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The new economics of music criticism

Not unexpectedly I ran into a couple familiar faces when we drove cross-state to Louisville to see the opening night of the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss tour. One of whom was reviewing the show for...let's just say it's a major entertainment conglomerate, with tendrils throughout the print and online world. For $50.

Which, by way of reference, is rather less than No Depression would have paid to review the show for our print edition, and we never were able to pay our writers near what they were worth, nor what they (at least once upon a time) commanded based on their experience and skill. (Your co-editors, as co-owners with staff positions, have never been paid additionally for what they write.)

Now...setting aside the two free tickets critics typically receive, though in the old days those tickets would have been paid for by the media organization so as to avoid conflicts of interest...let's see how this works out as a way to make a living. The tickets don't count because you can't eat them unless you scalp them, which is really unethical. And wrong. Just plain wrong. And the tickets don't count because we're talking here about making a living, and not even the IRS counts free tickets as income. At least I'm pretty sure they don't.

So. Let's say our reviewer lives near to the venue and it takes only a gallon of gas to get to the concert. That's $4. Parking across the street was $5. Let's assume no beer was purchased at the show, because we're trying to make a living here. You had to get to the box office before 8 p.m. to collect those free tickets, and the concert got out something after 11 p.m. So that's three...three and a half, maybe four if traffic stunk (hey, plumbers charge for travel from the time they leave until the time they return to their shop). And then let's say this writer, a professional who actually took notes (as opposed to your humble and error-ridden scribe), spent only another hour writing the actual review. Which doesn't count thinking time, and would be pretty quick for most of us. So that's four and a half hours of work, and I know it may seem funny to talk about sitting in good seats watching terrific music as work, but it is work when you're reviewing, and, again, this is how we make our living, we music critics.

The math works like this, then:
$9 gas and parking, which makes the net freelance income $41.
Divide 41 by 4.5 hours of work, comes out to $9.11 an hour. As of July 1 minimum wage in Kentucky will be $6.55. So it's nice to know that a college education, and decades of experience, is worth something.

This, perhaps, is how you make money in the new online ecology: By exploiting content providers. Let's see...the music is free, the writing about it might as well be free, but the people who make the boxes the music plays on and the sites on which it is discussed, they're getting paid, and some of them quite handsomely.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Only a bit worse, from the perspective of the caste I have proudly belonged to these last 21 years.

Posted by grant on April 23, 2008 8:29 AM | Permalink

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