Getting paid!

[AnthonyCFox]

I don't know about anyone else here, but I want to make a living making music.

I've got a plan I've been working on for about 10 years - Minecraft music videos.

The first time I played Minecraft the idea burst into my head, "Build cool stuff, make videos and add music!".

I'm not quite there yet, maybe a month or so, but I have a video here that's worth checking out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_IyMgSJfrg

Vanilla MC is too hard for the kind of large scale building you would need to make good videos; so I made a modpack that makes the game, especially building, easier. It's a very comfortable game to play, unlike vanilla. That's what I address with the pack - the stuff that sucks in vanilla. Build Big!!

[AnthonyCFox]

Minecraft + OBS makes for a great graphic art platform for people who don't want, or need, the level of detail and animation you would get if you used Blender and it's much, much easier to use - it comes with a broad range of textures that look nice and work well together and there are many mods to complement that.

I don't know about you, but I've messed with all kinds of art programs, Blender, Inkscape and I'm not too terrible at GIMP really.

Artists make art. Minecraft is a good platform for that. Ever watch BDoubleO100 or GoodTimesWithScar or, well if you know, you know.

My modpack is designed specifically to capitalize on Minecraft as a graphic arts platform - while still retaining some of the game nature - I'd love to see other artists use it that way. There is always room for more good art.

[AnthonyCFox]

There's also the option of a Minecrafter, a musician and someone who edits video getting together. That could be cool. Probably not a ton of money, but if you get good at putting music to video - that's a job. Every television show, movie and nearly all video advertisements have music.

There's always room at the top - getting there is the trick. Show you can do the work and people will throw money at you to do it for them.

[AnthonyCFox]

I actually have an idea for a movie. I suspect it will take place in the world I am building - there's a lot of swamps, and the story is pretty swampy.

It's basically a sequel to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth", but instead of Deep Ones there will be vampires. (Mean vampires, not the ones who 14 year olds fantasize about. )

It needs software that can animate the facial expressions in post production, but yeah, a movie made in Minecraft could totally work.

[d.healey]

I don't know about anyone else here, but I want to make a living making music.

I've got a plan I've been working on for about 10 years - Minecraft music videos.

So are you making a living making music?

[j_e_f_f_g]

are you making a living making music?

That would depend upon how long his plan is, and that information wasn't specified. But the more interesting question is "If he doesn't make a living as a career musician, which one is he giving up? Music, or living?"

[tseaver]

"Making a living" can be defined in a number of ways. In my state (Virginia, USA) at the time of posting, a full-time minimum wage job pays USD 13.00/hour, or _USD 27,000 /year.

One would need to define "winning" at writing such Minecraft "scores" in terms of a business plan, yielding steady-state income of that annual value times some reasonable multiplier. Variance and bankroll would come into play, as well as current / future investments to keep the revenue stream increasing at least slightly over time.

Given the oddball sharecropper economics of YT / streaming service revenues, I can't imagine trying to do such a career "on spec": rather, I would imagine that the savvy MC / score entrepreneur would need to secure various "placement" / "commission" revenue streams to make a reasonable "living" a non-imprudent gamble.

But WTFDIK, really.

[merlyn]

There's a book called Noise : The Political Economy of Music.

What I took out of the book, which isn't covered in the Wikipedia article, is that as there is more and more recorded music in the world, the value of each piece of recorded music goes down, as there is a finite budget available for music. What doesn't change in value is the value people put on their time. This means live music retains its value, and that is how I make money from music. And we see that -- it used to be that bands toured to sell records. Now the records are a way to get people to go to concerts.

With Youtube -- that's a new medium. If you think about it Youtube isn't selling music as such. It's selling advertising. To make money from Youtube a video or channel needs a lot (millions) of views, so that advertisers want a piece of it.

[merlyn]

Reality would bear out the argument. There is now a huge amount of recorded music in the world. Much more than when the book I linked was published in 1977. Now, virtually all of that music is available on Spotify for £9.99 a month, or whatever a Spotify subscription costs. QED.

[sunrat]

Agreed @merlyn . Recorded music is only a form of advertising for most musicians, except if you are Taylor Swift or another of the top 1%.
Virtually all music is available for free these days on Youtube or other less legit sources. Live performance and merch are the bread and butter for the rest of the "professional" artists, with recordings only a minor source of income.

[j_e_f_f_g]

with recordings only a minor source of income.

That's always been the case. Typical royalties are a few pennies on the dollar, and then creative bookkeeping by record/publishing businesses reduce that down to zero.

Even famous musicians have alleged that they haven't received royalties they were due.

Musicians have always relied on live shows, media appearances, endorsements, merchandizing, and sponsors as a significant percentage of their revenue. Merlyn's allegation that there is "more music" marketed today, versus the past, is completely unfounded. I see no evidence to support such a conclusion. Furthermore, the hypothesis that this alleged "surplus of recorded music" has made live performance more valuable is also not backed up with any evidence. In the past, every wedding reception had a live band. Now, a wedding reception is more likely to replace the live band with a DJ playing recorded music.

Record companies have been replaced by music download services using the same compensation deals as before. And ASCAP and BMI still handle the publishing rights, just as they've done for a century.

[merlyn]

I'll leave you to your Swiss cheese logic. It's really not worth dealing with any of your points, as it's likely the discussion will descend into the usual ad hominem. Posting FUD is more to be pitied than scolded.

[GMaq]

Well... slightly off topic but on the subject of getting paid...

@merlyn @j_e_f_f_g
As entertaining as your barb trading can be it's really getting tired and derailing far too many threads. If I didn't know you were both far more intelligent than I I'd be tempted to knock your heads together. Let's put the straw men and the ad hominii in the closet for a while... please...?

I'm no authority on making money from recordings but I have been gigging for over 30 years and in my neck of the woods unless you're doing corporate stuff the pay per person is about the same as it was when I started in the late 80's...(as in $100.00/person on the average) Oh and that's playing Covers... if you're doing original stuff enjoy being jammed on a bill with 5 other bands and drinking your entire pay with the first sip of beer you put on your tab... Weddings can be up a notch for the extra hassle and time requirements but it's a killer to see a DJ walk into a venue with 2 powered bluetooth speakers, a Spotify/Apple/Amazon subscription and their Smartphone and pull in over $1000.00..

Since Covid-19 the music economy has shrunk even further and most of my old haunts that hired full bands now only hire solo and duo acoustic acts... If that wasn't disheartening enough the growing GenZ audiences sit there scrolling through TikToks because by the first chorus of your sound check song you've exhausted their attention spans and if your repertoire hasn't been in a TikTok Vid or a topical Meme this week they don't want to know about it.., Wait for AI..., we musicians can't even fathom how obsolete and unnecessary we have already become, if you're lucky (and older) you may still draw your crowd living in their former glory days and yearning for the live human experience, but there is absolutely no indication to me that the current and future young generations are going to consume and enjoy music anything like what the current paradigm is. Times change and change is unavoidable, it's certainly not changing for the better as far as working live musicians go..

[sunrat]

... it's a killer to see a DJ walk into a venue with 2 powered bluetooth speakers, a Spotify/Apple/Amazon subscription and their Smartphone and pull in over $1000.00..

Amen brother, one of my pet peeves when I was working gigs as sound engineer and/or house tech. I'd get $300-ish for a 10 hour stint, and "DJs" would come in and play mp3s they stole off the internet, often with execrable audio quality and questionable taste, and get $300 for standing around pressing play for 2 hours.
I did have some respect for those who would only play vinyl as compiling a suitable collection was mostly a labour of love. I suspect DJ rates were based on the not inconsiderable cost involved in buying records. These days most DJs are scammers IMO.

[j_e_f_f_g]

it's certainly not changing for the better as far as working live musicians go..

Exactly my point. There are so many obvious observations one can make about why it's getting harder to "make a living as a musician" (ie, tightening of the economy causing reduced hiring of musicians and/or replacement by DJs, inflation and cost-of-living going up while musician salaries have not, no improvement in the terms of royalties/publishing, etc).

How then do you ignore all that, and somehow conclude (with no data source I've ever seen corroborate) that it's "hard to make a living as a musician" due to a "surplus of music"??

P.S. I've engaged in no ad hominem attacks in this thread. I simply identified an assertation that I see no justification for. The fact that merlyn appears to have read a book that proposed it is irrelevant. It's just totally unfounded, and I think it's wrong when you consider the above rationales.