Artistes carry significant working costs: instrument and equipment purchase and upkeep; studio and venue hire. They incur costs of the long and usually unpaid rehearsal and practice hours to stay skilled
Benefits and appeals were recently launched to support the medical costs of veteran South African guitarist Madala Kunene. It’s not the first time such initiatives have been necessary, nor the first time that media and politicians have expressed astonishment that a renowned musician “died in poverty.”
Musicians’ dire financial circumstances are sometimes wrongly blamed on irresponsible spending; a musicians’ pension plan is often proposed as a solution.
But until very recently, no data existed about what musicians in South Africa really earn, what costs they carry, and the tough trade-offs between professional and household costs they often need to make in order to survive.
As a music researcher who has written frequently on the economics of music work, I welcomed the opportunity to conduct long-term research with a team at IKS Cultural Consulting into a relief fund supporting SA jazz musicians during the Covid-19 period.
That work has now given us concrete information to better understand the picture. Surprisingly, far fewer research projects anywhere in the world have looked at individual musicians than at how “the industry” (major music businesses) fares.
What we found confirms what has been understood anecdotally for a long time. Even “star” musicians are not nearly as well paid as the public believes. In fact, their working costs are sometimes high enough to drive them away from music as a profession.
And mining the fund’s administrative data affirmed how valuable such data is for far more than accounting. It can inform policy too.