CMU School of Drama


Thursday, April 23, 2015

Here's Why You Probably Don't Want To Work In The Australian Music Industry

www.tonedeaf.com.au: On the surface, working in the music industry seems like an ideal for many people. If you’re a performer, it’s spending your days writing songs and zig-zagging between studios, for promoters it’s the crazy, haphazard situations involved with bringing a huge act into town, as for roadies, we all know the Motörhead song.

2 comments:

Katie Pyne said...

This is an incredibly serious issue and I'm very upset I haven't heard about it until now. That being said, I don't think that we can stand idly by and let this resolve itself. Even though we don't live in Australia, it's time to end the stigma of being "just a roadie". I've gotten the questions about whether I really just "wanted to be an actor but couldn't." And although the muggles are just trying to understand, they are being demeaning without realizing it. While there are certainly a myriad of stressors stemming from working in the arts, some of the biggest ones comes from people who are on the outside and judge the profession without prior education. This goes beyond the scoffs at family gatherings, though at this point in my own life, are getting extremely annoying. By now, I've reached a point where I can sort of explain stage management in a couple of sentences, but at that point; I've lost my target audience. Pursuing careers in the arts are difficult and it's time we change the stigma that we're going into a worthless profession. However, finding a way to do that is going to take some time and education.

Alex E. S. Reed said...

So this article really doesn’t have anything to do with specifically the Australian music industry, it’s pretty representative of the music industry as a whole. Not just the music industry entertainment as whole, the public has ingrained themselves with the notion that because we are a “pleasure” industry that our craft isn’t worth the pay that we deserve. Just because mush of our work is talent rather than skill based dosent mean we should come free and cheap. It takes a lot of emotional and finical investment to do what we do and that needs to be represented in the amount of recompense that we receive from our employers. People that should inherently understand what the industry takes, yet for some reason still short their talent. I understand that this includes a lot of legal jargon and statutes and ways that this has been done for decades, but every system needs maintenance once in a while, its time we took at look at ours.