Factually! with Adam Conover - How Can Musicians Make a Living? with Open Mike Eagle

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

Hip-hop artist Open Mike Eagle joins Adam this week to speak candidly on what it's really like to be a musician in the midst of a pandemic, how rapidly the industry has changed and if you can really have a career in music in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello everyone, welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover, and let's talk about music today. Everyone loves music. It's one of the most basic elements of our culture, in fact. I mean, at the dawn of humanity, we would gather around the fire with our buds, crack open a couple deer, and make music together. And a few months from now, after the apocalypse comes, we can expect to be doing the same. Music is something that people love to make and something that people love to experience. In fact, for many of us, it's one of the things that makes life worth living.

So as a species, we have a constant demand for it. We always want it. So if that's the case, why is it that it's almost impossible now to make a living at it? We all love music. We all love musicians. We all value musicians more the more talented they are. Yet we all know that those who make music aren't rewarded according to their ability or artistic merit. I mean, sure, sometimes a breakthrough song like Old Town Road or Gangnam Style is deservedly rewarded for being the objective masterpiece that it is, but there's a much longer list of incredibly talented musicians who simply aren't able to

make a living doing what they're good at. Why is that? Why are we unable as a society to support the people who do what we all love, whose product we can't live without? Well, to understand why, you have to understand that musicians' lives are in fact determined by things that have nothing to do with music. See, despite the fact that music is an ephemeral thing carried by the wind, the truth is that until very recently, musicians in the music industry always, always, always made their money, not by selling the music itself, but by selling physical stuff that contained music in one form

or another. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the music industry's biggest moneymaker was sheet music. Songwriters would pump out up to 25,000 new songs a year, which were sold in sheet music form so that people could play them in their own homes on their pianos and sing to entertain each other. The industry actually employed pluggers to play the music in department stores and public squares in order to make the songs a hit, a very early form of mall radio. And when those songs caught on, they could be massive. Sheep music for a sentimental waltz called After the Ball sold over 10 million copies. And that was without the ability to do remixes.

That wouldn't come for another hundred years or so. But as technological innovation marched on, the industry adapted. In the early 1900s, they began selling player piano scrolls, which were basically hard-coded instructions you could pop into a player piano to play a song, sort of like a hardware MIDI file. And again, this was used to sell hit songs in physical form, and piano rolls made the ragtime work of musicians like Scott Joplin hyper-popular. But the biggest leap was the development of true physical media. For the first

time, instead of storing music as information to be played back on an instrument, new technologies made it possible for the industry to record and sell the sound waves themselves and store them in a physical object that could be mass produced. And this model was incredibly profitable. What started as simple cylinders and shellac or vinyl discs became cassettes and then CDs. Compact discs were cheap to make and expensive to buy, so the margins were incredible. And as music fans rushed to replace their vinyl collections with CDs, the U.S. music industry hit a peak of profitability in 1999, making, get this, $22.4 billion. The money was flowing in. And when you saw glam rockers or rappers in front of mansions doing songs about how rich they were, that shit was real. The industry was incredibly lucrative.

But you all know what happened next. Music went digital. And instead of buying it on $10 pieces of plastic, it became essentially free. In the early 2000s, MP3 sharing made it easier to pirate music than to buy it in a store or even pay for it online. And online music stores barely staunched the bleeding, with the result that industry revenue plummeted to a low of around $7 billion in 2014. Since then, the rise of streaming has bumped that up a bit to over $11 billion, but that is still half of what it was at its peak in 1999. I want to say that again. The music industry has literally shrunk in half in the last 20 years. And not only has the pie gotten smaller, an even smaller amount of that pie is going to the artists who actually make the music.

of that pie is going to the artists who actually make the music. According to one account, Spotify pays a copyright holder on average. I'm going to try to put this into words. They only pay them point zero zero three one eight dollars per stream. That's a fraction, a tiny fraction of a penny. So that track, even if it streams a million times, the artist could only earn $3,180. If they're lucky, some contracts mean that the artists earn even less. But it's not as though everyone in the industry is suffering. Meanwhile, the major record labels have been able to arrange deals such that streaming earns them over a million dollars every hour. So the big boys on top in the suits, they're making bank

while the artists who make the actual music starve or have to work second jobs just in order to pursue their art. So where does that leave us? Musicians are still making great music, right? That's never going to stop. Music is a fundamental human activity. There will always be musicians and there will always be people who want to hear it. But because of everything other than music, because of technological progress, predatory capitalism and our own behavior as the audience shifting to this digital model, that has changed what it means to be a musician in negative ways. It is harder than ever to make music for a living. So how do they do it?

What is it like to be a working musician in today's reality? What do you have to do in order to make a career at this? I have always been intensely curious about that question. And on the show today, I've got the perfect guest to get into it with us. His name is Open Mike Eagle. He's an independent hip hop artist. He's an incredible musician. I'm a personal fan of his music. He's also appeared on Adam Ruins Everything, where he helped explain all the problems in the music industry to us. And he's here on the show today to go into it in an even deeper dive. I know you're going to love this interview. Let's get right to it. Please give it up for Open Mike Eagle, everybody. Hey, Mike, thanks so much for being here of course man thanks for having me

i've uh been a fan of yours for such a long time you were nice enough to be on adam ruins everything too uh last year really fun you're a working musician correct i yeah most of the time i'm working that's that's how i'd put it like you're not a forgive me for saying you're not a massive star you're not billy eilish saying, you're not a massive star. You're not Billie Eilish. No, no, no, I'm not. I'm not. I'm faced with that reality every day.

I've had to become quite comfortable with it. But it's how you make your living. You're not a wannabe. You're not trying to be. You are making your living at music. And it's kind of a, it's a difficult landscape for me. First of all, the pandemic. How's the pandemic affected your line of work? I can tell you how it's kind of a, it's a difficult landscape for me. First of all, the pandemic, how's the pandemic affected your, your line of work?

I can tell you how it's affected comedy. Well, uh, you know, I, I'll put it to you this way for me, uh, personally, I was in the middle of a tour when the country shut down. So, um, like I had done three weeks of a tour and like we went through the Northwest, I believe, like a few days after we left Washington is when they had they said they found the first case up there. And so we were kind of like ducking and dodging it and evading it. The the merch person on our tour actually got sick near the end of the tour. And we were all thinking, oh, my goodness. You know, we're all thinking she's got it, but nobody wants to say it.

And is she on the bus with you? Yeah, we were in a van. Yeah. So in the the first leg ended and we're home on a break and the tour is supposed to pick up three weeks from that point. Turns out she didn't have covid covid but she had swine flu where she had like the plague from 2009 and she's just 10 years late it was absolutely incredible and hilarious only because she ended up being okay okay but uh god but uh we you know we're we're at home for three weeks the tour is supposed to

pick back up again we're supposed to start in the midwest and go to the east coast and um yeah and then we get word that i mean we're all worried because we're all hearing that things are shutting down and then we finally get the confirmation like yeah this thing is postponed and then you know ultimately canceled but this you know something that unfolded over the course of a couple of months from like oh we're gonna reschedule till september and then to like no this thing is just not happening at all because they had already sold a bunch of tickets they'd already had a bunch of people's money so you know all these venues were trying to figure out ways to to keep the shows happening and

ultimately they had to stop. So this all unfolded over the course of weeks and months. I remember the first big shooter drop in cancellations was South by Southwest being canceled. And this was a year where I had lined up about $12,000 worth of gigs down there. So that was a huge blow so like that and then um the second half of the tour being canceled like there was a moment in mid-march where i just didn't even know what to do um i had i had gotten to the point where i had scanned my um my home for like all the leftover merch i had from like any tour you know what i mean like like not the one that i was on because all that stuff was actually shipped ahead to the place where we

were going to start the tour already but like this box of 12 shirts from this tour, this stack of CDs from this tour. And I put all this stuff together and like organized a sale to sell it all on the Internet, you know. Yeah. Over the course of a few days and like that kind of paid my rent that month. Wow. And I also at that point kind of had to divert a lot of energy into my patreon um because that became really huge for me uh and me and this uh a rapper friend of mine uh who's one of my favorite rappers all the time his name is sarangetti me and him

we collaborate under this name cavanaugh and we had these songs we were sitting on um that we recorded you know maybe two years ago we had recorded them and we've been kind of sitting on them and um when band camp first announced it was doing uh the friday where they wouldn't take their percentage of sales um we decided to just put that out but like we put it out you know we called it quarantine recordings and you know in our language around putting it out we were saying like this is literally like please buy this to support us because yeah we are having a hard time um and early on in this I found that to be extremely valuable, like for people like myself who are working musicians, who are fortunate enough to have some sort of fan base already direct appeals to people for support because things were dire was very effective. So people were like overpaying for things because they knew that the only reason I was selling things was because I lost a bunch of money with tours being canceled and I didn't have much else I could do in those in between months.

So it got it got really rough early on. Things kind of balanced out. Going forward, I figured out a few things to to help income come in and i was doing lots of feature verses which is something that i usually wouldn't do as much but you know not only did i need the money but i had the time are those and and forgive me for not knowing are those like income you do a feature verse and and you get yeah you get paid uh-huh um yeah that's typically how because this is work for hire basically yeah um you know of course if if it's somebody you know pretty well you you know you're not charging them but like yeah for somebody who just wants open mic eagle on a record um they're gonna pay me to be on the record and so i didn't know i

didn't know that was like uh how the system worked yeah yeah i mean that's how it's supposed to work um people approach it and execute that in different ways of course um but yeah that's hey man it was great for great exposure i like that shit i'm sure you got plenty of those people well you know um when i was first starting absolutely because when you when you're first starting you you can't really ask for money like because they're actually like in many cases either y'all are on the same level they're doing you a favor um but you know where i am now at least in being established people like there's there's an understanding that them wanting me on the record means that they're going to promote the record and hope that people listen to it because i'm on it yeah and with that comes this understanding

that they have to pay something but let's talk about this i mean like again i said you know billy eilish but you're a you're a well-known musician your shit's reviewed in pitchfork i was a you know fucking indie rock nerd in the mid-2000s so i so i still look at pitchfork i hate pitchfork but i'm like oh got a 7.5 from pitchfork it's pretty good your shit you know something it's still something i mean like you know there's like a baseline level of okay you're a fucking musician i remember when we talked about having you in our adam ruins music episode a couple people in the writer's room were like oh i love open mikey oh he's great yeah let's get him on the show like people people know your work right um we don't often think of musicians whose work we like as being folks who are having trouble paying their rent yeah right or or who who

we need to support like just for like hey i want to support them but yeah they're probably they're probably doing okay right um and i think that's such a contrast with like you know uh talking about the intro like the difference between the 90s right where like you know because of the cd boom like it was just a completely different industry and like today like i can't i can't think of an industry that's gone through a bigger change than that at least certainly not a media uh where it's like shrunk and changed and like the way the artists make their money has gotten so different and strange i wonder how how does it look to you i mean that is certainly um that's a reality that we all have to contend with that the revenue pot has shrunken drastically drastically um and then like you said it's about the way that people are consuming music now um and it's weird

how we got there because we went from you know cds being ten dollars a unit and then and you sold um if you sold a million of those that was awesome if you sold two thousand of those, that was awesome. If you sold 2,000 of those out of your car trunk, that's still pretty great. You know, like there's good margin on each of the individual ones. Like when you're selling plastic, it's for 10 bucks. You're making a good profit on every single sale. And it scales down well. That was the thing. That was the thing. It was it was easier to be independent then because the the way that people consume music made a revenue pool that scaled well with you as an individual.

Like I said, if you sold five thousand, ten if you get the equivalent of 5,000 album streams. It is a far different revenue level because the streaming revenue just doesn't scale down at all. Yeah. It just doesn't. streaming in the millions all the time or you know half billions then it's great uh if you're streaming in the tens thousands you know a hundred thousands it's not good at all i mean how does that look for you like i mean you don't got to tell me how much money you make off of streaming but like i assume people are streaming your stuff uh what is what does that look like like are you literally just hey that's kind of not even a piece of your income pie or. It's it's it's it's a hard to quantify piece of my income pie.

And that was part of the reason why I started my own label, too, is because the way that you get paid when you work with labels, the weight like it's impossible to depend on or calculate royalties when you're waiting on a label uh because they're waiting on distributors to pay them then you know they're taking however long their accounting takes you're supposed to maybe get paid quarterly you know um and then there's all these expenses that they paid and some of them you understand and some of them you don't like on the label side like as an artist working through a label it's it was it's impossible um but you know me putting out my records myself so now i have a direct relationship with the distributors so now i get money monthly but it's still hard to quantify how much is going to be um and really in the marketplace, I've only put out at this point

one EP under my own label, which is, of course, not a lot of catalog to chart revenue from either. So in a couple of months, I'm going to put out my first actual album under my own label. And at that point, you know, the, the streaming revenue I get from month to month should go up, but I'm not exactly sure how much. And that album, by the way, people can preorder that album right now.

Yeah. There was a vinyl preorder that sold out a special edition vinyl. And then I was going to buy it. It was on my to-do list. And now I missed out. I'm a, I'm a hard salesman on the internet, man. When there's something to move, I'm on there trying to move it. And honestly, that brings me to another means of creating income is selling merch. Yeah. selling merch yeah um i've done five or six merch designs over the course of the pandemic and everything in limited quantities and you know the the sales model uh the business model is that

you announce these things are available there's only 200 of them and because they're limited people want them and they go and like that's another way that i've had to um i had to put a lot of energy into that too to pay bills while there's no shows yeah i mean that pre-order was like i got a variant album cover it's like more expensive than the normal than a normal lp i assume right yes and it's like a limited run of a thousand and it's like on your on your instagram hey go get them right now and uh i mean and the album isn't going to come out for a couple months so that's like a way of like what it's like smoothing out the income for you and like making sure you're able to get some

before it actually goes out right i mean you know i'm the way that the vinyl manufacturing works is that the distributor does the manufacturing. So it's not so much to make, like, it wasn't so much to make sure that, because I make sure they were covered because they were covered either way. But it is like, it's literally a way to make sure that I get some income up front from the energy around releasing a new project. Yeah. It's like set a thing aside, make it special. And then for people who are really into me and want to have that special thing, then that is a pool of income for me. Yeah. that that is a pool of income for me yeah uh because other than that then it's just depending on the streaming it's depending on the traditional uh retail model of vinyl and all that's still

going to happen but like i said all of that's really hard to quantify yeah you know well when you look at the industry overall like because i i could you know if i wanted to have a really you know optimistic positive interview with you i could say oh man like cause I could, you know, if I wanted to have a really optimistic, positive interview with you, I could say, oh man, like Mike's doing it, you know, like he's making his living doing this. He's really smart and he's got all these ways to make income and you got your band camp, you got your Patreon, right? Like you can live tour. Oh, well not right now, but Hey, we can find all these other revenue streams. Right. And say, oh wow, that's really great. Like anybody can, anybody can do that right now. Right. On the other hand, I look at it and I say, hold on a second. You're you're really talented.

You've had some success. Right. People love your work. And yet to get by, you have to sort of like be doing all these hustles constantly. Hustle. Yes. Hustle is the word. And what I always think about that is like hey hustling's great but not everybody can hustle like you clearly have a keen business mind and not all musicians do and i don't think that knowing how to hustle in that specific way should necessarily be like a prerequisite to being a musician who we all get to enjoy and get to make a living right absolutely agree uh because you know and it's also about like, I have the luxury of having a team. I have a manager.

You know, I have agents. I have, you know, like, people who can try to make stuff happen for me. And even on a more basic level than that, people I can put my head together with and try to come up with some ways to to manage this and um you know i there's a there's a lot of people there's a lot of really really talented artists in the world who don't have any of that yeah and i don't know how they do this right now like i don't i don't especially like i think about if if somebody's independent right now and they're just starting out, yeah. Uh, I don't know, like, I don't know if it's possible. Like, I don't know what you do. Like, unless you're one of those people who's like really good at controlling your own narrative on

the internet and kind of creating some buzz that way, whether it's through videos or Instagram, or like if you, if you have that skill or, or that instinct, then you can, you can do it. You can navigate it. But if you don't like, what if all, what if all you have is great musical talent and you don't have anything

else? I do not know how you do this right now. I have no idea. Do you mean under the pandemic or do you mean in the industry? You know, I want to say both. I want to say that this was already a problem before the pandemic. And now, like, before the pandemic, it was difficult.

Now I think with the pandemic, it's impossible. Yeah. I just don't, I don't, I do not know what to do. So I have my label. I put out a project from an artist, Video Dave, who's a collaborator with mine. We put it out in March and, you know, we spent money promoting it and on PR and in a video. And, you know, he's a he's a person who's been making music his whole life. But like, I really wanted him to have a proper album release in a campaign.

And it was impossible. It was absolutely impossible. I mean, part of it is that because earlier you asked me. About the difference in revenue and a difference in how you make money and, and if that's kind of unprecedented or if that's happening in other fields, uh, I think it's happening in journalism. Um, yeah, I think they've experienced a great shift in how it is that they make money. And I, I bring that up right now to say specifically the pandemic had a giant effect on how indie music is covered. A lot of sites who would be covering indie stuff let a lot of staff go and didn't have a lot of budget to hire freelancers to cover stuff. So with those sites tightening their belts belts they weren't taking chances on things

that weren't sure to bring eyeballs to the site um and and you know since there was no budget for freelancers these writers had no uh incentive to try to convince editors to take a chance on yeah so you know we we released it and i used every piece of wisdom that i've had from my experiences and how you make a project go but because he was new and didn't have an established fan base or an established catalog it was almost like it just didn't happen like it's like if you you put out your new album or your new video and a place like pitchfork will do a little news brief because they've already covered you yes and they're like oh yeah open mic he's a guy who we cover he's got a new project make our little post it goes up um but uh but someone knew it's like how do you convince that outlet to even write the little blurb um especially when i mean if so much has changed so fast like like i remember there was like myspace and they're like

music blogs and like that was a that was a way that was a huge that was different that was when when my career started that's all you could hope for was to be on a blog to be on pigeons and planes two dope boys and um you know all of these independent sites that ultimately became part of complex or became part of you know condé Nast or whatever uh yeah that does that is another thing that doesn't exist anymore the editorial power that those blogs used to have now belongs to spotify now belongs to apple like the people who make the big playlist inside of those companies have complete editorial power right now yeah they're the gatekeepers that that that really uh that really concerns me like i listen to this apple podcast apple music podcast not podcast playlist um called beat strumentals and it's like it sounds like that youtube video that

youtube stream that was like lo-fi beat lo-fi beats to study and relax to it's like that and i'm like so i put that on when i while i write and look i'm not feeling cool like i'm listening to some cool new music i'm just i just have some nice relaxed beats in the background but then i heard a track and I was like, oh, let me, who is this? And I Googled the person and I find their Twitter account and their Twitter account is like,

oh, thank you so much Apple for putting me on the playlist. Oh my God, this is huge. Cause they're just someone in their bedroom who's made like a beat that made it, made its way on Apple music somehow. That was like the biggest thing for them. And I'm like,

this can't even be making them any money cause i know what apple music pays and not that many people are listening this is not one of the big playlists they're not on rap life you know right right but it's it's it's still a big deal though because yeah you know it's it's equivalent if not better than being on the front page of, you know, rap radar in 2011. You know, like it's a big deal, like the exposure. Because what happens is it's like this feedback loop where if they put you on a playlist that has 45,000 listeners, then, you know, you have a song that's going to be increasing. And also your monthly listeners is going to start increasing too. And all of this, then you start getting on people's daily mixes and getting on people's

release radars when you put out a project. And it's like, really? Spotify and Apple, they help they hold all the keys right now and how do they decide who goes on those playlists i mean i imagine some of its algorithm but some of its human curated too right yes um there are i know there used to be way more humans that made those decisions and curation. Now I think it is a little bit more algorithm based, but I'll say this too. If you talk to a distributor, that's what they spend most of their time doing.

It's trying to convince Spotify and Apple to put their products on prominent playlists. Just these huge, but see, there's, there's such a big difference between trying to call the writer, you know, a pitchfork or whatever or whatever blog, which is like employs human beings. It's a small it's a small publication. They do a music festival. You know, they it's like part of your world versus like you got to call somebody at Apple and try to get them to give a shit about you.

A two trillion dollar company. And they only have a few people on staff whose job it is to do that and could you imagine all of the inquiries that they're getting constantly and that's such a tiny piece of their business they don't like if their their curation is a little bit better it doesn't make a huge difference they're just doing that to like hey leo let's have a little curation on there like um i don't know honestly i do think that curation is a big part of their um yeah their their audience attachment in terms of people using their products i do think that that is important for them too but they give a shit less than an actual music writer does you know what i mean yeah 100 they work at apple yeah it's not yeah they don't they don't like oh i love this song. You know what I mean?

It's not that. You're right. I cut you off earlier, though. I mean, what else do you think about these guys? About who? I'm sorry. Well, like, what kind of impact does that have on you that you have to, like, you know, a lot of your fate is, like, controlled by these giant companies? I mean, all I can do is put myself in the best position to continue to exist.

Seriously. I hope you continue to exist. I mean, as a business entity, as a musician, as a public figure. And what that means, knowing where all these levers lie and who holds them, it's like, okay, I have to keep my distributor happy. I have to give them assets to help them put my products in the best position. And they're working hard trying to talk to the, what are they called? Digital service provider. I don't know.

DSPs is what they're called apple and spotify you know what i mean like yeah so they're talking to the stores um trying to get because it's all the digital version now of what it used to be when you go to amoeba like you go to amoeba and there's the giant cd racks and you're in the section you want to have and you're walking down the giant island at the end of the aisle there's this end cap right And 10 years ago, this end cap was the most important thing in music. Right. If you were a distributor, you wanted the Killing Joker Faces new LP on that end cap. You were on the phone with John from Amoeba every week to make sure that record was on that end cap you were you were on the phone with john from amoeba every week to make sure

that record was on that end cap it's the it's the digital version of that like these distributors talking to people at spotify talking to people at apple um if you ever go to apple music and you see like there's that little banner that's like a picture of the artist and the name of the album and it kind of scrolls by like yeah that's the golden ticket you know what i mean like that's that's how you know that you know that store has a great relationship with that artist by means of their distributor by means of their label because the labels are big in this too like yeah that's that's really like that's the part i can't directly speak to but i can tell that it's huge because they're taking up all the oxygen in the room you know what i mean like my independent distributor is talking to these people but

they're spending most of their time talking to warner talking to universal and talking to sony you know but does that feel at all like you know completely divorced from what you're doing as a musician i mean i saw this guy uh a musician named julian villard wonderful singer songwriter piano guy and a song to a show and he introduced a song by saying he was like so uh i don't like normally perform this song it was on one of my old albums but then uh for some reason it was added to a spotify playlist or the algorithm liked it and i don't know why and it suddenly got like hundreds of thousands of listens this like random song off an old album so it's like my most popular song now and i have i don't know why it happened so anyway i guess i'll play it for you and i was like that's so

that's so weird to like have, have that to, to have a song get big. Like, okay, this is my most popular song. And I literally don't know why it happened. Yeah.

I mean, that is weird, but I, I, I imagine that that used to happen when there wasn't digital too. I imagine people would put an album out and a song would catch on. There wasn't a single, you know,

it was just a deep cut that people started liking and they didn't know why, you know what I mean? I don't think the playlist thing does exacerbate it. Cause you don't, you don't know why, but, and I think in some ways you never knew why, you know what I so i don't know that that's not so bad feeling i don't think how do you feel about those companies i mean a lot of people you know have this idea like we do

about all these big tech companies now we're like oh apple and spotify like they're bad for music like i feel guilty for using them like how do you feel about that as a music producer do you think people shouldn't use them and should like all be pre-ordering vinyl from you instead or i mean obviously you think they should do that i mean i honest but i i'm i'm i approach it with some level of understanding and some level of practicality um because we didn't get here by accident you know we got here because uh hard drives got you know consumer hard drives became such that you could put lots of music on them yeah and and now we all walk around with a hard drive in our pocket um and and so once consumer storage became such that you could hold on to albums in a convenient way that meant that at some point people were going to stop buying them

um and so the industry went from ten dollars a unit to the void of downloading. Downloading was just a chaotic, insane, depressing void of, of just like, you don't know how much money to put into marketing something. The, like you could almost depend on the biggest projects, uh, that were coming out to be leaked by somebody who worked at a warehouse uh and that would destroy the value of these things um and there was you know there was so little money coming in uh you know it was about artists trying to convince people to please buy a thing that everybody has for free. Yeah, it was it was really rough. And so we landed at streaming as a way to monetize the fact that everybody was downloading albums anyway. So like that Spotify and Apple represent the reality of consumption the reality of

consumption is not ten dollars a unit and it's just not gonna be you know what i mean like and if it's just like you know if you really like a movie you might buy the criterion collection dvd because then it means something to you and there's packaging that makes it like more valuable where, you know, the, the, the, the album itself is just information.

Yeah. You know, it, it, it is recorded information that you're paying to own or, or interface with in some way. And streaming is the practical reality of now, you know, ownership is not a thing we're not going to be able to own things that we can download going forward it's just not

going to happen you know what i mean like we're we're subscribing to the news now even you know what i mean like yeah it's just not it's ownership is not how this is going to work, you know? So I think that streaming is not the worst way because I saw the worst way. The worst way was trying to get everybody to buy it. Nobody would. Everybody would download it for free anyway. Really? Because I always sort of felt that like when it went from,

my assumption was that when it went from like, you know, iTunes downloading, when people would buy it, you know, buy those to streaming, that that revenue went down even further. But those were actually the worst days to you, the iPod years. We had CD years, iPod years, streaming years. And you think iPod was worse than streaming? Was iPod worse than streaming? I just think – I think iPod was a stopgap thing.

Yeah. I think iPod was a transitional thing. thing yeah you know i think ipod was a transitional thing apple music store that world yeah i you know i that was great while it was around but you were asking people to pay for something oftentimes they already had yeah you know and it was like you were paying as a way to show support and and i think like yes that support is important but i don't think that as an industry we want to depend on appealing to people's emotions that way like yeah as a means of survival it's like we have to figure out a way to do it practically in a way that makes sense for what the piece of information is actually worth in the marketplace. You know,

man, I have so many more questions for you, but I have to take, we have to take a break and, and, but we're going to come back right on this note. Okay. We'll be right back with more open my Google. Okay. So let's just keep talking about this the technological changes that the music industry

has been to just in my lifetime have been nuts like i think it's bananas that now i've got nostalgia for the mp3 years you know what i mean that like i had my cd collection in high school then uh went to mp3s and like now we're on streaming and i still buy i buy vinyl and i buy physical and and that's like when i really like a record like i i buy that and and so i feel like we're still kind of have the best of physical media if we want to you can still get the best sleeve you can still own the thing and have in your house that's really nice but i think it's so funny that like you know i like like i actually have i regret us missing out on like the best of uh torrent sites now like there's a couple of music torrent sites that are still up but i use them every once in a while and and the reason i use them is because there's a couple where they actually have a better catalog than you can get on spotify like they've

got like you you want to get a you know you want to get a charles mingus album they've got every album and they've got every release of it and you can get it with the bonus tracks you can get the remaster you can get a vinyl rip you can get like it's like the library of alexandria and now music piracy has gone from everybody's doing it and it's ruining the industry to like now now there's just 5 000 nerds around the world who are exhaustively cataloging all music and we should just let them do it because absolutely we should absolutely we should because we because we need access to that sometimes. I mean, there's another conversation to be had. And it hits me in a very direct... I have so many feelings about it

because I come from underground rap music. And underground rap music I come from was mostly distributed by white label singles. It wasn't proliferated it was never successful but these songs this music was really important to me and important to this community that i um that i come from and this music largely doesn't exist in streaming because those labels were small labels that aren't around anymore and they never got bought by bigger distributors and you know like there's all these rights issues and you know and and and a lot of it is an artist kind of just like deciding okay it's been long

enough let me upload this and hope nobody cares and i don't get sued that there need to be efforts taken to like library of congress all music like all of it like like like it needs to be preserved because as much as i appreciate spotify and apple for dealing with the consumption of music in a practical way. Music's existence shouldn't depend on that solely. And that's where it is right now. You get the sense that if something isn't on Spotify, it doesn't exist because there's so much there. But there's a lot of stuff that gets missed. There's a lot of songs that are missing there's you know there's an there's artists entire catalogs that aren't on there yeah um and i think that some efforts for preservation because these you know like music recordings and a lot of times can be more like culturally important than retail would have you believe yeah, so much of media has that problem.

Video games has that problem really hardcore now too, where it's like if something, it's really hard to preserve old media and you sort of end up looking to the pirates as being the people who are like uploading the version that you can at least get if you're a student or if you want to go back and hear something like because it's not always available commercially um yeah and there we

it's like it's sort of lost in the internet somewhere and you like need these volunteers who we've been treating like pirates for the last 20 years to like uphold the history i mean and it's like there there just has to be some way where like okay copyright law is important understandably but there's got to be some wiggle room for preservation like copyright law in a lot of ways really destroyed the hip-hop that i up with, like just really destroyed it. Like how so? Because once sampling laws were instituted and became, you know, violated, relatable in the ways that people could get sued and of cases and producers became scared of it, there's just a lot of classic rap albums that could never be made today. It just couldn't be made. Yeah.

or they, or they could be made, but it would be cost prohibitive because, uh, each one of these Sam, you know, copyright holders has to name their price and then it gets into, you know, the millions.

And then at that point, it's not even worth making cause it's never going to make that back. Yeah. Um, and I think that, like I said, copyright is important, but it's not the only important thing. And, and I said, copyright is important, but it's not the only important thing.

And I just I want there to be some sort of way where legally or culturally we give some credence or some some sort of energy to the other important things, not just the law part. not just the law part. I mean, there was that movement in like the mid two thousands, like the creative commons movement to like, have like copy left and, and these ways of copywriting things where, you know, okay,

it's, I'll let people use it for such and such a purpose for like sampling. Right. Like I still own the music, but anybody can sample it kind of, but it never really, never really caught on. It was like a sort of like digital punk kind of thing to do for a little

while. Yeah. I mean, you know, that, never really caught on it was like a sort of like digital punk kind of thing to do for a little while yeah i mean you know that that stuff doesn't make people money i mean if you're a copyright holder your best bet right now is to have somebody to represent your library and be out there like hoping somebody samples it so you can sue them and you can make money off of it well not even so you can sue them just so like you can get the clearance money yeah you know like that's a that's a hustle that's a hustle yeah um that a lot of people are on and there's a lot of like there's a lot of um reissue labels who buy particular artists music just for that reason just so they can control the samples do you know what i mean like yeah and and and i'm saying like i get all of that you know i get all of that i i like if i if i was you know

if if if i was a jazz musician in the 70s and you know and i watched my contemporaries music get rediscovered or sometimes stolen from or and like I totally get like wanting to protect yourself. And to me, I think it's even more about if there's some way to designate certain songs as OK retroactively. But like I said, it's just it's about it's just about preservation and just about making sure that things aren't disappeared. Because that's the problem with digital. Things can be disappeared. Yeah. Yeah, like you said, if it comes off of Spotify or Apple, it's like it doesn't exist.

But like, okay, so with piracy, I always felt – I remember at the time, I pirated a ton of music. I feel bad now. Me too. I feel shitty. I feel really bad now. I had to realize, Adam, that I'm partly responsible for the destruction of my own genre. How so? Because when downloading first started, some of the fastest and most vicious and relentless

downloaders were people like me who were in underground rap music yeah uh and we would jump on napster soul seek lime wire whatever every day just looking and downloading looking and downloading because you're trying to gather music to hear to feed your your own creativity like you're going to be voracious for that shit. But that music was the most vulnerable to piracy. Like, if you were Metallica, yeah, you were worried because your income was being threatened. It might mess with your quality of life, but you were still going to sell hundreds of thousands of albums. If you were the juggernauts and you came out with an album in 2000 or 99, that label needed you to sell 10,000 of those

for any of this to work. And us downloading made sure that didn't happen. Yeah. Like they needed my $10. Yeah. And I didn't give it to them. Cause you're the, you're the audience. You're like literally one of the few people who likes the music or who knows the music.

I'm the market. And the whole market is on Napster, BitTorrent, whatever it was. So we killed it. Like we did that, you know, like we,

we watched rap city and, and, and yo MTV raps. And we're complaining about how like only commercial rap music is on TV and is being marketed. But the reason why that was is because those people were still paying money for music, people who enjoyed that stuff. We stopped. We stopped cold. And that destroyed the genre.

But also, I mean, let me give you a little credit here because like we're about the same age. I remember those years. I was like, I don't have 10 bucks. I don't have 20 bucks. That's how I felt as a college student or like right out of college during the years where I had the least amount of money. And look, now that doesn't account for the fact that in the years before that, I bought like 200 CDs when I was in high school. Right. Like I still have them. They're in, they're in my garage. Uh, but like, you know, at the same time, you're like,

Hey, what am I supposed to do? I can get this stuff for free. I wouldn't hear this music. Otherwise I'm hearing so much more music than I could. Um, and you know, I'm a young person who knows how to use the internet. Like, am I really going to go out and spend music like there's a spend money on this when you know i'm uh my finances are limited right uh there is that piece of it like also the people that you're talking about who are buying those metallica cds well they were older and they had they had jobs yeah i mean but you know we chose not to pay And that is in some ways reflective of what I was saying. Like, okay, the hard drive is big enough now. The internet is fast enough now. These goods no longer become commercially viable. music fans we were the first wave of it you know what i mean um it's just technology meeting the market and that's just kind of what happened uh so you know where i i say that i mean the reason the reason i can say so i say so confidently that we just that you know people in my community

destroyed the market is because now i be me being on the other side of it. I have just an intimate knowledge with like, oh, right. You know what I mean? Like, that's why that label is not around anymore, because they needed my ten dollars and they needed all of my buddies ten bucks like they did so much better when one of us would buy it and dub a tape for everybody else like that was at least sustainable. But like once we were all on Napster and none of us paid the money, it wasn't viable anymore. But why do you think it is like, OK, so at the time I remember thinking I was like, hey, music industry, hey, movie industry, if you don't want me to pirate, you got to come up with something better. Right. You got to come up with something better than piracy. You know, like that's the way that they beat it. And that's what they did. Right. You got to come up with something better than piracy. You know, like that's the way that they beat it. And that's what they did. Right. Like we ended up with streaming and in movies and TV, we have Netflix.

We have all these streamers and like, you know, I will I I still have a BitTorrent client, but I only use it when I cannot find something otherwise. If I want to watch some BBC show from 1995, I go on BitTorrent. Right. Because it's probably not available anywhere else and i instead i have subscriptions to all these services now the fucked up thing is that like in music apple and spotify we've got this story where all the people making the art are making almost no money from these services that's like the rub of it is that like uh you know is that it looks like much worse for the industry the industry's shrunk but in tv and movies that's not the story right people aren't i mean like netflix has too much power right disney has too much power but we're not saying oh man like the people who make you

know movies can't make a living off of it anymore right like we're not saying that the industry the industry hasn't shrunk in the same way that it has in music even though we've moved to streaming in both of them we went through that same piracy disruption and then we moved to streaming so what do you think is why do you think that's that's happened more intensely in music or do you think i'm off base in my analysis well you know what i think i think that's a great point and when i'm thinking about it now a few things popping in my head one um movie and tv the production of it is a lot more organized and there's they got in front of a lot of it you know what i mean like the unions like they they made like you weren't gonna put them in a position where you were paying less for production just because it was streaming versus being on air.

And in music, you don't you don't you have none of that. There's none of that. There's no protections against making sure that there's still a cost associated with the production of it. You know, none of that exists. There's no union saying, hey hey if mike's going in the studio i don't care where you're selling it i don't care if it's for streaming or not you got to pay him this or that here's here's the minimum here's scale there's none of that every everybody um everybody works for whatever you know whatever they can get and that's that's from the producers

to the engineers to everybody else involved in the process, the people who do the art, like there's no protections. So people can pay less. They will. So that's one thing. Two. In streaming, there's a lot happening right now with the big corporations trying to outdo each other to make sure that they are like the number one platform. with the big corporations trying to outdo each other to make sure that they are like the number one platform and because of that i think a lot of them overspend on production um and i i don't know if that's always going to be the case um like you know once you know once if disney if disney plus fails or if apple tv fails yeah is netflix going gonna continue to spend billion dollars on production no i don't think so you know so i i think at that point then we might start to see a similar contraction um you know in that marketplace too no i'm i'm absolutely concerned about that that like you

know you look at those companies and they're getting more and more like commodities where they're just like hey let's just get as many hours as we can for as, for as little money as possible. And like, as long as it's good enough, as long as people don't cancel their subscription, cause they've got, you know, cause they got enough reality shows to watch,

uh, as opposed to like the, the peak TV years, the HBO versus AMC years when it was like, how much, how much money can we fucking spend on this beautiful period thing? Right. You know, right. You remember, you remember how much money Netflix we fucking spend on this beautiful period thing right you know right you remember you remember how much money netflix used to spend on its original shows like house of cards like when it's you know what i mean like so different now like they like they've

obviously realized that that's not what's gonna tip the scales in their favor is how much money you spend on something you know so i you know so i think that might be uh evidence of what's to come what do you think's to come for the future of the music industry um i don't know it doesn't look good um because and and the reason that really the reason it doesn't look good is because like even the the biggest acts i think i think like there's a there's a there's this little aura of desperation around even what they're doing like wow like the the the pr stunts are crazier than ever um there's still a lot of like public narrative um what's the word misdirection and shit going on all the time um they're still trying to figure

out is it best to release the beyonce album by surprise or is it best to uh announce it four weeks out so we can do a whole piece like they're they're still trying to figure it out that's what scares me you know what i mean like the and, and that it's like, especially because big artists, there's a value now in appearing independent and appearing, um, organic. Yeah. Um, that, that bugs me too. Like, because all of that, all that does all of those things. Um, in addition to helping those artists stay successful, they suck all the oxygen out of the room for people who are actually struggling. Yeah. So, I don't know. It doesn't look great. There's a lot of money in it because people still love music.

So people are paying for Spotify and people are paying for Apple Music. So as long as there's money in the system, uh, it's going to survive and it's going to evolve. Um, I just think that the, the, the pie,

the piece of the pie for independent musicians. Uh, I don't, I don't see that getting any bigger anytime soon. It's the disappearing middle class. Yes, absolutely. It's absolutely.

Yeah. But in music, it's the disappearing of every class except the big one. Yeah. I mean, that's the, yeah, that's what really concerns me.

Like, again, just talking about CDs, it's like, Hey, you know, part of, part of what made indie rock or just indie music like explode in the late 90s,

early 2000s is like, yeah, the CD thing that you're talking about, right? That like, you have these small bands that are like, I don't know, name a, I don't know, Granddaddy. Do you remember Granddaddy? And like, you know, not a huge band, but able to, you know, I assume make money for, you know, about a decade because, you know, I assume make money for, for, uh, uh, you know, about a decade because, you know, selling CDs and stuff like that. And like, does that, I don't know, how much does that exist anymore? How much does that market exist? Like, I think that it's like this. I remember, um, when my space started, people thought my space was great. Cause Oh, now the playing fields level, cause everybody's got a page on here so if you make an upload right

so if you make something it's great uh you have just as much chance of being heard as anybody else but that's bullshit um because the truth is this if you came into the myspace era having already been established in any kind of way you had a leg up yeah you know because it's not like everybody starts from zero notoriety um you know so if so you come into it and once you announce you have a page and you put that on your email list server, into a little bit more of a boutique market where, you know, it might get to the point where for independent musicians, they might take their stuff off of streaming altogether and just make direct to consumer products, you know, vinyl or whatever way they want people to experience this stuff and sell it that way. But again, that only works if you're established already. That only works if you came into this having a fan base, because how do you build a fan base if your products aren't in the retail marketplace? marketplace right like you can sell if you if you if you said hey i'm only selling my shit on band camp now and it's nowhere else well you've got a fan base of however many thousands of people who want to buy you you sold out your your pre-release of your of your record right but like how do you do that if you're if if you're you 10 years ago yes i have and that's the thing i literally have no idea like what if i was just starting

right now i i would you know what i would do i would put a lot of energy into videos um because i will be trying to sell my aesthetic over social media yeah um like that's that's an angle that wasn't available to us previously that you can't take advantage of now but like i said that works if you're good at aesthetic if you're good at the internet that works great yeah here's my look and here's what i stand for right if you like me you like this kind of lifestyle yes and that whole yes like that that can work but you know like that takes some acumen you know like that really like that's not an easy thing to do like on paper, that formula seems pretty apparent. But the actual execution of that is there's giant firms who exist because that's a difficult thing to do when these people get hired as consultants. I worry about the talented people who don't have resources.

Yeah. In the near future. I worry about how it is that they're going to be able to release music that reaches people. Also, the social media thing, like that gives so much power, not just to Apple and Spotify, but to like the YouTube algorithm. Right. Like I think about in comedy, I got started because my college sketch group made videos and they got big on YouTube and actually just on our website. Like we were just uploading MOV files before YouTube. Right. And the videos weren't even that good. They were just like our, you know, our very early sketch comedy brains doing weird shit and people liked them.

Right. But now if you wanted to get your stuff seen on YouTube, like this, if we upload the same stuff now, we get 200 views. Right. We would have to play the YouTube channel game and say, OK, how do you be a successful YouTube channel? Well, you upload every single day and it's videos of this type and you got to have this type of thumbnail and like that kind of thing yep and all those decisions that end up changing your art in a way that youtube wants your art to be all those decisions benefit youtube not the art or necessarily the audience and you have to be in the top point zero zero zero one percent of people who are good at that part of it before anybody even sees your comedy or music, I assume.

And so, like, I don't know, like, I imagine, like, SoundCloud as, like, a thing, for instance. That's a whole world I barely understand. But, like, you know, I know for a while it's like, oh, people putting stuff up on SoundCloud. Oh, shit going viral. But, like, you know, that world, I imagine, would have a similar problem yeah and and soundcloud used to be the organic space and from my understanding now it's not anymore you know because because i haven't heard about it in a while yeah i mean the labels the labels figured it out you know they they put soundcloud as a company in a position where like if you're not

gonna you know if you're not gonna help us push what we're trying to push in some way or another then we're going to stop you from operating because all of your stuff here is copyrighted you know what i mean yeah uh do you have uh let's see we're getting close to the end here and i like to end on an optimistic note not on the note of i don't know how people who don't have resources are ever going to make it ever again i mean what did you do in those first couple years that brought you to where you are and is there anything that uh you know you think a young musician listening might take away with them not to not to make you say hey kid be just like me but well you know a one transferable thing that i that i do still believe in is it's

paying it forward because that helped me out too like there were artists who were more established than me that got on songs with me who helped me talk to labels who put me on tours opening for them they didn't have to do any of that but that's kind of part of how this thing works is that you're looking for who's coming up and you kind of help them out. Cause this, you know, this anything is really about a community of artists. Yeah.

So like, that's one thing that I'm always trying to do. Like I said, I, you know, I I'm using my label in that way. It's just trying to figure out how to do it successfully I said, I, you know, I I'm using my label in that way. Um, it's just trying to figure out how to do it successfully in this new marketplace. Um, but I think that as long as,

you know, any artists who are established still kind of have that understanding of it and are looking for ways to help bring other people up, then there is some hope for how we can figure this out going forward. Um, you know, so I think it's about people like myself scanning the community and looking for free-floating entities that could use the support and the context and really make it an effort to help bring them up. Now, that was a wonderful positive note. That was great. Thank you so much for being here, man. Of course, man. Thank you. Thank you. It's always great to talk to you. that was really that was great thank you so much for being here man of course man thank you thank you it's always great to talk to you you too and and what's the name of the new album and where

can people get it and how can they give you money so you can pay your goddamn rent because i'm sure people are going to want to do that after hearing this well it's called anime trauma and divorce and it's out uh it's not out till october 16th i'm not sure when this is going up um and you know the biggest way to support it is listening to the single uh there's a couple singles out if you search open mic eagle on your streaming services you can check out those and uh we sold out of our our pre-sale vinyl but there's going to be a standard vinyl offering soon uh but it's really just about enjoying the music right now and if you like it letting other people know about it.

Hell yeah. Thank you so much for being here, Mike. Thank you. Well, thank you so much again to Open Mike Eagle for coming on the show. That is it for us this week on Factually. If you like this episode, please, please, please give us a rating or a review wherever you subscribe. It actually does help us out.

I know it's hard to believe, but it really, really does. If you'd like to let us know what you think of the show, if you've got some comments, if there's a topic you'd like to see me cover, send me an email at factually at adamconover.net. Always love to hear from you. I want to thank our producers, Dana Wickens and Sam Roudman, our engineers, Ryan Connor and Brett Morris, Andrew WK for our theme song. As always, you can find me online at Adam Conover dot net or at Adam Conover wherever you get your social media. And until next time, stay curious. Thanks for listening.

That was a HeadGum Podcast.