Just rewards
At a dinner party at a waterfront house in Sydney last week I was reminded that it isn't just us Headcount=1 types who live in bubbles.
I sat across from a merchant banker who found it passing strange that I watch little television and listen to even less radio. I get my information about the world from a combination of magazines, the occaisional newspaper and online news sites, podcasts and a selection of blogs. My dining companion had used YouTube precisely once. Here were two relatively succesful white fortysomething men with quite profoundly opposing media consumption patterns.
He grandiously despaired for the future of old style music companies like EMI in the face of that online file sharing that all those crazy kids are into. Eventually we established that technological change was inevitable and that EMI had no more right to exist than Monty Burns' Trans-Atlantic Zeppelin.
His hand-wringing shifted to The Artists. How musicians would get their rightful rewards? File sharing was organised theft and even entities like the Apple Store ripped off The Artists by driving down prices.
Unsurprisingly he'd not come across the idea that a successful musician's income has shifted away from a reliance on record sales in favour of live performance. This too was unfair as The Artist's annual income was now limited to the number of performances that he or she could physically deliver in a year.
Given that much of the working world follows this exact model I couldn't see the problem. You get your bookings, you turn up, do the job and you get paid. If you're good you get booked for more jobs and maybe paid more to do them.
Of course the clue was in the word 'Artist'; he was as sentimental about musicians getting special treatment as he was about EMI. He hadn't heard that Radiohead released their latest album In Rainbows online with a pay-what-you-want pricing plan. Then again he hadn't heard of Radiohead. And he felt it was demeaning that A Major Artist like Bruce Springsteen might still 'need' to play gigs to get his due. The fact that I saw one of two Springsteen shows last year at the Emirates Stadium in North London where over 40,000 fans paid £100 each night didn't alert him to the fact that there's plenty of cash about if enough people think you're good enough.
He saw Artists where I see craftsmen. The good performers I know focus on the craft and leave it to others to grandly declare the work to be Art or not. They're happy to make a decent middle class income doing something they love.
Why should a halfway decent musician or comic make much more than a good plumber or architect or self-employed management consultant? I accept that there are a few game-changing exceptions to this rule but frankly most so-called Artists are journeymen like the rest of us.
If merchant bankers can be overpaid then why not rock stars?