Shawn Reynaldo, it is an outstanding newsletter First Floor, asked an important question for not just folks like me, but any world that values thriving culture:
Everyone says they want independent music culture, but is anyone willing to pay for it?
When I read Shawn’s work, I tend to imagine Eeyore, rather than Tigger or Christopher Robin. I’ve never met him. But mostly his articles are gloomy and follow the unfortunate journalistic writing of “bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, glimmer-of-hope.” He’s no solutions journalist. And I don’t mean to suggest he should be or that all journalists should be (we need outlets like ProPublica, more outlets like ProPublica, and music-focused outlets like ProPublica—folks like Liz Pelly). I write this to give folks who don’t read First Floor a sense of the tenor and timbre of Shawn’s focus and writing.
Shawn’s glimmer-of-hope paragraph is all true, and I hope it will be taken to heart by more people:
It’s hard not to slip into cliché while talking about what that support needs to look like, but the required tactics and methodology ought to be familiar to even casual music fans. Buying music and merch. Patronizing record shops. Attending local shows, especially the ones at small-to-medium-sized local venues. Subscribing to publications, podcasts and newsletters, prioritizing the ones whose editorial hasn’t been compromised by corporate overlords and (often unacknowledged) brand partnerships. That’s just a partial list, but what it ultimately boils down to is taking an interest in how culture is being funded, and actively avoiding the stuff that doesn’t align with one’s personal values. It’s about being an active consumer, one who makes deliberate and thoughtful choices instead of just passively hoovering up whatever dreck pops up in their feed.
Yes. Please do this! For those already doing this, do as much more as you can and share with others how wonderful it is to do these things.
Shawn throws water on this spark with the next sentence. He doesn’t think this will happen. I understand his feelings and the conclusion he reaches by looking backwards. Please help prove him wrong (by) going forward.
But that’s not what stuck in my craw reading this article—like I said, I both think of Shawn as Eeyore and value his work so much that I read his writing every week and have given him money for that privilege.
What bothered me was his apparent opinion of busking as a way of sharing performance art—music, in this case, but it could also be juggling, acting, etc. Shawn doesn’t just come out and say that busking is bad—certainly not that busking musicians are worth less. But he does imply that having lots of busking—having a world in which more artists busk—is undesirable. Maybe it’s Shawn’s preference for electronic music that makes him feel that way. I don’t know. But it’s a constricting viewpoint.
The two cities I’ve lived in that felt most magical to me are Edinburgh and Halifax (yeah, rather related). One of the big reasons that they felt magical to me is how prominent busking was. To hear buskers nearly every day. To see buskers perform often every week. Halifax even has a massive buskers festival. Artists didn’t attend that festival out of desperation (if so, they hid it exceedingly well), and the audience did not watch out of pity (that many humans can’t fake genuine engagement). The world would be a better place with more of that magic.
To be fair, Shawn was using busking as a metaphor and was borrowing that metaphor from someone else: Mat Dryhurst, who coined the term “e-busking.” Still, the metaphor resonated with Shawn’s values enough for him to adopt it, promote it, and use it in more than just this most recent essay. It was a different writer who likened artists using Substack and other subscription-based revenue strategies to busking. Doing the same thing as I’m doing now, but putting out a digital payment hat is considered busking and therefore undesirable. (You can support me with a donation here.)
Eh.
Shawn lumps in journalists (e.g., using Substack) with musicians. (He is a journalist and is rightfully concerned about the state of music journalism.) It’s true, I’ve never seen a busking journalist. And I’ve had enough interactions with journalists—including working for them—to imagine how journalists would react to seeing one of their own handing out paper copies of their stories with an open typewriter case on the ground. I don’t see anything wrong with that. However, I understand the reaction from a professional and cultural perspective.
Beyond dissing the magic of busking, another aspect of their concern I don’t understand is the idea of “subscription fatigue.” The fact that so many people are offering subscriptions means there aren’t enough people who want to subscribe to the 10,000s of artists (and journalists!) out there. Well, first, mathematically, there are more non-artists/journalists than artists/journalists. More importantly, someone paying a musician for a couple months of a subscription in a given year is more than they often otherwise would, especially if that artist doesn’t live in the same region or constantly pump out albums. Providing fans and well-wishers with another means of support is entirely a good thing.
That doesn’t mean Shawn’s paragraph about what we need in addition isn’t true. It is so true, I’m going to paste it again below so you can read it again, copy it, and paste it into a communication of your own.
It’s hard not to slip into cliché while talking about what that support needs to look like, but the required tactics and methodology ought to be familiar to even casual music fans. Buying music and merch. Patronizing record shops. Attending local shows, especially the ones at small-to-medium-sized local venues. Subscribing to publications, podcasts and newsletters, prioritizing the ones whose editorial hasn’t been compromised by corporate overlords and (often unacknowledged) brand partnerships. That’s just a partial list, but what it ultimately boils down to is taking an interest in how culture is being funded, and actively avoiding the stuff that doesn’t align with one’s personal values. It’s about being an active consumer, one who makes deliberate and thoughtful choices instead of just passively hoovering up whatever dreck pops up in their feed.