The music industry today seems to be a golden age for aspiring musicians, but are we losing the heart of music?
With the advent of streaming services, home recording and short-form consumable media, it seems like the perfect time to launch a career in music. But with this massive influx of new content, many artists feel drowned out in the sea of art and are looking towards new formats of media to stand out.
Local artist Trey Fifer is currently studying Audio Engineering at Spokane Falls Community College in hopes of one day owning a studio and producing his own hip-hop and RnB.
“At home is where you’ll start out…but at home the quality doesn’t usually ever sound as good as the studio,” Fifer said. “And that’s why you gotta get live so people know you so you can get the money to get into the studio.”
He talks about the viability of becoming a full time artist.
“Right now I feel it’s hard and easy at the same time,”said Fifer. “It’s easy because of social media, and once you start being consistent on social media and you know how to work around it, you can get your name out there from just one song. The hard part is how much you’re getting each stream and how much are the streams altogether making you?”
Another pressing issue of the industry Fifer mentions is reposting and media theft.
“Keeping track of where all of your music has been,” Fifer said. “Because some people take a Drake song…from his page or something and then post it on YouTube, so essentially your music can be streamed billions of times but you only get the money when it’s your account and you’re making so little that it’s ridiculous.”
With an average Spotify stream making between $0.003-$0.005 it’s easy to see how turning to social media or live performances is the answer for so many artists.
Asher Gordon, Bishopp Thiesfcn and Luca Malara, are founding members of their teenage indie alt-rock band, Fall of the Conscience. After struggling to find the right members and gigging across Spokane, they feel they’re finally beginning to find success with the aid of social media.
“With the Instagram Reel popping off and everything like that, I think our song Nevermind is sitting at like, almost 20,000 streams,” Luca says.
He is referencing an Instagram video he had made with his bandmate Asher shortly after the single had been released. The video is a short format comedy between the bandmates with one pretending to be a Dad cancelling the band.
“We’ve made so many Instagram Reels and they’re insane. We were just kind of making the videos at this point, just as a fun thing,” said Luca. “On a good day we would get 10,000 views. But this video, I think it has 900,000,47 views. We were sitting at 50 followers on Instagram and now we’re at 9,000.”
Aspiring producer Mwangi Kariuki, has seen his fair share of the music industry. While growing up in Kenya throughout the early 2000s, he found himself falling in love with Kanye West’s The College Dropout record. He explored various gigs adjacent to music like album cover artwork and visual DJ-ing, but never found a way to make solely producing music financially viable.
“Then that became more of a hobby because I couldn’t figure out how to make money from making music…so I just kept teaching myself and I would produce wherever I could,” said Kariuki. “I would produce a beat for a local musician and sometimes they would go all the way to the point where they would release the song. You never know what gets released, you just hope that it does and you get paid.”
Kariuki stresses the nature of the industry and how it can be corruptive in a way. Many artists end up in a self-destructing cycle of chasing fame instead of pursuing the perfection of their craft; the art of music.
“You have to have an undying passion for the art because there will be times when things aren’t going well financially but you still have to have something that pushes you to create.”
For any question or comments on this story, please contact Alex Cover at sfcc.alexander.cover@gmail.com.