Lo de los Black Keys

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https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/the-black-keys-interview-no-rain-no-flowers-b2802146.html

There’s much talk now of touring becoming financially unfeasible for most bands, even at the upper levels. “Yeah, it’s getting exceedingly expensive,” Carney says. “Ticket prices are soaring, but the money’s not necessarily trickling down into more profit or anything.” He recalls early tours spent sleeping in vans and living like “cockroaches” to get by on fifty-dollar gig fees. “But it was definitely a different time. And us being a two-piece made it much easier. One of our first tours was just the two of us in a sedan, all of our gear.”

UK singer-songwriter Billie Marten recently claimed that “mostly, artists are in financial ruin; we’re all paying Taylor Swift”. Fair point? “When you’re a big artist like Taylor, you’re able to negotiate powerful deals,” Carney says. “It’s a different business that she operates in than most of us operate in.

On tour, he argues, the artist takes on all of the risk, paying for everything from venue to crew to PA. “But each time you’re playing a show, someone’s slapping these service fees on, they’re taking 25 per cent of your merch off the top, it’s a f***ing racket, man. You would think over the course of 65, 75 years of rock’n’roll, someone would have stepped in and be like, ‘F*** all this shit. This is insane,’ and I think most managers would, but they’ve all been compromised.”

The value of Spotify, Carney claims, has risen from $25bn to $165bn in the past three years. The specific figure recently reported by Billboard is almost $161bn, but close enough. “There’s a lot of money in music; it’s creating billionaires. It’s just, we’ve been saying since 2010, that this s*** just doesn’t pay fairly. It’s insane.” And it’s a pattern he sees repeated across US society: the super-rich, rather than any particular politician, driving the world into the ground. “A lot of politics is a huge distraction from some other s*** that’s going on,” he says. “In America, you’ve had all this power aggregated by billionaires, and no one’s stepping in to fix that. If you have money here, you can get anything done and that’s really f***ing unnerving. It seems like people have a little bit more of a voice in the UK and France, for instance. But here it is a game of money, and anybody who doesn’t have it is losing.”