Annie Lowrey: The coronavirus recession will be difficult to fight

For musicians, the arrival of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, came as a second cataclysm, the first being music-streaming services’ final triumph about five years ago over other ways of delivering music. Within a year or two, the 40 percent of our income that once came from radio royalties and music sales had vanished, as sites such as Spotify exploded in popularity. These sites pay us an abysmally low royalty rate for our music. My band, Stars, had more than 9 million streams on Spotify last year. Our royalties from that service amounted to less than $35,000. And we split them six ways. Minus management fees. Minus taxes. For 9 million streams of our music. So we had grown accustomed to the sky falling.

But the coronavirus was different. For musicians, the giddy, ecstatic communion of playing live shows—and the certainty that if you got out there and played for the people who like your work, you would make some money doing it—is the reason we do what we do. But that was taken away in a matter of hours, as health regulators, venue operators, and performers came to terms, seemingly all at once, with the dangers of inviting hundreds or thousands of people into the same room. For musicians like me, the one reliable way of making a living had vanished—for the time being, anyway—and we were left with nothing but fear and uncertainty.

My band has been around for two decades now, and our relationship with our audience isn’t just an incidental benefit of performing; it is the entirety of our career. We don’t do the kinds of streaming numbers that would make recording royalties possible for us to live on. We’re not the hip new thing; we can’t rely on any press or buzz to sell tickets for us. Only the emotional connections we have built up with fans over the years keep us solvent and alive as a band. We go to their town and play our music for them in clubs or small theaters, and they, knowing that we bring it every time, keep investing in us by buying a ticket and coming to cheer for us and sing along to songs that, by now, have been in their lives for years. Some of the more generous among them even buy a T-shirt. Despite the mythology that persists about rock and roll—that we are all riding around in limousines, snorting coke off silver platters—most of us live lower-middle-class lives and, like any service-sector workers, we rely on the goodwill of our customers and the consistency of our product. We try to run a good shop and hope that it’s enough to keep the public coming back. Simple.

But then came the virus. No amount of hype, no amount of press adoration or zeitgeist-defining hipness could protect us from the chilling effects of it on our business. The customers we count on to come out and spend some money at night were told they should not do so—even that they must not. And we have no idea when or if they will ever be told that going out the way they used to is okay again.