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One very small thing I wish more people understood was how hard independent touring musicians work, and how dedicated and passionate they have to be about what they& #39;re doing to get to the point where anybody besides their pre-existing friends knows they exist.
If you& #39;ve ever enjoyed a live performance or an album by a band that isn& #39;t on a major label and isn& #39;t from your city, it& #39;s almost guaranteed that the people in that band were more committed to their music than you could possibly guess! Touring is wicked hard!
And even besides touring itself, a band staying together as a creative musical entity at all involves so much collaboration and interpersonal dynamics management. I know it& #39;s intense and I& #39;ve barely done it myself - certainly never on the road for long periods of time!
And definitely not with the financial, organizational, emotional, professional etc. pressures that such a life brings.
Basically what I& #39;m saying is: recording/performing musicians work really hard, most of them are no longer (if ever) making much money at all from recordings (thanks to pitiful streaming royalty rates) and now they& #39;re not making any live revenue either.
If you are spending any time during this quarantine listening to music, consider sending your favorite artists some $! Some of them have Patreon, some have music on sites like @Bandcamp that have fair revenue splits (Bandcamp is even waiving its share 1x month in June+July!).
You can use sites like this to give your favorite artists money even if you use streaming services! You don& #39;t even have to bother downloading the files; you can keep using Spotify or whatever. But you& #39;ll be supporting musicians you love.
Here& #39;s an idea: open up your streaming app and check your 5 most listened to artists during the last 2 months. Then figure out how to give each of them a little money. Especially if you would typically be going to shows.
Maybe, if you& #39;re still financially stable despite this economic hell world of virus-afflicted late capitalism, you could figure out what your typical show-going budget is and figure out some other way to send it to your fave artists.
Anyway these are just some ideas. The next @Bandcamp revenue-share-waiving days are June 5 and July 3, those would be great days to pay for some music whether you really need to download those files or not.
