Musical artists Justin Venrick, 23, and Tech Honors, 36, while being in completely different spots in their career, still find common anxieties about stability in the music world.
Both Venrick and Honors are self-described music producers and songwriters. They are two in an estimated 27 million, among those only 1,800 are full-time and less than 200 are employed by major labels.
“The pursuit of music as a career is not advisable. It's working for me right now and it's great, and I'm very happy about it,” Honors said, who says that he is financially stable on his music-related income. “I think that luck is just a big component.”
Most musicians are not exactly high-paid; the average income for a full-time musician in the 18-29-year-old range was found to be only $18,000 on average for music-related income.
Most income for full-time artists comes from live performances. This can be a struggle for new artists that are still trying to make a name for themselves or have nowhere to perform.
Without anywhere to perform, artists’ primary income is streaming. Per stream, Spotify pays $0.004 to the artist. This means it takes 400 listens of the same song to make a single penny.
“It's kind of a rip-off truly, especially because these streaming services are getting so much money for people to have subscriptions, and then they only go back and pay artists, like a fraction of a cent,” argues Venrick.
Venrick is a full-time student, looking to be a full-time musician in the future, while Honors is already financially stable off the revenue brought in from his music career. Both artists are in different places in their career, yet similar stresses arise from both.
With new successes come different stresses that might not have previously remained unthought of.
Justin Venrick – Violet Temples
Justin Venrick is an artist of many hats, and he has to be in order to survive. Venrick,a full-time art student at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, also works at a hotel nearly 40 hours a week as a front desk supervisor.
He refers to himself as a D.I.Y. or “Do-it-yourself” musician.
As a DIY musician, Venrick does everything himself, every process from the beginning of writing a song to putting the song on streaming services. Marketing is his newest challenge.
“You are basically just having to send out emails to random playlist curators, like ‘hey, here's my song, if you like it, put it on your playlist or write about it,” Venrick said. “I would kind of just put things out and be like, Oh, here it is, why isn't anybody listening? Well, you kind of have to advertise yourself.”
Venrick cites time management as another major problem prohibiting him from making music.
“I'll spend some time working on some ideas for two to three hours at most. Then if I feel like something's really going somewhere, I’ll spend a little bit more time on it. Then it will cut into time when I should probably be sleeping,” Venrick said. “I spend a majority of my time doing other things just because I need to keep myself afloat.”
The musician has been producing his own music since 2016. He has devoted more time only recently to harnessing his craft professionally. He previously released several works, but subsequently took them down.
“I shelved a lot of things or took them down, and I wouldn't say that I'm a perfectionist, but if I have to put it out, I want to make it good,” Venrick said. “I kind of had to pull myself aside and be like, okay, you got to start somewhere.”
It took Venrick roughly a year to produce his debut EP, “Polaris.” The artist made the entire EP in his bedroom with a keyboard connected to his PC, a microphone, and professional audio editing software.
Venrick invested around $400 in his equipment and tools. Thus far, Venrick has made just over $10 on streams alone.
“It can be discouraging, but I knew what I was getting myself into with this. I knew it was gonna be crazy, but you know, I can hope,” Venrick said about the future of his career. “So, here's to the next one being even more successful, maybe I'll get $20 off of that one.”
Tech Honors – one-third of Death’s Dynamic Shroud.wmv
Tech Honors is more of an established musician. Honors has a fanbase, set of followers and stable financial income, yet many of his struggles are similar to that of Venrick’s. Honors is a full-time musician living in Miamisburg, Ohio and one of the members of electronic band Death’s Dynamic Shroud.wmv.
Honors and his music partner, James Webster, also from Death’s Dynamic Shroud, release monthly albums through their “Nuwrld Mixtape Club.” Subscribers pay anywhere between $7 and $25 monthly and receive the albums digitally and/or on cassette. Right now, there are around 450 subscribers.
“As far as what James and I have always sort of dreamed about is just being able to make music as our job and truly with this club we are able to do that and I'm able to feel financially stable and comfortable,” Honors said.
This stability is still volatile.
“It becomes kind of a weird thing when your financial livelihood is dependent on the whims of people who like you for a certain reason. You testing the waters and being creatively adventurous becomes a business risk,” he said.
Honors argues his music is his business and sometimes the pressures of catering to the audience come up while producing the next album.
“It's not like we're totally dictated by that pressure, but it's just something that can be on your mind,” he clarified. “Instead of having people just not like your album, it's now people don't like your album and you make less money.”
Honors began his career in music at the age of 15 after receiving a keyboard for his birthday and joining a band his friends recently created called Fâtum. Webster, joined the group the next year after Honors saw him perform an Oasis medley at a local talent show.
The group stayed together for 10 years, before splitting up to get their associates degrees, Honors in sound recording and music technology and Webster in music composition respectively. Honors and Webster, similar to Venrick, went to school and worked full-time to support themselves, while continuing to record music.
The two musicians started the band Rebecca Peake and recorded a song every day for a whole year while in school. The number of songs totaled at 366 songs, due to the leap year in 2012.
“The idea was to partially stay in good practice with recording and then partially a sort of a competitive idea,” Honors said about Rebecca Peake. “We're like, we can make a song every single day and it would be good. It was kind of brash.”
However, this practice was not sustainable.
“It was an insane time because I was in school. I had like 15 credit hours. I worked 35 hours a week and then we were writing songs every day. In retrospect, I had no idea how I was doing it. It was going to bed at four or five in the morning and waking up at eight every day,” Honors said.
This practice with Rebecca Peake led to the artist’s confidence in creating an album every single month, allowing Honors to live off of the mixtape club’s revenue.
This year alone, Honors and Webster invested nearly $40,000 into their label which includes all of their projects. The group released shirts, physical pressings of their albums, and performed live.
“Our fans have been really willing to indulge us on these creative endeavors,” Honors said. “We're fortunate to have them be interested in what comes next.”
Different places, different and similar struggles
Both Venrick and Honors need to put in massive amounts of time in order to work on their passion. Even though Honors is financially stable in his music career, there is still this sense of volatility that Venrick also describes as a beginning musician.
“I think you have to adapt, but at the same time, stay true to what you're doing,” Honors said. “I feel like James and I are plenty capable of adapting to cultural music landscapes, because we're so involved in keeping up with modern sounds and embracing new technology and new ideas.”
Honors produced music for more than 20 years. The landscape has changed considerably over that time. Honors believes major labels now only invest into a handful of artists.
“I grew up in the 90s, so my idea of what a recording artist is pretty different from what I think a lot of Gen Z might think of a recording artist,” Honors said. “The rock star was still a thing in the 90s and I don't really think that it's as much of a thing anymore.”
In 2003, 880 full-time recording artists were employed by major labels in the United States. By 2014, this number dwindled to 200.
“Now, pop stardom is like sustained success being propped up by a label, that is just investing into a handful of artists, rather than taking lots of chances on smaller artists.”
Honors also believes that because of the rise of the internet there is the possibility for smaller artists to be successful.
“Now I feel like that's sort of what being successful is like, having this smaller fanbase that you interact with regularly. It's not about being on a different Echelon,” Honors said.
Venrick also believes that the accessibility of new tools allows smaller musicians to make professional-sounding recordings, which is what pushed him to begin pursuing a career in music.
“With a lot of tools that are coming to home PCs, it's made it a lot easier for people who are just starting out to actually dip their toes in,” said Venrick.
However, the old idea of the “Popstar” from the 90’s has lingered in Honor’s mind.
“I'm still climbing the ladder as any corporate person might,” Honors said.
Venrick expresses a similar sentiment about continuing to push through to success, “It's a really good strategy to have constant releases when you can, just because it's easier to get people's attention when you're constantly releasing things.”
Both musicians mention that sometimes, being successful in music is just luck.
“It's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time,” Venrick said.
Honors echoes this sentiment from a more experienced perspective, “The only piece of encouragement I would say about that is that there is an argument that you make your own luck by constantly creating. If you throw enough darts at the dartboard, maybe one of them hits a bull’s eye.”
Venrick’s music is available on all major streaming platforms under the name Violet Temples and on bandcamp.com.
Honors’s music is available on all major streaming platforms as Death’s Dynamic Shroud.wmv or on bandcamp.com through the Ghost Diamond label.
