Large stadium concerts, streaming, and rising touring costs are having a detrimental effect on artists' income and smaller live venues, according to music industry insiders.
Celebrating 40 successful years as a musician, singer Mary Coughlan is currently touring with her new 'Repeat Rewind' album.
"There is some recession coming because the venues that I've been working in for the past three months on the tour since the album came out in September have said that they've noticed a 30-40% drop off in ticket sales," she told Prime Time.
"People don’t have the money and everything costs so much."
Ms Coughlan says that after an initial post-Covid surge in people going to concerts, many musicians and artists are really struggling to make a living in Ireland.
"Some guys I know work two gigs on Sunday for €80 a gig and get maybe €120 for another gig. They just work and drive constantly all over the country and that is just heartbreaking."
"I know a handful of amazing singer-songwriters, performing artists who are incredible musicians, and they will never, in Ireland, be able to make a living out of the music business. They do gardening, they do working in coffee shops, they do all sorts of other stuff."
Alfie Hudson-Taylor was in the band Hudson Taylor with his brother Harry for over decade before the band split in 2022. Now a successful solo artist, he presents a podcast about the darker side of the music industry called "How to break an artist."
"I've been working in music, doing this as a career for the last 12 years, and there's never been a harder time to make a living as an artist," he told Prime Time.
With artists like Taylor Swift and Oasis commanding sky-high prices for tickets, not much is left for smaller artists, he says.
"How much money is a viewer at home going to spend on live music in general within a year? I have a number, maybe that's in my head, about €300, would be the max I'd want to spend on concert tickets. Now, that could be one Oasis ticket, or it could be 10 or 15 grassroots gigs."
Streaming
For Mr Hudson-Taylor, music streaming has had a massive impact on the amount of money artists can make.
"A product which we make and produce used to have a value on it that has now completely gone, or in the best case, just minimised to €0.003 per play or per stream," he said.
According to a report released last year by data and insights company Luminate, 120,000 new tracks are released every day on music streaming platforms. This, Mr Hudson-Taylor claims, makes earning from streaming extremely competitive.
"Some of our songs have had millions of streams, and you could look from the outside and go, 'Wow, they must be doing great'. But I think even a billion streams before I would even see any money, if you get me, because those streams have to pay back that debt that it cost to record our music."
"Unless you're Beyoncé, Hozier, or any of these huge artists getting millions and billions of streams, it's very difficult to sustain a living."
Mary Coughlan has had a similar experience with streaming. Last year, a song written by her ex-husband called The Double Cross, was available to stream for the first time. The song was released in 1984 and was her first number one.
Despite reaching a million streams in a year, the returns were not as impressive.
"I got €29, and he got €35 because he wrote it...for a million streams on Spotify."
Changing music industry
Mark Graham performed vocals and percussion with the electro-dance group King Kong Company for years and he now lectures in Music Industry Practice at the Southeast Technological University.
He told Prime Time that it has always been difficult for artists to make a living in Ireland but the changing face of the music industry has made it more difficult.
"Part of what is happening...is the diminishing returns from live performances that the amount of money that it's possible to make from live gigs has gone down, that the music industry has become adept at separating artists for money."
Mr Graham says the revenue made from touring merchandise like T-shirts, records, or CDs, traditionally helped bands fund their tours.
However, he claims that some venues "have been reported as charging 20 to 30% on sales of merch," which further diminishes artists’ earning power.
"Artists have been hit hard from a number of different fronts," he said.
Another issue facing artists is the closure of number of live music venues.
"Of the 366 grassroots venues that Ed Sheeran played in as he was becoming famous, 150 of those have closed in the last four years…one wonders then where the Ed Sheeran of tomorrow will ply their trade," Mr Graham told Prime Time.
As well as that, touring in general has become more expensive for bands, according to Alfie Hudson-Taylor.
"Artists pay for absolutely everything on tour. We're talking rehearsals, equipment, accommodation, transport, musicians, crew, technicians, managers, agents. Artists pay all of these people to do a gig."
With costs going up across the board, in terms of accommodation and transport, he says it "just takes away from anything that was there at the end of a gig four or five years ago."
"You need to be selling thousands and thousands of tickets and touring day after day after day in different cities and selling lots of merchandise in order to actually turn a healthy profit."
Basic Income
In 2022, Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media Catherine Martin brought in a three-year basic income pilot scheme for artists as a measure to help the arts and culture sector to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.
The scheme has given 2,000 artists a basic €325 weekly payment and there have been calls from artists for that scheme to be renewed and expanded.
"I think that's been one of the most positive changes to, or one of the most positive things I've seen a government do in my whole career in music," Mr Hudson-Taylor said.
Mary Coughlan told Prime Time the grant should be "extended to all, certainly people who are working as musicians and not making a living. The whole situation was rent. Most of the guys I know who are musicians live in shared houses, like with four or five of them all living together. And that's the only way they'll ever be able to."
Mary Coughlan is one of the lucky ones. She has had a very successful 40-year career.
But she says the outlook is grim for others. She said, "In Ireland, it's catastrophic at the moment for young people and for small venues."
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