Tuesday, November 23, 2021
Pandemic leaves 83% of musicians unable to find regular work
Access All Areas: A third of professional musicians were earning nothing from music, with 22% considering leaving the industry, after live event restrictions were lifted earlier this year, according to research by mental health charity Help Musicians.
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3 comments:
I appreciate when articles are written about lesser known companies and organizations. I hadn’t heard of this organization before but it sounds like they are doing a lot of good. I think that, at least governmentally, a lot of relief effort when in to the theatre industry, almost too late, but it came. Now we are realizing that this pandemic has drastically effected many arts companies, including dancers and musicians. The entertainment industry is slowing coming back but according to this article, not fast enough for people to have steady jobs. I do fear that with so many people leaving the arts and entertainment industry, there may even be less entering for the same reasons. If it’s not sustainable, it’s not. But what will nations do when there is less and less art available to the masses? I fear this is going to result in yet another culture shift and I’m not sure if it will be for better or for worse.
When I saw this article headline, I immediately thought about the advent of and the transition from silent films to sound films. In the silent film era, films would often be accompanied by musicians in the theatre to play a live soundtrack. When technology was developed so that music and sound could be directly recorded onto reels of film, there was significantly less need for live musicians, which then put many of them out of work. That was a very permanent cultural shift, because we don't have live accompaniment in movie theaters nowadays. I do not know what will happen to the musicians currently out of work, and obviously the circumstances of unemployment now are different from the circumstances surrounding the beginnings of sound film, but I have no way of knowing whether this wave of unemployment will become permanent for live musicians. I hope not. It always saddens me to see an arts industry wilt.
This definitely is a huge challenge because we are getting close to year two of the pandemic and it doesn’t look like there’s a miraculous ending in sight. This also means that even if musicians do finally find a boost in work and the industry wide money problems start to disappear, less people will be inclined to go into the industry from the beginning and we’ll have less musicians to start with. The other thing is that there are many live and recorder music adjacent jobs that are going to end up not existing, especially folks like sound techs and others. The good news is that because jobs like that many times don’t guarantee income, people who work in the entertainment industry have other types of job skills that they may be able to rely on during this very long hiatus from their normal lives. I certainly hope that live music comes back better than ever soon.
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