Make Me Wanna Holler: New Musician Study Explains Why So Many Sing The Blues

 

Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty Images – NYC Busking
STACKED DECK: According to a musicians survey recently conducted by the Music Industry Research Association, musicians are more likely to experience discrimination, earn less than $23,000 per year, suffer anxiety or panic attacks and have substance abuse issues.

Richard Swift may not be a household name, but bands he’s played with –  including The Shins, The Arcs and The Black Keys – certainly are. He’s also a solo artist, multi-instrumentalist, short-filmmaker, recording studio founder and producer. And he’s worked with artists including Foxygen, Guster, Damien Jurado, Sharon Van Etten, the Mynabirds and others.

But at press time, Swift was in a Tacoma, Wash., hospital with an unidentified, but reportedly life-threatening, medical condition. He is uninsured and friends have started a GoFundMe campaign, an all too frequent sight on social media for helping those in need – especially for musicians.

A week earlier, a disturbing report reinforcing the difficulty of being a musician was released by the Music Industry Research Association with the results of a Musicians Survey, timed for the non-profit’s annual conference in Los Angeles.

The study, conducted by MIRA and the Princeton University Survey Research Center in partnership with MusiCares, examined income, health, substance abuse, sexual harassment and racial discrimination among those who earn at least part of their income from making music – whether by busking on street corners, singing in church choirs, composing, performing at weddings or the local pub, or touring the globe. People just like Swift.

The research effort is the latest project for MIRA, launched last year by Alan B. Krueger, whose bona fides include his day job as Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton.

He’s also the former chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Closer to home, he presented a keynote report on ticket pricing during the 2004 Concert Industry Consortium and conducted a roundtable called “Rockonomics: Learning From The Pollstar Boxoffice Database” at Pollstar Live! last February.

The Musician’s Survey sample included 1,227 musicians who were interviewed between April 12 and June 2. More than half were MusiCares clients who, in turn, referred other musicians to participate. Others were recruited from a list of music industry personnel maintained by the American List Council.

In this year of #MeToo and #TimesUp, MIRA’s findings are perhaps most disheartening. MIRA found women make up just one-third of the professional musicians surveyed and yet 67.1 percent of them say they were sexually harassed – which likely explains why there are far fewer female musicians.

Another disturbing metric: 72 percent of female musicians say they were discriminated against because of their sex.

Corresponding figures in the general U.S. population are 42 percent and 28 percent, respectively.

This damning data also showed racism in the music industry over-indexed by a wide margin with an unconscionable 83 percent of non-white musicians saying they faced racial discrimination compared with 36 percent of other self-employed workers.

– Dr. Alan B. Krueger

“I think harassment and discrimination are bigger issues for female musicians than most other employees because they are independent contractors and they have fewer protections,” Kreuger tells Pollstar.

“They don’t have a human resources office, they aren’t covered by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and the people with power have a lot of power.

“I suspect it’s the case that, in superstar industries like movies and music where there’s such an enormous gap between those who … make it to the top and everyone else, that there’s a greater imbalance of power that will increase the likelihood of sexual discrimination and harassment.”

Questions of sexual harassment and gender and racial discrimination were added to the survey at the urging of Tina Tchen, formerly Michelle Obama’s chief of staff and an attorney for the Times Up Legal Defense Fund, who, most significantly, heads The Recording Academy’s task force on inclusion and diversity.

 “We are just digesting the data but one of the things that is very public is that the Recording Academy has launched its task force, with Tina Tchen, to address these topics specifically,” Debbie Connell, MusiCares’ senior executive director, tells Pollstar.

“I would expect MusiCares to be working very closely with this task force to come up with some solutions and recommendations how we as an industry move forward, and this is included. It’s a piece of a bigger puzzle and it’s going to be a collaborative effort for us all.”

Krueger says the conversation with Tchen “set off the light bulb” to include those questions in the survey. Krueger pledges to continue the conversation going forward.

Whether this means proscriptive actions like increasing diversity at agencies, venues and management or a concerted effort by the industry to book and represent an artist mix that better reflects the general population,
or a public outreach campaign that educates our business has yet to be determined.

Anyone who thinks being an artist is an easy path should look at the study’s findings on musicians’ struggles with mental health, which occur at a far higher rate than the general population, the study finds.

MIRA cited a 2016 survey of 2,200 professional musicians in the U.K. by Help Musicians U.K. that found “71 percent had suffered from anxiety and panic attacks, 69 percent had suffered from depression, and 18 percent had suffered from some other form of mental illness.”

Terming those statistics “alarming,” MIRA did a deep dive into the subject and found its results among American musicians no more encouraging. “Half of musicians reported feeling down, depressed or hopeless at least several days” in the two weeks prior to the survey period, the study states.

Another alarming statistic: 11.8 percent of the respondents reported “thoughts that [they] would be better off dead or hurting [themselves] in some way” for at least several days during the same period, compared with 3.4 percent of the population. Two-thirds of those responding reported suffering anxiety around performing at some point in their lives.

“Like anyone, artists and musicians want to be liked and accepted,” one focus group participant said of the reasons for his anxiety. “But unique to creatives, rejection is not just about the work … It’s about you personally … because it’s your unique expression, unlike anyone else’s.”

Not as surprising, after decades of the archetypal mythos of “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” the study revealed that substance abuse is higher among musicians than the general public, though marijuana use in the last month was nearly the same: 28.7 percent of musicians said they’ve used the variably legal weed, compared with 28.2 percent nationally.

Musicians were nearly twice as likely to drink alcohol, four or more times per week then the general population.

Other drug use, while not as pervasive as pot, occurred at much higher levels: Cocaine (in any form) use among musicians: 3.5 percent; among non-musicians, 0.7 percent; ecstasy: 1.4 percent vs. 0.2 percent; LSD: 1.8 percent vs. 0.1 percent; speed: 1.3 percent vs. 0.7 percent; heroin or opium: 0.5 percent vs. 0.2 percent; and meth: 0.9 percent vs. 0.3 percent.

Median income for musicians continues to be woeful, with no appreciable change from earlier studies pinning median income from $20,000 and $25,000 per year between 2012-16 to a current $21,300.

And the study found that the average musician only earned two-thirds of their annual income from music-related activities, underscoring the sad necessity of the adage, “Don’t quit your day job.”

In the area of health care, music-related injuries were reported by about half of the sample group, with back and neck injuries leading those at 24.8 percent, repetitive strain among 23 percent and hearing issues citied by 22.2 percent of respondents.

While MusiCares is widely known for its substance abuse programs, only 3 percent of its clients come to the organization for those services. The majority, MusiCares’ Connell says, come for assistance with hearing issues.

“The stigma around hearing loss in the music industry, and the fear that so many people have that they won’t work if somebody knows about it, is lifting and we’re very proud of those and other preventative efforts,” Connell says. “We are doing our best to make sure music people have what they need to take care of themselves.”

One of those acute needs is health insurance.

The silver lining to the injury rate, and possibly the best news coming from the survey, is the number of musicians covered by some sort of health insurance has spiked in the years since the Affordable Care Act was implemented in full in 2015.

A study conducted by the Future of Music Coalition in 2013 found that 57 percent of musicians had health coverage. MIRA’s study, asking the identical question about coverage, returned 87.7 percent of respondents saying they are currently covered. About half say they purchased private insurance or are covered by Medicaid, two sources of coverage that were expanded under the ACA.

MIRA reports that figure is only slightly lower than that of all workers, but Krueger cautions that coverage in some areas remains inadequate for musicians.

“A lot of services aren’t covered by health insurance, like mental health,” Krueger says. “It’s a big area that wouldn’t necessarily be covered. That’s why I mention that health insurance may not necessarily be adequate.”

But with the future of ACA in doubt, Connell says MusiCares will continue to assist artists in procuring and paying for insurance and premiums going forward.

“We have partnerships and entities we work closely with that are experts in that realm and able to provide access to lower cost health insurance and help negotiate medical bills and help those that are uninsured if they have a significant medical crisis,” Connell says. “We were pleasantly surprised by those (currently covered) numbers but we continue to see clients who have medical concerns once they receive a diagnosis.

“Some of those clients are insured but have a very high-deductible plan, $6,500 a year, and if they are making the average of $20,000 or $25,000 a year that has a huge impact. We also provide funding for premiums. Affording the premiums is often prohibitive and we can help them with that,” she said.

A silver lining may ironically be job satisfaction. The surveyed artists cited artistic expression, performing, audience appreciation and collaboration with other artists – rather than any financial rewards – as their favorite aspects of being a working musician.

Krueger and Connell acknowledge MIRA’s work helps not only the musicians, but the industry as well. Identifying musicians’ concerns can help funnel direct resources toward treating or helping to reverse problems that can stop a career in its tracks.

“Musicians are not adequately represented in the music business,” Krueger says. “We’d like to provide more data for people to do research with. I think the report hits the highlights of what the survey tells us, but there is more that can be done.”

And that’s where we are, left with the devil and the details but no course of action. MIRA’s findings should be a source of outrage and tremendous embarrassment for our industry and ultimately a catalyst for change and, really, a call to arms.

While the data is intended to be used by outside organizations to find solutions to long-entrenched societal conditions, our business can’t wait. Too many, as this survey indicates, are suffering and at risk. We need diversity and inclusion in our ranks now and at every level of the industry.

And for all they do for us and for all the careers they sustain, musicians deserve incomes far above the poverty line, access to first-rate health care and rehabilitation services. All of this is obviously far easier to say than do.

Jess Wolfe/GoFundMe.com – Richard Swift

Meanwhile, for whatever reason – too-high premiums or deductibles, inconsistent or not enough income or whatever other pitfalls befell Richard Swift – there wasn’t enough out there to protect and support him.

It’s a difficult position too many musicians find themselves in. Given the failures of our industry to adequately protect its raison d’être – its creatives and artists – a visit to Swift’s GoFundMe campaign page might feel in order. You can here: https://www.gofundme.com/medical-fund-for-richard-swift.