The Music Industry One Year into the Pandemic
By Arjun Novotny-Shandas
Just over a year ago, DeAunn Davis and Adam Snider were living and working as professional musicians. Both had a doctorate for their respective instrument: for Davis, the horn, and for Snider, the tuba. Davis was playing for the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra and freelancing for various orchestras and brass groups across Colorado. Snider was the principal tuba for the Boise Philharmonic in Idaho. He also played for the Central City Opera, worked for the Boulder Philharmonic as their concert production manager and wrote grants for The Denver Brass.
In early 2020, the married couple were already worried about COVID-19 since Davis had been seriously sick a few years earlier. Snider was in Boise, Idaho, finishing up a concert cycle in the beginning of March 2020, and they both decided it was safer for him to drive back to Boulder.
“As soon as he got back, all of my work for the next six months was canceled in two days,” Davis says.
“It was like a spigot going from all the way on, to all the way off,” Snider elaborates.
In March of 2020, businesses all across the U.S. began shutting down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Jobs were lost in all industries of the economy, leading to Great Depression levels of unemployment. However, the music industry faced devastation at a level greater than almost any other industry.
Live performances, which bring in significant revenue, proved impossible during a global pandemic. Luckily, Davis and Snider had revenue streams that did not require them to play music for in-person audiences. The orchestras they played for moved quickly to virtual performances to keep donations coming.
“It did cut our income significantly, but we were still able to pay our bills,” Davis says.
Not everyone was so fortunate. Davis and Snider know of musicians who lost their salary and health insurance from organizations they played for. The famed music venue First Avenue in Minneapolis used to have hundreds of live shows a year. This past year, they had two–and they were live streams.
“We were at around 500 employees before the shutdowns,” owner Danya Frank shares during an interview in February. “We furloughed 98% [of our staff].”
According to an article published by the World Economic Forum, the global music industry is worth over $50 billion. Slightly more than half of all income comes from live music. The other half comes from recorded music—a combination of streaming, digital downloads, physical sales and revenues from licensing entertainment music. Until recently, live music made up a clear majority of the music industry’s income. Over the past few years, recorded music has become an increasingly larger proportion of global music industry revenue. Even before the pandemic, trends predicted that recorded music would overtake live music as the leading source of revenue.
With live performances canceled for the foreseeable future, the industry’s total revenue has been cut in half, requiring radical change. Livestreaming has become a potential replacement. The American rock band Underoath has had success in this regard.
During the summer of 2020, the band launched “Underoath: Observatory,” a series of concerts livestreamed every Friday for three weeks. Each concert, Underoath performed one album at an undisclosed location known only as “The Observatory.” Even before the first livestream, the band raked in six-figures in ticket and merchandise sales.
When all was said and done, Underoath made $800,000, according to an article by New Fury Media. The livestreams did not quite match the income of a typical six-week tour, but still brought in a respectable profit without the usual travel and organizational costs of a live tour.
Despite this, Underoath is an exception, not a rule. Rapper and musician Dessa notes in a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine, “Streaming has made music easy to find, but hard to sell.”
For many artists, touring is a necessary part of bringing in profit, especially after the release of a new album. The vocalist for Senses Fail, Buddy Nielsen, put the predicament into words in an article from Producer Hive:
“I spent two years making [this new record] and if I don’t get to tour on it, it will basically be a waste financially and a large loss. The model now is to pump out music and hope it goes viral. … The only way to extend the life of the record is to tour on it… Labels no longer push records after they come out, unless it’s viral…There just isn’t much to do. Most bands are hanging on to their records in hopes we can tour this summer, but I highly doubt that happens.”
With close to $30 billion in losses from the absence of live music events, the music industry did not have a good year. In Colorado alone, the first few months of the pandemic resulted in the loss of 8,372 music jobs. That is a full 51% of all music industry jobs in the state gone. Many local or independent artists, in Colorado and all over the country, cannot take advantage of streaming to help offset losses from shutdowns.
Koo Qua, a Denver based M.C., tried again and again to put her music on streaming platforms as an independent artist. She was not taken seriously until she joined with LMIT, a distribution service. Being successful in streaming requires a combination of business and music skills that many artists were not prepared for.
“Music is forever, music is the universal language,” Koo Qua said in a recent 303 Magazine article. “But you have to have so much business knowledge…you don’t know that you’re signing up to do calculus.”
Live music may have taken a serious hit, but the story of the music industry is not all bad. Physical music sales were down, but listeners streamed so much music that total audio consumption bounced up about 10 points in the first half of 2020. In a strange twist of fate, vinyl sales made up 27% of all album sales in 2020, which was in large part due to a massive Christmas surge in purchases that saw the best week for vinyl since Nielsen Music/MRC Data began tracking music sales in 1991.
Musical creativity did not go anywhere either. Researchers at MIT created a musical rendition of the COVID-19 virus. Markus Buehler, a musician and engineer, and his colleagues assigned musical accompaniment to each protein and structural element of the virus. The resulting “Viral Counterpoint of the Coronavirus Spike Protein” would never have existed without the pandemic.
Another creative work that the world might have missed out on had the pandemic never occurred? Christmas music videos DeAunn Davis and Adam Snider composed, arranged and filmed for their families whom they could not be with over the holidays.
“[The videos] are not something we would normally have done or even have had the time to do,” Davis says. “So, if [you] want a little rosy outlook, there it is!”
It is off-season, but Davis and Snider’s work can be viewed by audiences through YouTube:
Eine Kleine Cookiemusik:
A Visit From St. Nick:
In the past year, the music industry has changed. Even with the pandemic’s end within sight, will things ever go back to the way they were? How long will it take until everyone feels safe enough to rub shoulders at concerts or dance at a club? Some shifts might become permanent. It is hard to say. But through all the uncertainty, music will always, in some form or another, be with us.
