Alan Ratcliffe wrote
Otherwise, you'll likely end up like most people - squeezing your music in to the limited time you have left after Uni, then work, then work and family - and before you know it, you're fifty and telling some young salesperson at a music store how you "used to be in a band" as you join up for Weekend Warriors.
Does it have to be that way? It seems to me that there's many ways that you can play music - depending on what you want.
In 2010 I saw a lady by the name of Camille O'Sullivan singing in London. Fab singer, terrific performance. She's been on TV, she has records, she gigs, but not all the time. She's an architect as well, and architecture pays the bills and that allows her to follow her own musical instincts - which are not main stream. The trade off might be that she has rather less external pressure on her career because she doesn't need the record company to survive. I don't know the exact recipe, but I'd guess she's looking for a certain amount from her live work and CD sales, but it's not her only revenue stream and she could survive without it, so she's immune to the pressure of the record company trying to turn her into whatever they think she could be that will also sell. If she wants to do something else (like bawdy Shakespearean pieces, which I believe she is thinking of for a run of shows in London) then she can.
Obviously there's a balancing act - she has to get enough out of the day job to survive and to provide for retirement, and she has to spend enough time at that that she can remain visible in that part of the business world.
The Waterson Family toured the same year. They don't all survive just from recording and performance, several of them have 9 to 5s. OK... in terms of earning power (from music) we are not exactly talking U2 or Coldplay here, but, again, they tour, they have DVDs, they have an audience and they get a lot of satisfaction from their musical exploits (and can even pack it in if they want to, which they did for a few years).
Richard Thompson was asked in an interview who he hung around with and jammed with when he was at home in California instead of being on the road. I guess the interviewer was expecting names like Henry Kaiser or David Lindley, but RT said (something like) "I'm not going to tell you their names because you won't have heard of them. There's lots of very good musicians in this town who didn't get certain breaks or don't want to deal with the beast that is the music industry, and so they have 9 to 5s in Silicon Valley and play very good music, the music they want to play, after hours."
It depends on what you want. I mentioned Dax Butler's CD in another thread on GFSA. Dax has a lot of fun writing and performing music and has been doing that for, literally, decades, and he has a CD on sale AND he has a 9-5.
I think there's many ways to play the game, and there are ways where you can get the satisfaction of playing music AND have the security of a day job and investments for your retirement and medical aid and all that good stuff. You may not make enough from playing to live on, but you won't have to.
Finally, whatever you want to do, discuss it with the person who is going to be bankrolling all of this. If you don't, if there's a major discrepancy between their expectations (which they're entitled to) and what you actually do then serious unhappiness may result.
