Measuring the price of ambition: understanding music’s mental health crisis
Music makers are three times more likely to experience anxiety and/or depression than the general public.
Is making music actually… bad for you? It’s a confronting and uncomfortable idea, but one that resonates with any artist who has ever felt frustrated, jaded, confused or isolated by the contemporary music ecosystem.
Two researchers in the UK, both with relevant personal histories inside the music business, compiled years of academic research and interviews with working artists into a book provocatively titled “Can Music Make You Sick?” The book dispels some myths while bringing others firmly into the light.
Written by Sophie Benjamin.
If this article raises serious issues for you, or if you or anyone you know needs help, you can call Support Act’s 24/7 music industry wellbeing helpline on 1800 959 500, Lifeline on 13 11 14, or visit Beyond Blue or Support Act for more resources.
Being a full-time musician was tough prior to the pandemic, but the last two years have made it even harder.
Australian music industry charity Support Act has given away $35 million in crisis grants to music industry workers since the pandemic began, and many people and businesses have not made it through to the other side.
Sally Anne Gross and Dr George Musgrave are academics who have more than four decades of combined experience in the music industry. Their recent research into the negative effects of working in music was published in early 2020 under the title Can Music Make You Sick? Measuring The Price of Musical Ambition.
Spirit Level’s Tim Shiel spoke to them in late 2020 — watch the full video below, or read on for some highlights from what we learned.
1. Musicians do the emotional heavy lifting for all of us
Before moving into academia, Sally Anne Gross worked for many decades in the music industry as an artist manager, record label director and international business affairs consultant. In 1993, she was the first woman to be Head of A&R Manager at Mercury Records UK, and over the years she has worked with many artists including William Orbit and Gotan Project.
She can speak directly to a truth that is often invisible to the broader listening public — working in the music industry might look like fun, but it’s a lot of labour. And it’s often musicians who are working hardest of all, with the least financial stability.
“When I started trying to get money to do this research, I was met with a lot of people telling me all musicians are lucky, making it seem like it’s not a proper job,” says Gross. “As somebody that worked in music for 25 years, this has actually felt like a proper job my whole life.”
“Musicians do emotional labour on our behalf. We gain from other people expressing stuff that we cannot express. If you work in a bank, you may like money but I doubt you’re dedicated to it. [Music] is part of our emotional world and if you’re working in that space, you’re doing more than merely turning up for work. [Musicians] are bringing their entire selves into a place of huge vulnerability.”
Fellow academic and co-author George Musgrave himself has a history as a recording artist in the UK, and says the idea that being a musician isn’t the best job in the world is something that most people don’t want to hear.
“A few years ago I got invited by a school to come and speak to the kids about trying to have a career in music,” he says. “At the time I was signed to Sony, I lived in this beautiful house in West London and it was like [the school was saying] ‘tell them to just follow their dreams.’”
“I said to them, well, I don’t really think that’s really responsible of me to say because there are a lot of negatives too. It’s important to have some kind of balance. The school was like, ‘oh no, we don’t want to hear that.’”
2. Technology has given us an abundance of music — for better or worse.
In early 2021, more than 60,000 tracks were uploaded to Spotify every day.
Musgrave says lowering the barriers to entry into professional music-making has made making a living off music harder, not easier.
“It’s called the Babel Objection: when everyone speaks at once, how can anyone be heard? There is this music industry rhetoric where they’re like, ‘Guys this is amazing, all the tools are in your hands… upload your music and this time next year you’ll be on the main stage at Glastonbury’.
[They] need to stop bullshitting. The data doesn’t bear that out. It has big ramifications for people’s emotional experiences of that world.”
This abundance of music has been sold to us as a good thing, but who is it really good for?
“The music industry fetishises technology,” says Gross.
“If you look at what’s happened in the last 30 years, you can see how [the record labels] ran gleefully into the digital future without thinking what that might do for them. Spotify is running at a loss because it was there to prop up the idea that piracy — the swapping of music for no money — needed to be eradicated. Nobody saw the deals the major labels did.”
3. It’s time for artists to get real about what a music career really looks like
There’s not a lot of transparency around the material benefits of being a professional musician.
“Thinking about what you’re hoping that your music career is going to give you is a helpful thing,” says Musgrave.
“If what you’re hoping that it gives you is the ability to perform, to share, to have enjoyment, to meet other people, to express yourself and and it gives you that — in many respects that constitutes success for you. If what you want to achieve from it is other things and you find that it’s struggling to provide you those things, then sometimes there needs to be a painful rethinking.
If financial sustainability is one of the things you want a music career to give you, let me give you a heads up: the data tells you it probably won’t give you that.”
Even artists who find their way into the more commercial end of the music business are often surprised at what little support and financial stability there is “on the other side.”
On this topic, Musgrave speaks from direct experience — as a rising 24-year old rapper in Norwich in the early 2010s, he had support from BBC Radio 1 & was signed to a major global publishing deal, collaborating with a very young Ed Sheeran and being remixed by The Streets.
“In some ways I’m much happier now that I don’t make music [for a living],” says Musgrave. “I wanted it to give me something that it wasn’t giving me.”
“I wanted to go on a holiday that wasn’t camping. I wanted to be able to go with my wife to a restaurant that wasn’t Pizza Hut with a voucher cut out of the free newspaper. Ultimately it just became smashing my head into a brick wall and being upset a lot.”
Conventional narratives of success and “making it” in the “music business” still often rely on the idea that artists should intertwine themselves with big business, and align their lives and output with the commercial goals and incentives that these companies operate by. This can be a trap for artists who might find it hard to imagine an alternative, more healthier and holistic relationship with their practice.
“You don’t have to simply experience music completely bombarded by this economic framework,” says Gross. "There is another way to experience making music.”
4. Community is the antidote to isolation and exploitation
Loneliness is big business in the 21st century, with tech companies conspiring to bring about a cruel moment in history where we have the promise of infinite always-on connection, but in reality feel more isolated than ever.
In the context of music, artists are encouraged by marketers, labels and industry workers to be everpresent on social media, to share more and more of themselves at a greater pace and frequency, in order to build momentum and connection with a perceived potential audience.
As artists find their focus shifting from working on their creative practice, to trying to game the algorithm as workers in the social media attention economy, it’s no wonder that many of them feel more isolated and exploited (not to mention exhausted) than ever before.
Gross & Musgrave’s findings align with a lot of other contemporary research that suggests that a lot of the psychological pressure that weighs on artists could be lifted if we begin to prioritise real-life and small-circle relationships over the illusion of building a “big audience”.
“Music is essentially a social vehicle, so I think that the most important thing that you can do for yourself as an artist is reach out and make friends with other like-minded artists and make community,” says Gross.
“You need the support to do this work. It’s a lonely road on your own.”
5. Music is undervalued — but true change may require some radical rethinking
Many of the issues facing musicians today stem from one big problem: money.
Revenue streams from the sale of recorded music have all but dried up thanks to the deals made between streaming services and the major labels. The big drivers of revenue now are merch and live shows, which force musicians out onto the road and away from all their support systems.
The events of COVID-19 have shown also that with live touring stripped away, few financial safety nets exist to insure that those who work to provide music and culture to society at large can continue their practice.
While much campaigning and activism has focused in recent years on increasing payouts from streaming services, many increasingly believe that deeper systemic change is required to begin to disentangle the production of culture from economic systems.
Universal basic income systems for artists are being trialled around the world. San Francisco and other cities are trialling programs that would provide monthly stipends to artists, while Germany in 2020 launched a broader experiment to test the ungoing feasibility of basic income for the wider populice.
Under a recently launched pilot program in Ireland, 2,000 arts and culture workers will be paid the average national income of about $550 a week, for three years.
Though the Irish government have implied this is a “once-in-a-lifetime” post-COVID program, many experts are now advocating for a bottom-up rethink of how music is valued and how those working in music are supported to pay their bills.
“We’ve got to think of different ways of how people will be remunerated in a time when a lot of people will be doing creative things if we think doing creative things is good for society,” says Gross. “It becomes a political question.”
Related links
- Can Music Make You Sick?: Measuring The Price of Musical Ambition (physical copy)
- Can Music Make You Sick?: Measuring The Price of Musical Ambition (digital copy) FREE PDF
- The Unlikely Odds of Making It Big — The Pudding
- The case for a Universal Basic Income: freeing artists from neo-liberalism — David Pledger, ArtsHub
- Why Are Musicians Expected To Be Miserable On Tour Just To Break Even? — Stereogum
- Forgotify — a website and playlist chronicling songs uploaded to Spotify that have never been played
About the writer
Sophie Benjamin is a writer and musician in Australia.
