Today, Explained - The year live music died

Episode Date: December 22, 2020

 In the second of our five-part series, “You, Me, and Covid-19,” musicians explain how they got creative when live shows and tours were canceled. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Romsferm. You know when people ask you, like, what are you going to do when it's all over? What's that first thing you're going to do, man, when you get the shot, even though there's like two shots, man, and even though once you get those two shots, man,

you still can't get out there and do whatever you want. Whatever it is, one day when this pandemic is in the rear view, what are you going to get back to? And for me, it's dancing. I miss dancing, not like in my house to a song I put on, but out in public with other people and smiling and laughing in public with people while we enjoy music. And that is one thing we definitely lost this year. And if you're someone like me, you felt the loss. Halima Shah, you've been reporting on this loss of live music.

It kind of had a hard time this year, yeah? Yeah, and I think the people who felt the loss were not just fans like you and myself who love going to concerts. I think it was also musicians. I mean, they kind of lost their lifeline. Touring is something that they depend on to make money. And then, you know, you make music in part for the fans to see other people enjoy it and dance to it. And you've been reporting on how musicians dealt with that loss in 2020. They definitely had to get creative. And that's a task that musicians can take on because they're creative people. But some of those alternatives to the live concert were kind of meh. And then there were others that were

so good and so interesting that they're probably going to outlast the pandemic. Okay, let's hear about them. Where do we start? Let's start stuff off with musicians kind of taking shots in the dark. And then I'll tell you about some success stories. I actually spoke to the musicians that I was really looking forward to seeing this year, Division. They're the R&B duo. Division, like,

they made a song with Drake back in the day. Drake? Drake? Yeah, they did. But I would say Division is probably, like, even more in their feelings

than Drake. They actually dropped an album this year called Amuse in Her Feelings. And I think that's the perfect soundtrack to 2020 because it's sad and it's moody. Starring my universe. If I just took time to plan it. Told me secrets you ain't wanna. The vocalist of the group, Daniel Daly, said he was really looking forward to performing the latest songs for fans like this. We have some of the craziest R&B fans, I believe.

It's like R&B fans that turn up the way that a rap fan would. They jump up and down, they scream, they yell, they know every word of everything, they get hype. Any ad-lib, any super high note, they try everything. They're like, I don't care who's here, who's listening, I'm trying every note I heard him do. But then COVID-19 happened. Coachella and Stagecoach are scrapping their plans after originally postponing the events until October.

Lady Gaga is pushing her Chromatica Ball tour back a year. The Pitchfork Music Festival is now canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Kesha postponed to a TBA date. Brad Paisley, some shows canceled.

And Taylor Swift, her entire world tour canceled. 1985, who's the producer in Division, said because the world was in lockdown, there were serious questions about whether or not to hold the release of the new album. I think the first conversation our whole team had was, do we wait and, you know, do we push the album back? And we both just said, nope, you know, we got to go now. Like, it's not even fair to keep making our fans wait. 85 says people kind of needed music to lean on during this time. Obviously a lot of

people are feeling uncertain and people are having breakdowns and people are in their feelings more than normal and we just happen to make music that in some ways speaks to all of the different mental issues that I think a lot of people are going through right now. So they released an album, but there was no touring, no crowds trying to hit high notes with Daniel. You just keep rubbing it in our faces. Just lots of live-streamed content.

This time around, it was just all the shit that we don't like to do as far as artists, you know? Sit here and have to get digital. In other words, Daniel's a musician and he likes to play music. He doesn't like tweeting about his breakfast to keep the audience's interest. Joanna Connor misses putting on an actual performance, too. She's an independent musician and a fixture of Chicago's blues and jazz scene. In 2019, you could find her playing at one of the city's blues venues three or four nights a week. I'm someone that looks like your mom or your next-door neighbor,

and I shred the hell out of the guitar, and that's my notoriety. I'm from the blues scene in Chicago, but I've mixed it up with rock and roll and funk, and I'm pretty much in your face doing what I do. Her career was about to take off in a way that it hadn't before. 2019 was a really pinnacle year for me, and at my ripe old age of 57 at the time, I was becoming the latest discovery on the internet and through Twitter and other, you know, outlets.

In 2020, she was supposed to go to Europe with a touring agency she had just signed to. Her band was supposed to be in a movie with Ben Affleck. But instead, she got... Famine. It's just desolation. You know, they've pretty much just left musicians to, you know, out there on a limb

and try to fend for themselves for the most part. And that's the unfortunate about America is that artists are not taken care of or treasured like they should be. Artists like Joanna are struggling more than their A-list peers for obvious reasons. But there's also one thing that they all have in common. Before this pandemic happened, we had live shows as a fairly reliable, in the scheme of things, stream of income. That's how most musicians these days, whether they're famous or independent, make their money is through touring. And now that is off the table. So it's cut individual musicians off from their lifeline. Andy Cush is a contributing editor at Pitchfork.

He also plays in the band Garcia Peoples. Even before the pandemic, over the last couple decades, as the recording industry has moved from physical sales to almost entirely streaming. That left a lot of money out of the pockets of artists, especially small artists, but big artists too. And the inability to tour has really exposed the deficiencies of streaming as a way to make a living for 99% of musicians. We're live. Joanna Conner, J-Red, our first very private concert for two lovely humans. Here we go.

Joanna did virtual concerts like lots of other artists, and initially it went pretty well. We did do some with different festivals that we were supposed to be in. A couple of them did like a live stream thing in place of the actual show. We had like 30,000 people tuned in over a few days, and we made a pretty good amount of money, you know, a few thousand dollars. And I split it with the band, and I was like, well, okay, this is doable. But as time went on, within a couple of months, it went from like, say, $3,000 to $300. Joanna thinks audiences started tuning out because they were being inundated with virtual concerts.

It's easy to sit in front of your phone and stream a live show from your basement. But if you want it to actually sound good, it's going to cost you. I can't see anything, so I don't know who's watching. All right. That's not to cost you. I can't see anything, so I don't know who's watching. All right. That's not going to work. Okay. The upfront cost of doing that is a lot higher than it would be to simply show up at a venue and play.

You have to hire a camera crew. Perhaps you have to hire someone to edit the footage. The sound engineering requirements to get something that's going to sound good to broadcast over the internet are very different from getting something to sound good just in the room. So you may be looking at a few thousand dollars just to put one of these things on. But musicians still have to eat. And when COVID-19 attacked the service industry, which has long offered day jobs to musicians, artists like Joanna had to get creative. But a lot of just wonderful humans out there, like, were sending me PayPal money and, you know, hiring me to play in their backyard and write songs for people for their birthday. Just kind of think of any way possible just to bring in some cash.

Even streaming giants are offering ways for to donate directly to their favorite artists. You know, that's generous of Spotify, but it also feels to me like a sort of tacit acknowledgement that the money you're making from Spotify is not enough to keep you afloat for most artists. When Chicago's winter made backyard concerts impossible and the unemployment check and PayPal donations weren't enough, Joanna had to live off of something other than music. I've been a musician for decades, 30 plus years, and I haven't had a job. So I live up the street from a Trader Joe's where I shopped all the time and I was like, hey, do you guys need help? And they're like, yeah. So they actually, I had a couple interviews, they hired me, which was amazing. But she couldn't keep that up either. When COVID numbers in Chicago surged, she didn't feel safe going into work. So now when she's at home, she practices playing guitar on her own. But at first, it was kind of a saddening experience.

I didn't really want to play my guitar for some reason. It was kind of like emotionally painful to pick it up or look at it. But yeah, I play off my band. I used to do some solo stuff, but not being with my band, not having that creative outlet, I really miss them a lot. That loss of not being able to play off a band or improvise together or even react to what the audience is doing is one of the things artists miss most in 2020. Division described making music right now as sort of taking shots in the dark. It's not obvious anymore if the audience

is loving or hating or crying or dancing to the music. But Daniel also describes it as kind of a freeing experience. Like when Division was at the beginning of their music career and just made what they felt like making. We were two guys that were trying to make music and didn't know if any of it was going to work. I think now it's going to literally come strictly back to, are me and 85 going to sit here and listen and be like, oh shit, this was crazy. Whatever, this song, this song right here, we're in love with this. in a bad mood It's good to know I have you Bomb. Bomb.

Division hunkered down and focused on the music, but they joined legions of musicians who innovated in ways that will change the industry long after this pandemic. That's after the break. All my time now And I'm past him long after this pandemic. That's after the break.

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1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. All right, Halima, back to long division? No, I want to talk about Cardi B. She didn't let the pandemic stop her from making one of the biggest songs of the year, and she actually spent $100,000 on COVID-19 tests so she could produce one of the most provocative music videos ever.

When I from the top make it drop, that's some wet, that's some wet. When I get a bucky and a mob, that's some wet, that's some wet. I'm talking wop, wop, wop, that's some wet, that's some wet. Macaroni in a pot, that's a wet, that's a wet, huh. But artists also got smarter about how to use the digital realm, which is definitely here to stay. Travis Scott went way beyond the live-streamed concert and partnered with Fortnite to do a video game show. We ain't even make it to the room.

She thought it was the ocean, it's just a pool. Now I gotta open, it's just a goon Audience members, in this case players, can walk around the venue and explore it. When the show starts, a giant Travis Scott towers over the audience who are the size of ants compared to him. He turns the entire Fortnite island into a stage, as backup dancers made of fire and lightning performed behind him. And he reportedly earned $20 million from that show and the merch sales, which is exponentially more than he makes from a regular show. It's like half of what he made on his entire last tour.

A few months later, Lil Nas X partnered with the popular kids game Roblox. A digital Lil Nas X dressed in a pink cowboy hat, pants, and jacket opens the show with his hit Old Town Road. Like other artists, Division took this time to experiment. In their home city of Toronto, Division decided to do something that they had never attempted before. A drive-in concert in what was essentially a parking lot turned music venue. The freedom was coming back, so it was perfect time.

So what was dope about it is they'd still let you outside of the car. As long as you stayed in your parking space and your parking space was, you know, distanced, then you'd come with the people you came with and you'd have your little section, and then another car would just be, you know, six feet away from you. It was a risk, but Daniel says it was also an opportunity. Toronto had just begun loosening social gathering restrictions. I won't even lie I think we were both a little bit nervous about that because we know how important those shows are for our fans and in a drive-in show the idea of people being kind of behind the barrier of a car seemed like it might take away from that conversation that Daniel was having with them during the show.

The show sold out seven times. People were getting mad creative. They started renting out cars, Jeeps, drop tops, anything without covers so they could sit on top of the roofs. They'd reverse their cars into the parking spots, pop the trunk, just so they could have an open seat to just kind of sit there and do their thing. I'd look out into the crowd and I'd see people literally with hookahs set up on the ground, sitting there smoking hookah outside. People loved it way more than we thought. It's the type of thing where even when normal shows do start again,

we probably could have some pretty successful drive-in shows. Daniel said that one of the challenges of singing to a giant parking lot ended up being an asset. In a typical venue, a singer might sing to the center of the room where everyone is. But in this case, Daniel had to address different sections of the lot that was spread out across hundreds of parking spots. I think what it did for them was crazier because they knew he looks over here, it's just my parking space. So as soon as I do that, they would feel like, oh, the spotlight's on me. And then they just, you know, they turn up like,

yeah, he's there. And then you almost get a million intimate shows. Andy Kush, who reports on music and also makes it, says that there's a new kind of intimacy that's forming between indie performers and audiences too. He says it's because of a new willingness on the part of artists to release rough, unedited songs. A friend of mine, a guitar player and songwriter named Riley Walker, is doing something that's really cool and inspiring to me, where he set up a Patreon account for a really, really low monthly donation.

I think it's $2 or $3. If you donate to that, he gives you access to an incredible amount of media. Like every day he might upload five or six different things, like an old concert recording or a song in progress or just a little improvisation that he did for himself that he never would have shared in ordinary circumstances. If you like an artist enough, it's interesting to hear their work in progress. You don't only need to hear the polished final version. People are paying to go behind the music. My band released a collage of improvisations that we had taped over the year into this sort of lo-fi thing that we wouldn't have put in a record store, but that plenty of people who listen to us

are interested to hear. To me, that's been one of the most positive developments of COVID is this sense of community among musicians and listeners, a willingness to spend money to support musicians you care about, and from the musician's side, a willingness to kind of peel back the curtain a little bit and let your listeners in on a little more of your creative process

than you may have been doing previously. Joanna Connor also found a way to get closer to her audience and get some cash, too, by offering guitar lessons online. That's straight off of Elmore James, so I'm going to do it a little bit slower for you. She even gives one-on-one lessons on Zoom and gives her fans a chance to talk music and jam with her. The ninth fret to the tenth fret on the E and B string. I met a lot of interesting and just wonderful people. They vary in all kinds of styles musically. I mean, there's a lot of blues fans. That's how they know me. But I was teaching a professor in Arizona, the banker in China, an IT lady, a Brazilian lady that lives in New Jersey, a fan of mine from Germany who's really sweet.

That's been pretty fantastic. Musicians have been passing around the hat since forever. But this year, it's kind of like they got a whole bunch of new hats. Bandcamp this year, on one Friday every month, decided to waive their portion of revenue from sales made on the site entirely. Bandcamp has always been a favorite among musicians who want to sell downloads. And this year, they let artists keep an even larger cut of the profit. Which ended up turning into this kind of cultural phenomenon among musicians and their fans where people are posting on social media about here are all the records that I bought on Bandcamp.

You know, maybe hundreds of dollars worth of downloads. And send me your recommendations and I'm going to buy them. People got very into it and so did musicians. The music company that houses my music and pays artists directly waives its in-house fees on albums and other products it sells for shipping or download, so more money goes directly to the artists. Win, win, happy, happy. But the small victories through download and merch sales, donations, and Zoom lessons are only helping artists like Joanna get by. There are very few independent artists who are making what you might describe as a full living off of that. It's helpful for making ends meet. Maybe it's a couple hundred dollars here, a couple hundred dollars there, but very few people are making an entire living this way

during the pandemic. So they're still waiting for the post-COVID world to come. You know, all the festivals that canceled this past year said they would rebook us for next year. It's just like a wait-and-see situation. I mean, I just, I feel like if we get to go back and play, it'll be like, you know, giving water to someone in the desert. So I think it'll feel tremendous, and it'll be, I think we'll appreciate doing what we do even more. And I think people in the audience will as well.

I know I will. Because I'm yearning to see the musicians whose songs energized me when it was hard to get out of bed in 2020. Who made me emotional when every day in lockdown felt gray and started to blend into the next. Whose songs gave me support in times of loss and who make me hopeful that 2021 will be a little bit better than 2020. I can confidently say that musicians were on my list of 2020 heroes. And like so many heroes in the United States, a lot of them should be paid better. Halima Shah is a reporter and a producer at Today Explained.

The rest of the team includes Muj Zaydi, Will Reed, Amna Alsadi, and Noam Hassenfeld, who contributes music too. The rest of our music comes from the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Extra help this week from the mysterious Paul Mounsey, Lauren Katz, Bird Pinkerton, and Cecilia Lay, who's also our fact checker. Afim Shapiro is our engineer. Golda Arthur is the show's supervising producer, and Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's editorial director of podcasts. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I got a boy he just wanted to. I got a boy he just wanted me to. Sometimes I don't know what to do. I shake that money maker. Shake that money maker. Shake that money maker. Shake that money maker. guitar solo guitar solo