Finding Nirvana in the Age of Streaming — The life of a working musician (Part III)

How Laura Carbone from Germany adapted to digitization and gained a foothold in the US.

Most music lovers can remember a defining moment in their youth when they first tapped into the transcendent quality of music. For Laura Carbone, that moment arrived when her father walked into her childhood home in Sinsheim, Germany with Nirvana’s Nevermind and played it on their home stereo. She recounts how the record “beamed her into another world”:

“My dad brought home a record he got from a colleague at work, and neither of us had the slightest idea what would come out of the speakers. Nirvana got me to start playing the guitar and writing my first songs as a teenager in awe of releasing tension, noise and anger.”

She knew little then of the path she was embarking on. Fast forward a decade, and Carbone is currently working on her third album while splitting her time between Berlin and Los Angeles. If you think about the constant sunny weather of LA, where pool parties and weekend stays at a Malibu beach house are the norm, you’d be hard pressed to imagine how it inspired Carbone’s second album, the Empty Sea.

It is a collection of raw, melancholic, visceral tracks featuring sparse arrangements and a pained, elegiac main vocal. The title track gradually builds using a warm organ sound accompanied by gentle rhythm guitar, coupled with a commanding descending scale. The whole album sounds like a stark counterpoint to the cliché LA lifestyle. But that’s the magic of music — for Carbone, Southern California provides the setting for a “a blissful retreat into isolation, nature and music” where she feels “overwhelmingly creative and very free”.

Carbone made her US debut at the SXSW in 2016. The US had been on her radar for a very long time, and gaining a foothold was a major stepping stone in her career. Indeed, her evolution from part-time to full-time artist is quite recent — she only quit her day job two years ago. When it comes to being an artist, Carbone regards this as her true profession.

While this gave her the time and energy to focus exclusively on her music, it also meant juggling many competing priorities while balancing the books:

“Being an artist means being confronted with planning and executing many projects at once… I had to learn to allow some room for changes and unforeseen circumstances, whether they influence things in a good or bad way.

Currently, my third album is a top priority, but sometimes I need to hit the pause button so that I can focus on the concepts for a tour or concert.”

Despite being among the first generation of musicians to come of age after digitization, she has retained an attachment to physical media. Just like that formative Nirvana album that came into her possession, with lightly scratched jewel case and well-worn sleeve, physical objects provide a way to expand and compliment the listening experience of her fans:

“The first item I sold was a DIY CD copied at home with a handmade inlay — I found some flowers that I had pressed a while back in an old heavy book. I scanned them in, put the lyrics on top and printed it on see-through silk paper — I still love the way it looks and feels…

The latest addition is my photo book that visualizes the paths I walked and the places I spent time while creating the “Empty Sea” album. To me it’s a very intimate ‘source of revenue’ — as an artist working with music you get used to sharing your inner world in sound and lyrics. It was new for me to allow people to also see what I saw and share those precious moments with the world — to make them traceable.”

Carbone’s comments are imbued with a sense that something has been lost in the digital age. She seems to feel that the ubiquity of music on streaming sites, coupled with the more superficial interaction with the underlying art, has turned some listeners into music consumers rather than music fans. However, she remains optimistic that this could be beginning to change:

“I have only heard about those “golden times” when you would get an actual return from releasing music… I think it’s the economy in general and people’s willingness to pay for art that needs to change. Creating a 3:30 minute song can take years, sometimes with a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Everyone knows that streaming isn’t repaying this, so perhaps they could find other ways to do so — by buying a physical record, a t-shirt at a show, or by becoming a patron.”

Carbone has combined the revenue from live shows with a selection of innovative and highly personalized physical products to generate a balanced income in the digital age. Nevertheless, digitization has undoubtedly changed the value attached to music and made it much more difficult to be a musician who places emphasis on the art on recording. At Utopia, we aim to fix this — by combining technologies such as big data and blockchain technology to create a music ecosystem that compensates artists fairly for their recorded work.

Laura Carbone is currently touring North America. Her latest album, Empty Sea is available on streaming sites.

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