Society as pyramid scheme

One of my brothers is a musician who runs a recording studio, and recently he told me that a friend of his recorded an album (is that still the right term?) at a well-known studio in Los Angeles. His friend doesn’t have a record deal or anything — he just rented the studio time to cut the record.

Here’s the interesting part: the guy’s backing band consisted of Jim Keltner, Leland Sklar, and a couple of other guys who names I didn’t recognize but who my brother assured me are similarly big time. OK, that’s not really the interesting part: the interesting part is that, according to my brother’s friend, you can currently hire superstar session men like Keltner and Sklar for $500 per day to make your self-financed record. In other words, you can basically get Eric Clapton’s or Jackson Browne’s former backing band to be your backing band on your record for around $2000, total, if you’re willing to do it in a day.

According to my brother, what’s happened in the music business is that it’s moved from a model where a lot of supremely talented people were making very good livings to one where a handful of people at the very top (performers and production moguls) are making literally hundreds of millions of dollars, while 99.9% of the people who actually make the wheels go round are left fighting for scraps. ($500 for ten hours of session work is far from starvation wages, of course, but the point is that if these guys are working for $50 an hour, how is an as average or, God forbid, aspiring studio musician going to get any work, let alone get paid for it?).

It’s true the people at the very top have always gotten huge rewards, but what seems to be changing is that those rewards have increased exponentially, while everybody else is left with a an increasingly tiny sliver of the overall pie.

And needless to say, this isn’t just happening in the music business.