The Underpaid Reality: The Battle for Fair Pay and Sustainable Careers

If anyone’s interested, I have a really good story to tell about how my sister’s deportation from the New Orleans compelled me to produce a jazz concert, but the real headline here is more pedestrian:  “TORONTO MUSICIANS GOT PAID IN FULL FOR PLAYING IN A BAR”

Surely this happens all the time and we never hear about it.  The more common refrain is that Toronto’s music industry will shrink unless more opportunities are created to employ and showcase talent.  The implication is that financial pressures are eliminating music venues, casting marginal players into the streets.  

My experience in producing the New Orleans Stomp at Grossman’s Tavern for six weeks was the opposite.  All I had to do was arrange payment, flights, and hotel for the New Orleans headliner, work out details with the venue and other musicians, market and staff the event, and then count the money.  

That’s all.  And honestly, it wasn’t that hard because in the end I didn’t do most of the work.  Toby Hughes and Roberta Hunt, two smart, accomplished veterans of the traditional jazz world, directed me every step of the way.  They actually booked the headliner, set up ticket sales, assembled the band, set terms with the venue, and vetted every significant decision I made after that.  All they needed was someone to coordinate the work, sweat the details, and front the money.  

Musicians in Toronto are used to doing all this because no one else will.  It is only for lack of earnest people willing to do the dogsbody work that events like this aren’t more common.  This contributes as much to the decline of live music in the city as any of the other reasons I’ve heard.

It’s unreasonable to ask struggling artists with day jobs to manufacture events for their evening employment.  Like other labours of love, it becomes tiring and demoralizing over a lifetime of unrelieved and unrewarded effort.  It takes a lot of energy to perform for a room full of others, often under challenging circumstances.  Talent welcomes managerial support provided it’s competent and respectful of the art. 

There’s not much of that available to musicians on the ground floor of the business in Toronto.  The venue operators, mostly bars and a few concert halls, are content to have their otherwise dismal product and service offerings enlivened by musicians.  They just won’t pay for time spent training, practicing, transporting equipment, and performing.  It is very common for musicians to be passing the hat around a bar that would be empty without them.  Most are paid less than the wait staff and dishwashers.

Of course the more talented performers get more gigs on better terms, it’s true.  Still the music industry doesn’t operate on a principled merit system, and there are many deserving professionals struggling to compete with garage band hobbyists, booked by indifferent bar managers.  

The most promising young musicians get picked up by agencies and some get signed to record labels.  Here too the musician labours to pay for the opportunities this seems to promise.  Record companies draw from a surprisingly large pool of government grants that incentivize music production and distribution, but equally surprising is how little this obliges these companies to do for the musicians.  Ask a young musician about what exactly their agency does to improve their career prospects, and you’ll hear a lot of “wells,” “ums,” and “I dunnos.”  

Pardon this digression, but Toby and Roberta knew how to book venues and talent and sell tickets, yet simply lack the bandwidth to do all of this for themselves all the time, while putting in the hours needed to master their craft in addition to their day jobs.  There is no lack of talent and commitment among Toronto’s musicians.  But we’re asking too much of them if we rely on musicians to elevate the scale of events and programs even to the level we took the New Orleans Stomp at Grossman’s Tavern.  

Another thing I learned was that the venue managers can make a huge difference.  At Grossman’s, Christina has been the music czar for the last 20 years.  She recognized the value of bringing a ticketed performance to a bar that’s famous for providing “free” music.   She’d seen previous iterations of the New Orleans Stomp at the Tranzac Club and Lula Lounge, and wanted it for her bar.  So she made it easy and offered a modest contribution toward show costs instead of charging rent.  

Let me emphasize “contribution.”   All the alternatives were charging hefty rents and service fees while taking in thousands of dollars in food and beverage sales.  Christina knew that the New Orleans Stomp would pack her bar on a night that would otherwise be mostly empty; a huge return on a small investment.  

Because the bar was smaller than the concert venues used in the past, it was necessary to perform two shows in one night to generate enough ticket revenue.  This led to a couple of other interesting discoveries.  

First, there is so little live music still heard on that stretch of Spadina Avenue that the wonderful sounds of the early show attracted passersby to look in, inquire, and return to buy tickets for the second show.   It was a warm night.  Music was once heard every night, on every block.  All it took to recreate this effect for one night, was for someone to book a great band, open the windows, and let the street hear the music.

Just to tie this off, the musicians who gave so much were elated afterwards.  They live for the chance to connect audiences to the art.  Yet the money was important.  It signified respect.  It gave their work more value, and their performances reflected this.  It signalled the appreciation of a paying and attentive audience.  It showed that the venue operator believed in them. 

The lesson for me:  Support and compensate the musicians and everyone in the live music ecosystem will be rewarded.  If they’re required to create and market their own events, or left to pass the hat after performances, playing in shabby venues for uninvested proprietors and inattentive audiences, nothing good will happen.  Prospects will become more bleak and fewer professionals will dedicate themselves to the practice.  Venue income will decline in parallel to performance quality and audiences will drift away. 

A potential solution to this incoming problem could be inspired by a recently proposed ordinance in New Orleans, which mandates a minimum payment of $200 per hour for musicians performing at public events. Implementing a similar policy in Toronto could provide a much-needed financial safety net for local artists, ensuring that they are fairly compensated for their time, talent and efforts. Such a measure could also encourage more venues to host live music and drive local business. Over time, this may encourage development in Toronto’s music scene and lead to a more sustainable environment for the city’s many musicians.