like Campbell's Soup pay one penny per pound more for tomatoes in order to allow the farmworkers that harvest them to make a living wage.

But also, it would make a huge practical difference in the lives of countless musicians in the world.  I don't know how typical I am as an independent musician, but I can certainly say for me that it would make the difference between streaming royalties being financially significant for me and my family, as opposed to more something of a joke.  Approximately the difference between $120 as it is now, and something closer to $800 if Spotify and the rest paid a penny per play.  (And I'm not saying that $120 as a number is a joke, but compared to the $1,000+ per month in CD sales that streaming services have now replaced, it is.)

Why not just get more famous and solve your problem that way?  In another article I read today, a mathematician calculated that in order for an artist to make the minimum wage solely through Spotify royalties, that artist would need to get 1.5 million plays per month.  There are only so many  people out there, even in the English-speaking world.  The $120 or so I get each month from the streaming services represents tens of thousands of plays each month, if I'm doing the math right.  That seems like a significant number to me.

The pie is only so big.  Only so many people are going to become pop stars, or become YouTube sensations with some outrageously viral video.  In our celebrity-obsessed culture we can all feel terribly inadequate for not having millions of views on YouTube.  And perhaps the "penny a play" formula should be adjusted for those who get more than a million plays per month, if that makes the math work a lot better in one way or another.  My concern are all of us who get a lot less than a million plays a month -- the 99% (or probably much more than that) of working musicians.

Technology is changing fast -- whole professions become obsolete overnight, or suddenly the bottom drops out of one.  Like CD sales being replaced by streaming internet services.  Of course, in between there was the "anything goes" period of sharing music, or stealing music, or both, or neither, depending on how you look at it.  I gave away all my music, and why not?  I never got on the radio to speak of, and here was a new way to get my music out there in a big way -- and perhaps undermine the broken music industry at the same time.

But now people mostly are getting their music from streaming services.  I don't know how they'd have to adjust their business model if they were required to pay a penny a play to artists, but I'm pretty sure the consequences for the music consumers out there would ultimately be fairly minimal.  (Especially if those who get more than a million plays a month continue to get much less than a penny per play.)

What saddens me is that there does not appear to be a campaign like this already in existence.  Am I just a dreamer who needs to come back to his senses?  Is what I'm proposing so impractical?  If not, then why isn't such a campaign already happening, led by, say, the national branch of the American Federation of Musicians?

Maybe folks running the union just haven't thought of such a campaign yet, but it seems to me the explanation might be the same kind of reason why what's left of the labor movement has been so slow to embrace service workers and the $15 an hour campaign.  When I get the monthly AFM magazine, I get the impression that the musicians that matter to AFM are the ones that draw a steady paycheck -- symphony musicians working for film studios and whatnot.

And to be clear, I have no ill will towards either pop stars or symphony musicians.  Some of my best friends and favorite cousins are symphony musicians.  But any self-respecting union of musicians needs to represent the vast majority of working musicians, who would be affected by royalties paid by Spotify far more than they are affected by the local symphony's union contract.

As with the $15 campaign, a campaign like this wouldn't be the sort of thing where the union would get more dues-paying members out of it, necessarily.  But it would be huge for the actual musicians out there.

Whether such a campaign happens or not, and whoever leads it, it won't be me.  But here's to the concept, anyway.  Feedback, particularly from other working musicians, most welcome.

Why Do They Keep Begging?

More Forgotten Folk:  Reflections on Subsisting as a Musician in 2017

I was driving across Oregon yesterday, thinking about whether I might be able to afford to do another recording project this year -- like in a studio with a band over the course of a week or two, the kind of recording project that costs many thousands of dollars to do right -- when it hit me.  This year is really different from other years.  If you're a touring musician and you're reading this, I'd be really curious to hear from you.  

Because for me, the last big tour I did was the first time I've ever toured for two months, doing forty gigs or so in several different countries, and barely sold any CDs.  I think I sold around 100 by the end -- about 10% of what I used to sell on a tour like that.

It takes me a long time to really notice these things, but it seems we have now truly entered the post-CD era.  For those of you who are not trying to make a living as performers -- from a consumer perspective you could say -- this may not mean much.  We're all overwhelmed with data of all kinds, including streaming music services and YouTube videos.  Most of us don't have CD players anymore, and we listen to music online.  Maybe we subscribe to a streaming service so we can listen to whatever we want without ads, or maybe we put up with the ads to avoid paying any monthly fees, or maybe we find our free music in innumerable other corners of the web.

And somehow, regardless of whether there's anybody left in the world who is able to make a living as a musician, the internet will be full of great, free music.  When independent musicians stop touring and find another line of work, they may still manage to record -- they'll spend money they earn from their day jobs on that.  They'll do it because it satisfies some need, maybe various needs -- but for most formerly professional independent touring musicians that I know, making a living is no longer one of those needs that they can satisfy.

When they stop touring, they're generally not going to announce to their email lists that they can't afford to tour anymore, that nobody buys their CDs anymore, that they're not making any money with the streaming services, that they have failed to deal with the new post-CD reality.  No matter how well they may understand the impossible math involved with the new reality, on some level they feel like they have failed -- presumably because they're not good enough -- and they will go quietly into semi-retirement.  You may notice that they stop sending emails about their upcoming tours, because the tours aren't happening.  Or, more likely, you won't notice, because you already get way too many emails.

I enthusiastically embraced the new technology.  The system was totally broken before the internet came along, so what did I have to lose?  Like way over 99% of other professional, independent musicians who never got commercial or "public" radio airplay, approximately nothing -- but much to gain.  And many of us did gain -- we gained bigger followings out there in cyberspace.  To some extent, for some of us, this increased attendance at some of our shows, sometimes.  In the early years, it might have caused an uptick in CD sales for some artists -- but no longer, in the post-CD, largely post-download, streaming service era of music.

I enthusiastically embraced the new, old ideas for how we indy musicians can survive in the modern era.  I crowdsourced a recording project before Kickstarter existed, and I started up a CSA before Patreon existed.  And I think crowdsourcing is really cool, to be sure.  It has allowed me to continue to make a living as a musician, and I'm very thankful for that, and thankful for all the support.

But the whole situation is very troubling to me.  Not so much my own situation, but what I see around me.  Because what I see around me is most musicians falling through the cracks, so to speak.  They quietly stop touring, they mostly stop recording.  They make a foray into the world of crowdfunding, but they don't do it with sufficient enthusiasm and it doesn't work out well and they give up again.

It's long been the case that being good isn't good enough for musicians -- you can't just be good at your craft, you also have to be good at marketing, if you want to have a hope of making a living at it.  The difference now is that there are whole other levels of marketing you have to be good at -- and one of what used to be your two main income streams no longer exists.

A lot of people just haven't been able to cope with this, or haven't wanted to try.  Because the new economy for musicians is all about begging.  Not just trying to get gigs and trying to get audiences anymore.  Audience members used to buy your CDs, depending on factors like whether they were blown away by your performance and whether you have a new CD since the last one they bought.  Now we also have to try to get people to pay for us to make recordings -- so that we can give them away.

With all the "everything is progress" propaganda out there, it's easy to get swept up in the popular new crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Patreon.  There are lots of real success stories -- and those are the ones you hear about.  But it occurred to me as I was driving yesterday that these platforms didn't become popular for no reason.  They didn't become popular because the concepts were just invented and people thought they were cool.

They became popular, mostly, I'm pretty sure, because of the desperation of those of us trying to cling to the idea that it may still be possible to make a living as a touring performer.

That desperation has gone through phases.  The first phase coincided with the rise of Kickstarter.  That was the phase when CD sales were drastically down, but not totally gone.  

The next phase of desperation coincided with the rise of Patreon (and Bandcamp and others).  That's the phase we're in now, with the almost total elimination of the phenomenon of physical recordings.  (Never mind whatever you've heard about the rise of vinyl, etc.  It's statistically irrelevant, as far as I can see.)

To demystify and perhaps slightly oversimplify the math that used to be involved with being an indy touring musician, it went something like this:  if you were someone with a small but loyal following and you knew how to work with your fans and supporters and could successfully organize tours, you might do 100 gigs in a year, which effectively means spending most of the year on the road.  Let's say you manage to average $300 per gig, and you're supporting a family of four and you live in a rapidly-gentrifying US city, and your rent has doubled over the past ten years.  And then let's say that out of that $30,000 you've made from your gigs, you're spending a third of that on travel costs, leaving you with $20,000.

You might be able to support your family on $20,000, but you certainly will have nothing left over for anything other than food, rent, and clothing from Goodwill.  Ah, but this is before the post-CD era, so in addition to doing those gigs, you're also selling CDs.  I used to sell around 3,000 CDs in a typical year.  After spending $5,000 making the CD at a studio and giving away a few hundred CDs to community radio stations, that still left me with another $20,000 in income every year from CD sales, the vast majority of them at shows.

So, when that $20,000 turned into $10,000 -- for me and I suspect for thousands and thousands of other indy touring performers -- along came Kickstarter.  OK, so now we can make up for the losses by crowdfunding the expenses of making the CD.  Or at least those of us who are willing to spend much of our time begging for money can.  Those of us who didn't want to, or weren't good at it were out of the game at that point.  Or working other jobs in order to fund their recording habit -- but no more touring, except maybe in a very limited way, during work vacations.

But then that annual $10,000 turned into $2,000, and the floor dropped out from under us in terms of that essential second stream of income, CD sales.  

Around the time that this was happening, along came Patreon, and other platforms using this old NPR/Pacifica concept of supporting someone that produces a free service by subscribing to them at a rate of $5 or $10 a month.

This was then the next process of elimination for indy touring musicians, and I think it will ultimately result in a much greater wave of extinction than the wave that coincided with the rise of Kickstarter.  Because before, you could tighten your belt.  You, if you were like me, might have been making enough money that you had some room for belt-tightening that didn't end you up in a tent on the sidewalk.

Now, there's no more belt-tightening.  The sales are just gone.  Replaced by streaming services that pay virtually nothing.  I don't know the stats on the average touring musician out there -- the ones like me that have enough of a following to make a living, who used to sell thousands of CDs in an average year.  But for me, those $20,000 in revenue from annual CD sales have been replaced by a trickle of about $120 per month on average from royalties, when you add it all up, between Spotify, iTunes, etc.

Now, unless you can survive solely from ticket sales for shows, without selling any merch, you're out of the game unless you're really good at begging.  You're not just trying to replace the lost income required to make recordings every now and then.  You need to replace the income you lost from all your CD sales -- which is far greater than the cost of making the recordings.

I've been thinking a lot about why it's so hard for so many musicians to do this begging for money.  Aside from pride or just lack of interest in engaging in such activities for whatever other reasons, there's the fact that you have to convince your fans -- many of whom might not even make as much money as you do -- to donate money to fund a recording project which costs many thousands of dollars.

Regular people who aren't professional musicians look at this $5,000 or $10,000 goal and they think, really?  Can't you just put your phone on a tripod and hit "record"?

One of the many maddening things about being a musician is the knowledge that most people will only notice something when it's not working.  They'll hear a bass note that's horribly out of tune, but they won't notice the bass line at all if it's all in tune.  It effects them subliminally, but not consciously.  And to try to explain to them why it's so important for the bass line to exist, and to be in tune, and to be recorded with a really good microphone in an isolated room in a building that was built for the purpose of being a recording studio, and why it should take hours of your time, the bass player's time, and the time of a producer and an engineer, to record one bass line for one song, well, it's hard.  In the end they just have to trust you that it really costs so much to make a good recording.

I know that the situation I'm describing applies not just to really indy musicians like me, but also to more established performers, like the kind who attract crowds in the hundreds or low thousands, who typically might spend more like $50,000 to make and promote a new recording.  They're feeling the hit, and they're making lower-budget recordings in many cases, I know for a fact.  Whether the pop stars are feeling the hit is not even a matter of question -- they are, and they sometimes complain about it loudly, such as Taylor Swift's recent spat with Apple.  Of course, for them, a hundred million views on YouTube still results in pretty good money, but nothing like the profits involved with selling physical merch.

And as for the other 99.99% of musicians, who might get a respectable hundred thousand views on YouTube in a given year if they've got a serious DIY following?  YouTube is secretive about their method for determining royalties, but I can tell you from personal experience that 100,000 views on YouTube or 100,000 streams on Spotify translates into approximately jack shit.

So when Trump talks about the forgotten people who don't have those factory and mining jobs anymore, nobody's going to mention the statistically irrelevant class of people known as professional touring musicians.  But we musicians have also been put out of work by the free market, essentially.

Maybe the unemployed miners should try crowdsourcing their income, too?  Ah, but they probably don't all have enough fans they can appeal to for mercy (aside from other unemployed miners).  That makes us musicians the lucky ones, I guess.  It's all relative.

By the way, would you like to join my CSA or help fund my next album?

In Praise of the CSA

The CSA is becoming a popular method for both DIY artists as well as family farmers to get by. I wrote a poem for the CSA concept, and for mine in particular...



In Praise of the CSA 

Before the concert's over, allow me if I may
To subject you to a message about my CSA
That's Community-Supported Art, in case you didn't know
Since folks stopped buying records, it's the way to go
If you got a few bucks extra, there are few nicer ways to say
"Keep on doing what you're doing" than to join a CSA

You'll find mine on my website, it's a link up near the top
Just click on there and sign up so each month you can drop
A few bucks in the hat out in cyberspace
If we're busking online then we need a virtual guitar case
Because unfortunately Spotify really doesn't pay
So for some solid solidarity, join a CSA

 Of course there are many ways to support the arts
Many people have to play many different parts
From organizing gigs to finding a palette for the shed
Where a traveler such as I can lay their weary head
But what many of us are hoping for is to see the day
When we have a lot of people join the CSA

 Other folks are doing it, and I think it's pretty cool
At least given the options, it's a useful tool
If state sponsorship of art is too much to expect
Then at least we can set it up so the support can be direct
In return we'll give you all the music we can play
Thanks for your consideration of my CSA

www.davidrovics.com/subscribe


P.S.  You'll also find this rhyming missive pinned to the top of my Facebook page.  Shares, likes, and comments tend to make it more likely that more people see it, so please feel free!

A Portlander in Europe

I live in Portland, Oregon. Whatever it is you're thinking, it's not that place. Like many other cities in the US, it's a place in crisis. A deep crisis, wherein some developers make billions of dollars while thousands are thrown out onto the street, with hundreds of thousands struggling to keep up with their rapidly-increasing monthly rent.

Various politicians position themselves as progressive, and talk about their accomplishments. Such as making the streets very nominally safer by improving signage. Or publicly refusing to go to North Carolina, in protest against that state's discriminatory treatment of trans people.

I'm all for those things. But as for the acute suffering of half of their city's population (the half that rents), none of them seem to have anything approaching a solution to the problem. They talk about investing a little tax money in some new, low income housing. And then they sometimes even acknowledge publicly that this plan of theirs will have essentially zero impact on the housing market, given the 17,000 people moving to the city each year, and the 1% vacancy rate. And the fact that rent control is illegal, and unmentionable, somehow or other.

The evidence that the city is in a crisis is pretty obvious. The homeless population is mushrooming beyond anything I've ever seen outside of the cardboard shantytowns ringing Mexico City. With so many people working two jobs and spending most of their income on rent, other things are clearly getting overlooked, such as expensive things like car repairs. The number of damaged cars that just sit there and stay damaged month after month are mushrooming along with the homeless population. With more and more of those cars inhabited by people who are living in them.

Gentrification without controls, an undeclared class and race war, an ethnic cleansing in all but name, with half of Portland's African-American population lost between the last two censuses. What over 150 years of racist governance in Oregon failed to accomplish, gentrification is accomplishing.

Those increasingly few of us who have lived in the city for more than a few years walk around in a daze, as if we just landed on another planet. Where did all the stores on Division Street go? Where did all these well-dressed yuppies come from?

I listen to a couple of guys in their twenties talking excitedly about having found a two-bedroom apartment for “only” $1,500 a month. I hear a small group of homeowners slumming it in a food cart encampment, disparaging the tenants rights movement of which I am a part. (I leave, not trusting my ability to refrain from physically assaulting the yuppies, and not wanting to go to prison. Yes, I'm serious.)

I hear people talking about how much they like the new train lines, the new bike paths, the new organic supermarkets, the new drug laws. And I want to shout at them. Who cares about these things? They're just making the city more expensive. They only benefit those who own houses. Or renters making six-figure salaries who don't care how much they're paying to live in the city that still has the reputation of being full of artists. Most of whom have actually already left.

Portland, like the rest of the USA, is an everyone-for-themselves kind of place. I mean in terms of how it's run. Housing is a privilege, not a right. The market, I am told repeatedly by yuppies who somehow find their way to my YouTube channel, is sacrosanct, and those who can't afford to live in Portland should go somewhere where they can afford to live. Like one of those many cities where rent is cheap, but there's no work. They don't say that part, but that's what they mean.

The United States is currently designed by law to be a country where if you want to live in a city where there is work, and you weren't fortunate enough to be old enough to have bought a house several decades ago, then you have to spend most of your earnings on rent. And make some people very rich in the process. If you don't want to pay most of your earnings on rent, you can live somewhere where there is no work.

Of course, some of those places where there is no work are still within commuting distance of a city where there is work. So by design – or by lack of design, however you want to frame it – these allegedly “green” cities like Portland develop horrific traffic congestion, because so many people are moving from the city to the exurbs, in a desperate search for rent they can afford. And there aren't any buses or trains out there, so they have to drive to work, which is in Portland. Thus the traffic.

That's where I'm coming from. The land of capitalist chaos and untold suffering. All the police brutality and massacres and such are, to a large extent, a direct result of this kind of rampant inequity and inequality. Inequality, incidentally, is greater now than at any time since the nineteenth century in the USA. That is, you have to go back to the age of the robber barons, way before we had any kind of a welfare state – decades prior to the New Deal reforms of the 1930's – to get to a point in history where there was such gross inequality in the United States.

So then I go to Europe. Twice a year or more, for months at a time. Europe is where I make a living these days. This is the first year where I'm almost entirely making a living from touring Europe. Most of the musicians I know in the US are struggling to make a living, or have gotten other jobs now. Luckily, I have a following in Europe, and I've discovered this year that it's big enough for me to subsist entirely off of the backs of Europeans.

In Europe, many people talk of the same kinds of processes we're being devastated by in the US – gentrification, government spending cuts on social welfare, rising housing prices, rising rents, police brutality, institutional racism, “free trade” bills, xenophobic, far right politicians. And so on. They've got it all. And the rest of what I'm going to write here notwithstanding, I applaud all the Europeans who are fighting against these things, who hold on to their vision of what society could and should be like. Those efforts will prove absolutely necessary for the future of European societies, as with any other societies.

However, for me, coming from Portland to Europe – not just Europe, but specifically, the social democracies of northern Europe where I've been touring for the past month – always reminds me of being one of Frodo's gang in Middle Earth, leaving the realms that have been taken over by the orcs and the evil forces of Mordor, and arriving in the elven forest of Lothlorien.

As in Tolkien's books, you get the distinct feeling that the forces of evil are trying to push their way in – but for the most part they haven't made it yet. I get the feeling that I have gone from a chaotic land of injustice, to a well-organized, prosperous place where there is still a pretty solidly intact sense of living in a cohesive society. One that shares certain values, such as the belief in the right to affordable housing, health care, actual high-quality education, and many other things like that.

I don't pretend to be an investigate journalist or get all my facts straight, but I thought I'd share various random recollections of this past month on the road, some of which will serve to illustrate various differences as well as similarities between different places.

Random recollections. My first stop was Hellebaek in Denmark, a beautiful town right on the Baltic Sea – where I sit right now, the continental Europe segment of the tour ending where it began, as usual. (As in most of the world, it's cheaper to return the rental car in the same country, and often in the same city, as where you rented it.)

Sitting in my room, from where I can see Sweden a couple miles across the straight to the east, I'm in a building that's part of what used to be a sort of boarding school campus. The school doesn't exist anymore (which is a long and interesting tale of its own), but the folks who used to run the school still collectively own the buildings, and do various things with them. One of which is housing Syrian and Eritrean refugees, for which they get money from the local government each month.

Everywhere I go in Europe, people I know are housing refugees, and getting paid by their government to do so. The money is less than they could get if they rented rooms using Air B&B or something, but it's not nothing. (What if we had a program like that for housing refugees in the US, along with the homeless?)

One of the folks at the school who is involved with various projects in Europe and in Africa is from Germany. She's just back from a year in the Berlin area, where she was teaching German to refugees. She says they were generally becoming pretty fluent within six months. In Denmark, she observed, the refugees get free language lessons, too, but they're less frequent than in Germany, and progress is slower.

I scheduled in several days to recover from jet lag with nothing else to do but relax. (Something I've learned to do over the years, the hard way, by hitting the ground running and then getting sick.) I took daily walks into the small city of Helsingor, several miles away. There are several different paths you can take to get from Hellebaek to Helsingor, all of which involve walking for a full hour without crossing a single paved road.

Some of the paths go through private land. A golf course, a conference center, several mansions, including one that belongs to the royal family. The paths are public, though some of the property is not. (Get your head around that concept, my fellow Americans.)

To the south of Hellebaek I'm told you can go towards Copenhagen, on a bike path that either hugs the coast or goes through forest, without crossing a paved road for dozens of miles.

The first gig of this leg of the tour was on the sidewalk outside of an anarchist book store in the center of Copenhagen. Parking the car was easy, but very expensive, like Manhattan prices. Mass transit and bike lanes are everywhere, so combined with expensive parking, not many people drive cars.

It's the biggest city in one of the richest countries in the world. But traffic is fairly light, even during rush hour – though bicycle traffic is very heavy.

How much does the book store pay for rent, here in the city center, I wonder? Less than the equivalent of $1,000 a month, came the response. A fraction of what a business in downtown Portland might expect to pay for their monthly rent. Why so low? The storefront is rented from a housing collective, consisting of hundreds of apartments in five-story buildings that take up an entire block.

Unlike with cohousing developments, you “buy into” these housing collectives simply by moving in and paying what you could call “rent” – but the buildings have already been paid for by the collective, or by one of many foundations that do just this sort of thing, in order to guarantee lots of nice, inexpensive housing in countries like Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. Who are the landlords? The collective is the collective's landlord.

My next gig was a house concert for a friend who has worked for the Danish labor movement for decades. He lives with his family in a big farmhouse in the Danish countryside. One of the 80% of Danish workers who are union members, he made enough money that it wasn't a problem for him to live in such a big house, or to spend several thousand dollars to throw himself a party with well-paid entertainment, a rented ice cream machine, a top-notch chef, and more.

Next gig was in Christiania. A 900-person urban commune that has existed since 1970 or thereabouts. Residents pay around $20 a month towards various collective expenses to live there. Some live in artistic, home-made dwellings, while others live in somewhat more conventional structures. There are collective baths for those who lack running water in their places, though many people are hooked up to the city water supply as well as the electrical grid. A few years ago, Christiania was officially legalized, so it's no longer a squat – though even as a squat, it maintained its territorial integrity and autonomy the whole time. (Though frequently threatened with “normalization,” these threats were never really carried out by the state).

The next six gigs were in Sweden. Five of them in the Skane region, all within an hour's drive or less from the city of Malmo, just across the bridge from Copenhagen. In each of the towns, my friend Kristian Svensson and I played in places that were owned by the adult education and cultural events wing of the Swedish labor movement, ABF. These gigs were all free entry, often in beautiful theaters – our fees paid for by a combination of the local and regional ABF.

In Gothenberg, the gig was the most well-attended of all, with around 100 people packed in to the top floor of a five-story building called Marx Engels Huset, which is owned and run by the Swedish Communist Party. For this gig there was a door charge.

We stayed in the housing development which is reputed to be the most dangerous place in Sweden. It may be true – there have been a couple of murders there over the years. But by US standards, it's a nice housing development that might be generally associated with the “middle class” – though maybe the “lower” end of that spectrum, and the part that includes immigrants with dark skin.

There are big courtyards with grass, trees and play structures in between each building. The buildings are well-maintained, and largely made of real wood. They even smell good. I'm told there are rats. I even saw one in the courtyard. (They say in New York City, no one is ever more than thirty feet from a rat.)

In the midst of the little tour of Sweden, I took a ferry to the Danish island of Bornholm. The cheapest way to get there is by taking a ferry from the Swedish town of Ystad. On Bornholm lives one of the many people I know in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe who were students when I first met them, and are now leftwing, elected officials. My gig there was sponsored by his party, Enhedslisten (the red-green coalition is how they refer to themselves in English). It took place in a farmhouse that is being fixed up, after being bought by an ex-squatter from Berlin looking for a more rural life. I met many Danes and Germans on Bornholm doing just that. Some of the old farmhouses in the less popular interior of the beautiful island are going for the equivalent of $20,000.

Coming into Sweden, there were immigration agents occasionally glancing at the passports of the cars driving past them. Usually they literally glanced, not asking most of the cars to stop. On the way back into Denmark, and then into Germany, there are still no border controls. From Germany going back into Denmark, there are now, and it's the same sort of thing as when you go from Denmark to Sweden. A glance. (Though for people who “look like refugees” it's often more than a glance.)

My gig in Hamburg was on a Saturday. I parked the car for free, a few hundred feet from the Rathaus – City Hall – where I was to sing at a rally against the “free trade” agreement between the USA and Europe, the TTIP. 65,000 people packed into the Rathausplatz. In six other German cities, similar numbers, though I think Hamburg was the biggest of the simultaneous demos organized by a coalition of labor, environmental, and other organizations and political parties.

Not only were the demos well-attended, but they were well-organized, too. Mostly music on the stages, mostly independent artists, and playing through a state-of-the-art sound system, run by highly-trained professionals. All 65,000 people could hear everything that was going on on the stage, if they were so inclined, and most were.

The last time I played at a big demo like that was also in Germany, a little less than a year ago. The last time I played at a demo anywhere close to that big in the US was ten years ago. And that wasn't a labor-oriented demo like this one. In fact, I don't think we've had a labor-sponsored demo this size anywhere in the US in my lifetime.

Everywhere I went, I rudely asked people how much they paid in rent. Since the rent crisis in Portland really heated up, it's just always on my mind. And when I go to other big cities that lots of people are moving to for lots of different reasons – prosperous cities in rich countries – I have to know how things function there. And every time, the response causes my jaw to slacken. Because in city after city, when people are living in an apartment similar to mine in Portland, they are paying half of what I pay in rent. It's usually in the low hundreds of euros – never in the thousands.

Now, part of that is probably the circles I travel in. I don't know a lot of really expensive sorts of people. But I know a lot of people who live in apartments similar to mine. And although the cities they live in are way more prosperous than Portland, with jobs available that pay way better on the average, where the urban planning, mass transit, bike lanes, etc., are worlds away from our haphazard efforts at development (which are characterized mainly by sprawling parking lots and sprawling, two-story malls), they are paying half the rent that I pay. And I pay less than most people do in Portland for a 2-bedroom.

In the Netherlands, prosperity takes on a whole new meaning. There, they have had a functional welfare state for so many hundreds of years now that much of the population has moved beyond thinking about money entirely. Which can actually be very challenging for a touring musician who is not from the Netherlands. Because most of the events that anybody in my circles is organizing is usually free, in every sense, out of some kind of principle.

Which is all easier to do when the venues where things are taking place are also free, owned by foundations, or semi-legal (or fully legalized) squats. People say it's much harder to squat than it used to be, but squatted buildings are still to be found in every Dutch city. They are places where people live, and places where lots of cultural events take place as well.

I repeatedly had the same conversation with people in the Netherlands who were grappling with their greatest conundrum in life. Namely, how much paid work they should do in order to avoid going over the threshold that would result in their welfare benefits being cut.

This is not a conundrum because they want to do more paid work. They're happy to do volunteer work, too. But they'll take money now and then when it's available. As long as it doesn't amount to too much. Because why get stuck doing paid work that threatens the welfare payments, as opposed to accepting welfare and just doing volunteer work?

And if we're all volunteers (paid by the welfare state) then why shouldn't everyone else be volunteers? The logic only works for Dutch people, as you can see (or people who are independently wealthy through some other means). But it's lovely logic, anyway.

As I've been driving around Europe on this tour, one of the things that's different from prior tours is my phone plan. That is, with my domestic US T-Mobile account, I discovered one day that I can now use my phone on 2G in 120 countries, with unlimited data. Which includes all the countries I ever go to. So now I'm driving around Europe, listening to US, British, German or other English-speaking radio programs in real time, live. Not just podcasts and audiobooks anymore.

So as I'm experiencing Europe, I'm hearing about the latest massacre and the latest racist, killer cop back home. There was a minor disturbance that was dubbed a riot in Rotterdam a year or two ago, when a cop killed a black man there. It's happened in England and Norway and elsewhere in Europe, too. Like once a decade, rather than once a day. There are racist killer cops here, too. Just not as many. And mostly they don't have guns on them.

A very nice Dutch event organizer let me use his apartment for the eight days I was based out of it, doing gigs around the Netherlands and nearby (by American, Australian or Russian standards of distance) Belgium. He stayed with his parents, in the room he grew up in, I believe, a few blocks away. I had his place to myself, and I explored the neighborhood during the days when I had time. Which was most days, since most of the gigs were not more than an hour away.

What was especially notable was that this neighborhood in Dordrecht, a small city near Rotterdam with an industrial past, is known as being one of the roughest neighborhoods in the country. As with the neighborhood in Sweden with this reputation where I had recently stayed, this one had some dark-skinned immigrants in it, too.

For the first week I was there, it entirely failed to live up to its reputation as rough in any way. It was, as far as I could tell, a quiet, nicely multicultural, family-oriented neighborhood, with all the amenities of life within walking distance – a supermarket, a few takeaway places, a bakery, a convenience store. And the beautiful center of town was only a short bike ride away, for lots more amenities.

Most people there lived in nice little apartments as far as I could tell. And there was a big park in the neighborhood, too, with canals in every direction. On the second-to-last day I was there, however, I heard screams, and glass breaking, and a big thud a block away from where I was staying. The event made the local news: there had been a fight between two guys, and one of them had been thrown through a second-story window, and had to be hospitalized. No one died.

There are lots of down sides to Europe – even to the prosperous social democracies of the north. But coming from the USA, they are increasingly hard to see.

Why An App?

Since I announced I was making a David Rovics app – available now for free on both Google and Apple app stores – a lot of people have asked me why. My short response has been “the ability to send geographically-targeted push notifications.” For many people, this response does little to answer their question in a way that makes much sense to them. So, for anyone interested, here's a more thorough answer to the question.

Mainly I thought I'd run through this because it's interesting. That is, society, people and how we communicate is interesting. And how all of this has changed and then changed again multiple times in the past two decades is of particular interest to me.

The pros and cons of modern forms of communication are familiar to most of us by now. In a nutshell, we can now communicate more or less for free with most people from most of the world (pro). But we are so overwhelmed with Too Much Information that our ability to communicate with so many people so easily has many of us in a state of shell shock, and we end up having superficial relationships online with lots of people, rather than the deeper kinds of relationships that are an essential ingredient in the making of a happy human (con).

Everything may change by next month – my abilities as a futurist are extremely limited and I have no idea if that is or isn't the case. But I do have some understanding of how things are now, and how things have changed over the past two decades or so.

Communicating by email became extremely popular by the late 1990's, and pretty soon musicians like me stopped sending out postcards to our mailing lists, which is one of the main ways we used to tell our fans about our upcoming tours, new albums, etc. Sending out all those postcards was expensive. And for a while, sending these tour or album announcements to our email lists seemed to work almost as well in terms of the feedback, album orders, etc., of the people receiving them.

Over the next few years, as most people became inundated with more and more email communication, email lists, etc., reaching fans via email for us musicians became less and less effective. Then Google started doing email (Gmail), and soon around half of email users seemed to be using it. When Google later changed the default settings for their email users from the normal chronological list of emails received to a three-folder system, relegating anything on a list to the Promotions folder, my experience was that my email list suddenly became about half as useful, overnight.

Just to get into this point a little more, for Gmail to start dividing their users' inboxes into three folders made a lot of sense from the perspective of the TMI phenomenon. Now people could just look at their main folder, containing the most important stuff – emails written personally to them, mostly from people they actually know and want to hear from. And they could check out the other folders if they had a chance, or just ignore them completely, which seems to be what most users have done. Mostly I don't think they consciously chose to do this – they do it because it is the easiest thing to do under the circumstances of TMI and not enough time or desire to stare at a screen longer than necessary.

Now, these settings can be changed. There are various ways around the three-folder system that Gmail has adopted, for people who have the time, knowledge and organizational tendencies to set their inboxes up differently. The fact that settings can be changed doesn't seem to matter much, because most people tend to do whatever is easiest and simplest. Your spam filter works, but you're still on too many email lists, half of which you didn't even sign up for on purpose? You can unsubscribe from each list you don't want to be on, you can choose the ones you really want to pay attention to and set it up so that they appear in your Primary folder, etc. But that's not what most people do, as far as I can tell. They do what's easiest, and ignore their Promotions folder.

As these changes were taking place within the email world, at the same time, Facebook was becoming massively popular. In the beginning, the News Feed for people with Facebook accounts was chronological, as with their email inbox (as Twitter still is). Musicians like me who have thousands of people on our email lists soon had thousands of Friends and Followers on Facebook.

Posts can go viral, and this was the case in the earlier days of Facebook as well. But in the earlier days of Facebook, if you had thousands of followers, a significant percentage of them were likely to see your posts, especially if you timed your posts for hours of the day when many people tend to check Facebook. But then Facebook introduced their mysterious system of algorithms, so that which posts you see in your Feed are not necessarily related to who you're following or when someone you follow posted something. Suddenly, I had the same experience many other musicians had when Gmail introduced the three folders – the floor dropped out from under me again, in terms of any kind of reliability as far as who might see my posts.

Of course, the situation we're in, whether we're on the marketing end of the equation – such as musicians trying to tell our fans about our upcoming gigs -- or the consumer end – people wanting to keep up on their email inbox and their Facebook feed without being overwhelmed by TMI -- most of us are in a situation where two megalithic corporations control our main platforms of communication, and change them at will. Unregulated global monopolies have a massive degree of control over every aspect of our ability to communicate with each other – how we communicate, who sees our emails or posts and who doesn't, what kinds of posts we see and what kinds we don't, etc.

Many people say that Google and Facebook made these changes in order to encourage people to buy advertising and reach people that way. There is no question that this is a big part of the story, and that they are able to make these random changes that affect the lives of billions of people because they are unregulated monopolies. Equally, what's also clear is global society is suffering from, among other things, TMI. In order to continue to be popular platforms that attract lots of users who see lots of advertisements, Google and Facebook decided to change the way their platforms work. That's also part of the story.

It used to be that if you wanted to invite all of your Facebook Friends to come to your gig, you could do that. This created a situation where many people were getting a constant stream of invitations to attend events that were essentially irrelevant to them because they were happening far away from where people lived. Facebook changed it so that you could only choose up to a certain number of Friends to invite to an event, which probably helped a lot of people target who they were inviting a little better. Of course it also meant that if you wanted more people to hear about an event that you wanted to invite everybody to, you were left with the option of paying to Boost your post or event.

Other platforms came along that were trying to address the TMI reality, in terms of musicians and their fans. Platforms like Songkick and Bandsintown came along. Their strategy for cutting through all the TMI was and is very sensible. You join Songkick or Bandsintown, you choose artists you want to follow and you tell the platform what part of the world you live in, and then you receive notifications via your Google Calendar, email, or by other means, that tell you when a musician you're following is playing within 50 miles of your home (or 100 miles or whatever you choose as your parameters).

These kinds of geographically-targeted notifications telling people about things they actually want to know about are handy. As much as I encourage people to use these services, however, I find that my numbers of followers on them remains anemic. The main reason, I believe, is that most people are too overwhelmed by TMI to bother signing up for yet another source of yet more information, even if it's information they really want to know about.

Another reason, I suspect, is that there's no significant incentive to use these services, aside from the fact that they work really well for helping people sort out their TMI.

If an artist has an app, however, the formula changes a bit. At least that's my working hypothesis. How does it change? Well, you can do what Songkick and Bandsintown both do so well – that is, you can notify people about something happening near them that they definitely want to know about, in a place they are likely to actually see. Unlike with these platforms, however, an artist can give away all kinds of exclusive digital material of whatever kind on their own app, in addition to having the ability to notify people about upcoming gigs, etc.

How does an app like this cut through TMI? I'll explain – but bear in mind that this all may change soon in ways that I don't understand and can't predict. But as things stand now, the way the Android and Apple smartphone platforms (that dominate the world) work is people download apps in their respective app stores that they want to download. So, unlike with email lists and Facebook invitations, you're unlikely to download an app that you didn't intend to download.

Once you download an app, you are asked if you want to receive notifications from the app, that appear on your phone when you open it. And you are asked whether you give the app permission to know your location, so that the notifications you receive might be especially relevant to you (such as an upcoming concert in your town).

What has been the tendency since the internet became popular is for the corporations that run different platforms to keep trying to evolve in ways that get more and more people to use their platforms for longer periods of time in a given day or week, and to maximize their profits at the same time. These goals don't always go well together – MySpace collapsed under the weight of all the advertising they introduced, for example. The corporation's efforts to increase their profit margin resulted in achieving the opposite.

So they have to be careful, to be sure. But once they achieve the monolithic level of popularity that Google and Facebook have achieved, the formula here changes, and the corporations have a lot more flexibility in how they change their platforms in order to maximize their profits -- without their users effectively having the ability to abandon the platform in favor of another one.

So if DIY musicians and others having their own apps becomes a way that we are effectively able to reach our fans without buying advertising on Google, Apple or Facebook, these corporations will surely at least try to find a way to limit the usefulness of apps or otherwise find ways to make us pay for the number of people we are able to reach.

For now, however, I'm banking on the notion that it will be worth my while to keep spending the $400 or so per year required to keep my app functioning and available, in the hopes that the Freemiums I'm offering – hundreds of free songs and an upcoming ebook that will only be found for free on my app – will inspire people to download the thing, so they might get – and see – the occasional messages I send to their phones when I have a gig in their area.

Where Are All the Protest Songs?

Announcing the Song News Network

Once a year or so, some of the lazier journalists working for outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian feel compelled to ask this question in a headline.  Or it could be their editors who are responsible.  In any case, between the editors and the journalists, they generally fail to answer the question.  Actually answering this question in the form of a news article is left to little-known independent media outlets such as Australia's Green Left Weekly.

But the much-vaunted investigative journalists working for these aforementioned trend-making publications in the English-speaking world's capital cities might be forgiven for their ignorance.  After all, in order to find out where the "protest singers" (the term itself is a derisive sort of thing invented in the 1960's to discredit the art form in question, but never mind) are these days, you have to look beyond the Billboard charts and turn off your local commercial radio station.

If these investigative reporters in New York, Washington and London did look beyond pop radio hits, perhaps they looked to the premier independent media collaboration in the United States, as it bills itself, the much-loved daily news and information show, Democracy Now!.  But if they're looking to this immensely popular show to answer this question for them, they should once again be forgiven for their ignorance, since according to my own year-long study of Democracy Now! music breaks, 83% of the songs played during the period of my study were by Grammy-winners or people who had a #1 hit.  And a majority of the artists played were dead.

But rather than just incessantly whining about this sorry state of affairs, I decided to do something about it.  I've actually been working at this in my free time for months, without telling you.  But I'm telling you now.  On May 1st, 2016 I'll be launching the Song News Network.

What, you ask with bated breath, is the Song News Network?

Well, the sky's the limit, but what it will be to begin with is a daily news feed on Facebook (yes, I know, but there are reasons) consisting primarily of songs by independent artists.  Generally songs topically related to something that just happened somewhere in the world (whether it was covered by media or not) and songs about something that happened on this date in history.

I have been collecting songs from most of my favorite artists (living and dead, but mostly living) over the past couple months, and will continue to do this.  I'm scheduling posts that will go out on the relevant date for songs about things that happened in the past that we would do well to remember.  Obviously for the songs about current news, songs will go up as soon as I hear about them.

If you like this idea and you want to help make it a success, there are things that you can do:

• Like, follow and share the SNN Facebook page
• Sign on to the Thunderclap social media blast about SNN that will go out on May 1st
• Send me songs

In terms of that last request, just to be clear, this is not an open mike.  It is curated by me, and I have all kinds of high standards for what I'll be putting up.  But I welcome all kinds of submissions of songs about current or historical events.

Given that the internet is largely divided along linguistic lines, and given that there is only one language that I speak with any degree of fluency, the songs that go up will mainly be in English.  (Please feel free to steal all of my ideas here if you want to create a similar network in another language!)  Given my musical inclinations and background, there will be a lot of acoustic guitars involved with this, especially in terms of the initial spate of songs I'll be posting.  However, please understand that I'm just as interested in submissions of hip hop or punk rock material as I am in more folky stuff.

Feel free to message me, submit songs, etc., on the SNN Facebook page or by emailing me at david@davidrovics.com.

Rejected by America

Inescapable conclusions from 19 years on the road

I'm sitting on a plane, heading home after a two-month tour. At times just like this, I often feel compelled to write a bit of a recap, mentioning some of the tour's highlights or more notable anecdotes. At the end of this tour, though, the overpowering reality I am left with isn't so much related to highlights or anecdotes -- though those also happened, of course. What I am mainly left with is the unmistakably massive contrast between the experience of touring on each respective side of the Atlantic.

The two months of touring that I just completed involved about 45 shows. I spent a little more than half of the tour in northern Europe, where I did about two-thirds of the gigs, between Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, England and Scotland. The rest of the tour was in North America – Texas, Florida, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Vermont, Quebec and Ontario.

I have no idea how many people reading this might find any of what I'm about to write about here relevant. I have no idea to what extent my experience is specific to me, specific to DIY musicians who do politically-charged music, or if it might have even broader relevance. But the trend for me, anyway, is now very clear, and thus seems worth sharing.

It probably might have been clear many years ago, but I think I tend to be a very optimistic sort, always hoping that things will be better next time. There is also the strong tendency among performing artists to project an air of impending fame, on the assumption that everybody wants to see “the next big thing,” and nobody wants to see a washed-out has-been of some sort.

So I don't know if this has happened to you, too, fellow DIY touring artists, or whoever else. But as for me, I have been rejected by America.

There are, I suppose, three main reasons I tour and play music for a living.

• It's fun to play music and fun to travel and see many parts of the world on a regular basis.
• I need to pay the rent, etc.
• By touring I'm also participating in some small way in various social movements, and having at least some kind of impact on those movements and on people's lives.

Now, of course, this is the age of the internet, and as long as the videos I put up are getting a few thousand views now and then, I can take part in the whole songwriting and education thing from my living room.

But there are a bunch of things that are special about the phenomenon of live concerts, that people leave their homes to attend as a group. And as far as that phenomenon goes, the phenomenon is dead in the USA for me.

To clarify in numbers that hopefully make sense: most of the gigs I did in the US and Canada on this tour had fewer than twenty people in attendance, and, at age 48, I was often the youngest person in the room. Of all the gigs I just did in North America, only one had more than 50 people in the audience.

In Europe, by contrast, a large majority of the shows had well over 50 people in the audience, and several of them had well over 100. Most of the shows that had fewer than 50 people still had more than 30. Most of the gigs in Europe had a very multi-generational audience, sometimes with more young folks and sometimes with more older folks, depending on the type of venue, the type of town, and other factors. I don't think I was ever the youngest person in the room -- though I was sometimes one of the oldest.

I don't know if anybody is wondering why I call this rejection, but in case you're unsure, here's the rub: in order to satisfy any of my three basic criteria for why I do this touring and performing thing, I need an audience of more than twenty people, the vast majority of the time.

Out of principle and, once upon a time, because of practical considerations, I rarely ask for what's called a guarantee – a financial commitment from the organizers of a gig that I will make a certain amount of money no matter what happens. Generally, when I'm organizing a tour and not flying to a specific location for a one-off gig of some kind, my methodology has been to cobble together gigs that mostly don't involve guarantees, in the hopes that most of them will involve organizers who are able to generate sufficient interest among the locals such that several dozen of them will be compelled to leave their home to go hear a concert, at which they will generally have to buy a ticket or make a “suggested donation” in order to get in.

When I don't ask for a guarantee, this means that some nice volunteer organizer doesn't get stuck paying me out of their own pocket if we don't get enough paying customers in the door. Which then means there might be more people willing to try organizing a show, who won't feel so bad about it afterwards if it doesn't work out. What it also means is I'm taking the risk of losing money on a gig, or conceivably on an entire tour.

So the number twenty is a key number here because typically at shows in the US people are paying $10 to hear the concert. In Europe, individuals going to my concerts are paying something roughly similar. Without drowning in mathematical minutiae, suffice it to say that after the expenses involved with touring, I need to make at least $200 per gig in order to break even. To actually make money in order to pay rent and feed the family during the months when I'm not on tour, I need to make significantly more than $200 per gig on average.

This is also why the aforementioned number 50 is equally relevant. When 50 people come to a show, this means I'm likely to make more along the lines of $500 for that show. When most of my shows are like that, then the finances work, and the rent gets paid and everybody gets fed when I'm not on tour, without the use of a credit card.

In terms of the non-monetary factors I mentioned – having fun, and feeling like I'm contributing to something bigger than myself – consistently playing for very small, mostly elderly audiences doesn't cut it either. To me it seems only natural that, as a performer, if you're regularly the youngest person in the room and it's not because you're working in a retirement home, this is a sign that you are becoming irrelevant. As for fun, there just isn't a whole lot of fun involved with doing a money-losing tour for small crowds, no matter who constitutes that crowd.

It has taken a long time to realize this, but my basic business model used to work in the US, and it now does not. It still works in Europe – better than ever, in fact. Or actually not better than ever, because of the fact that the euro is worth like 30% less than it was compared to the dollar a few years ago. But the numbers of gig offers, the crowd sizes, and the money – before you convert it to dollars – is better than ever in Europe, for me.

So, I'm not depressed. I love Europe. I'm very happy that there are many countries in Europe where I seem to have an audience that wants to keep coming to my shows in significant enough numbers to allow me to make a living.

I used to be very happy about touring in the US for the same reasons, but no longer. And rather than quietly drift into obscurity like so many other artists that you US people don't hear about anymore because they don't tour in the US anymore, I thought I'd announce my disappearance in advance.

I'm sure many of you who have made it this far in this post may be wondering why is there this contrast between the US and Europe? (By “Europe,” by the way, I mean the countries I tour in in Europe, which tend to be the wealthier, English-speaking countries of northern Europe such as the ones I mentioned before, along with a few others that I didn't get to on this tour.) The fact is, there are many contrasts and many similarities, and I don't know which ones are in play here.

Some things are global in nature. Such as the anti-capitalist movement circa 1999-2003, and the antiwar movement circa 2001-2005. These movements both rose and then declined at a similar pace on both sides of the Atlantic. During the heyday of these movements, I had a lot of good tours on both of these main two continents that have so far represented the bulk of my livelihood.

Now this is basically conjecture, but it seems like after these movements both did their rise and fall thing, what happened afterwards is we were left with the sort of baseline that existed in the absence of said movements. That's when the differences come into play, I suppose.

In the US most people work longer hours for less money. They have less time to go out and less money to spend when they do. When people step up to the plate to organize an event, they almost always have to first figure out where the event is going to be held, and this space often has to be rented in advance. Whereas twenty years ago there were well-funded student organizations that were responsible for about half of my US gigs, those organizations either no longer exist or no longer have budgets allocated to them by university administrations.

Where I play in Europe, the vast majority of people are members of a labor union. Labor unions have active union halls in every city -- oftentimes several in each neighborhood of each city. The unions have budgets for cultural activities, which they host regularly, through popular adult education programs. Many cities in Europe have squatted social centers or formerly-squatted social centers which tend to be vibrant centers of all kinds of activity, including concerts. These volunteer-run spaces generally have no rent and little other overhead, and they can often afford to pay artists well. Some of them get money from their government's cultural ministry, which they use for buying state-of-the-art sound equipment, paying bands, etc.

By all accounts from musicians who toured in the US before my time, like in the 1970's, everything was much better. It was vastly easier to get media coverage. Labor laws in the US for touring artists were much better for the artists, requiring venues to temporarily employ bands rather than treating them as disposable items of some kind. Schools and libraries had budgets for putting on cultural events. In the US back then, as with Europe still today, unemployment did not necessarily mean poverty. The welfare state still existed back then, and lifted up all the boats a bit, as welfare states do. People in the US without jobs could often still afford to go to shows – as is still the case in Europe, but has long since stopped being true of the US.

In any case, there are too many possible factors going in both directions, and I'm not an economist or a sociologist. But what I can say for sure at this point is that the United States has told me to get lost, and I don't see any option other than doing what I'm told in this case. I'll keep touring Europe as long as Europe tells me I'm wanted there – as long as a few dozen people predictably come to most of my concerts there.

As for the US, my home, where I live, where my family lives, the country on which the fate of the world unfortunately hangs in so many ways, I'll stay. I'll play gigs for small crowds in Oregon and Washington, locally, where I can afford to play for cheap. Maybe I'll take up busking again. I'll write songs about current events and put them online, where people can listen to them for free – a budget anyone with internet access can afford.

But as for touring in the US the way I've been doing it since 1997, I'm done. No more. I'll still do the sorts of gigs where they pay for my travel costs and pay me a few hundred bucks on top of that, from some kind of institutional budget or philanthropic sponsor. Gigs like that represent maybe 5% of the gigs I do in the US. But no more touring for the foreseeable future.

If you miss me, drop me a line or come visit Portland. Or Europe. Not that 90% of you in the US reading this can possibly afford to travel to either of those places. But at least most of you still have somewhere to live that has electricity, and can probably listen to my new album on Bandcamp and write me an email, anyway.

America, I'll miss you.