Dar Williams on the Economics of Touring
Here’s an interesting blog from the folk music artist Dar Williams on the changing economics of touring. Although the road may be a more welcoming place for a touring musician, in the age of streaming music services, the decline of recorded music has diminished an important stream of revenue, she writes. Music lovers are less willing to pay for recorded music, she writes.
“Many things are better, I’ve found, and yet touring itself is becoming unsustainable, and I think you know what I’m about to bring up. Most listeners resist becoming individual shareholders in the produced work of musicians: they don’t buy albums anymore,” she writes. Music sales, she writes, “paid for the production of the product and for a portion of my living as a touring artist. That’s the way it works. When the sale of music goes away, gigs alone will not pay for the tour bus, equipment, tour managers, and touring bands (if you pay them decently).”
You can read the full blog here, in American Songwriter magazine.
