ten local musicians discuss the delicate balance between making music and making a living

Music magazines and media Web sites say the old system is breaking down. CDs aren’t selling like they used to. Major labels aren’t taking risks on unproven artists. Record companies can’t stem the tide of file swapping, despite thousands of piracy lawsuits levied each year. Album sales in the United States are falling down the charts like one-hit wonders, from an all-time high of nearly 10 million units sold in 2000 to less than one-third of that in 2006. And the drop continues. Sales have fallen another 16 percent this year. Paid digital downloads are doing better, but not enough to make up for the shortfall.

In its June story “The Record Industry’s Decline,” Rolling Stone painted a bleak portrait of this collapsing empire, blaming digitization and illegal file sharing, advances in home recording technology and instantaneous distribution over the Internet. Mitch Bainwol, head of the Recording Industry Association of America, said in the article that the American music industry had been “damaged enormously, from songwriters to backup musicians to people who work at labels. The number of bands signed to labels has been compromised in a pretty severe fashion, roughly a third.”

On the other side of the digital divide, Internet visionaries greet these changes as harbingers of an electronically-powered musical renaissance. As they see it, personal technology lets artists take control of recorded music back from large corporations. A seventh-grade garage band can now make a studio-quality album on a desktop computer. International distribution amounts to a few mouse clicks. There’s no need for a label to provide access to high-end studios, no need for cover art or fancy packaging, no need for brick-and-mortar record stores. Artists are now free to create and be heard without leaping through the hoops of corporate control. According to these folks, the music industry is not dying; it’s opening up possibilities that will present listeners with more and better music than they’ve ever heard before.

Has anyone asked professional musicians what they think?

If the music industry is dying, the Seacoast’s working musicians aren’t quite ready to march in the second line. While many musicians are concerned about the impact of technological shifts, they remain mostly optimistic about their ability to build a life in music, although they might not to be featured on the next MTV “Cribs” series.

For Seacoast musicians, a music career means balancing night gigs and day jobs, touring and teaching, writing and recording, promoting and performing. Although a record label might still descend and grant three wishes, most local musicians aren’t keeping their fingers crossed. One key to survival is diversifying income streams—a skill that sounds almost Wall Street-ish, but is lived every day by local music makers.

The 10 musicians in this story play different sounds to different audiences, but one thing unites and defines them: the career choice they made for the love of what they do, in hopes that it will also provide a livelihood.

Jennifer Lynch

“An Austrian fellow said to me, ‘A strong tree has many roots,’” laughs Jennifer Lynch, describing her diverse range of projects. Primarily a hammer dulcimer player, Lynch has found stability in diversity. Mixing private functions with teaching and concerts, she blends a variety of traditions. “I have fingers in a lot of different pies in the music scene. I play what really works for the area,” she says. “Celtic and historical music are big.” Lynch has discovered at least one unique niche. “Strangely enough, there’s a market for reenactment weddings,” she says, having just returned from a gig at a French and Indian War-themed wedding.

Teaching helps, too. “It’s not a big money-maker, but I love it,” she says. She offers private lessons, as well as an African percussion workshop series, using a diverse collection of instruments to teach groups of students from all walks of life. She finds these students especially inspiring. “None of these people will be professional musicians. The real joy is making music accessible.”

Recording has not yet played a major part in Lynch’s career. “I’m behind the curve on that,” she confesses. She’s now working with Garageband home studio software to make a CD, primarily for use as a promotional tool.

Life in music is financially challenging, but worth it, Lynch says. Even hitting the big time has its costs, she notes, describing a recent epiphany she had after running into an old friend who now tours with a world-famous act. “Every single day, he’s around the world, playing every night, recording, in the studio—it’s his whole life. The contrast has given me an opportunity to reflect on what I want out of my music. For me, it’s about keeping flexibility in my life, being able to take the jobs I want, and playing the kind of music I love.”
 
Laurel Brauns

New Hampshire is proud to call Laurel Brauns a homegrown talent. Her brand of “indie folk” incorporates influences from alternative rock, blending them with strong natural vocals and acoustic guitar with Celtic folk flair.

Brauns paid her musical dues touring the United States and Europe and putting out three independently released albums. She made a 2001 CD, “Swimming,” in the basement of her college music building with help from a friend. “Periphery” followed in 2003, and “Closed for the Season” came out earlier this year. Brauns distributes via CDBaby, an online sales tool for independent artists.

The recordings provide some support. “I sold out of both those first couple runs, a thousand copies each. For someone doing it themselves, that’s kind of an accomplishment,” she says. But Brauns had to rely on touring to spread her music and sell albums. “I made the sacrifices of not having a normal life and normal place to live. I was on the road all the time,” she says. Even so, she’s noticed a gradual drop-off in CD sales. “When I play gigs, people don’t buy them in the same numbers that they used to. Everyone needs to kind of come to terms with that.”

Recently, Brauns has turned to playing the college circuit. “It’s one of the last bastions of well-funded programming where musicians can eke out something of a living,” she says. Although she wouldn’t spurn solicitations from a major label, she’d rather get support from an independent label. “I’ve spent a lot of time pursuing indie labels to put out this third album,” she says. “The major labels have something to offer, but it comes down to, ‘Do you want a mansion or a sick house on the lake?’ I don’t need a mansion.”

Brauns has reached a transitional phase in her career. She is moving to Portland, Ore., where she plans to start a band, do some teaching and rediscover the fun and creativity that originally drew her into music.

“Maybe this isn’t the century to try to make a living playing music, and maybe it doesn’t matter,” Brauns says. “What matters is to make awesome songs and let people hear them, not be trying to scrape together the few pennies that are out there available.”

Jeff Warner

Jeff Warner sings traditional songs, specializing in music that illustrates the American past. Using instruments like banjo, guitar, concertina, Jew’s harp and rhythm bones, Warner brings past events to life. If you’re lucky, you can see him do a little clogging, too.

Education has become an important career focus for Warner. “I do a lot of in-school teaching of American culture through traditional songs,” he says. His school programs range from long-term residencies to short workshops. “People in the last 20 years have found that kids’ music has been a way to survive in the music world. I would say it’s the reason I could go professional.”

In a traveling program of the New Hampshire Humanities Council, Warner performs at libraries and historical societies around the state. He also plays in living history museums like Mystic Seaport, Old Sturbridge Village and Strawbery Banke, rounding out the schedule with community concerts, folk festivals and appearances at music and dance camps and music clubs in the United States and Europe.

“In order to do what I wanted to do, I’ve had to make an irregular series of workplaces,” Warner says. “Somebody in the contemporary folk music world wouldn’t be doing as many academic, instructional, interpretive venues as I do. But to be able to look back and say for the last X number of years, I have really survived playing a music that is not mainstream—that is on the academic fringe of the entire musical world—yeah, I’m happy with that.”

Warner worked with the label Flying Fish to put out his first album in 1987. Today, he sells recordings on his Web site and at shows. CDBaby carries his recent solo CD “The Jolly Tinker.” “I think it was Harvey Reid who said to me once, ‘We just try to make enough money off of our recordings to make the next one.’ The truth of the matter is, you still have to record to establish yourself as a professional, and as a calling card.”

Jim Farquhar

Jim Farquhar takes a quick break from his day job as a manager at Tradeport Pizza, brushing flour from his tattooed arms as he reaches to shake hands. He’s the guitarist for the band Hot Rod Fury, a two-year-old trio that plays loud, fast, garagey retro rock. The band is lucky, he says, that the sound is accessible to a lot of audiences. “We play a lot of surf music and rockabilly, so we can play to almost anybody. It’s a common ground type of music. We play everything—private functions, smaller clubs like the Red Door, and we play in Boston quite a bit.”

Farquhar’s bandmates are also “day workers, weekday nine-to-fivers” The band’s drummer, who is also Farquhar’s girlfriend, works at a middle school, where her benefits include insurance. “When we were younger, we didn’t think about stuff like that,” he admits.

All the money band’s earnings get reinvested in recording and promotion. They’ve just collaborated on a CD with the East Coast Tremors, another instrumental band, and they distribute it at shows and on MySpace. “We split the cost of pressing right down the middle. We’re not at the time yet where we can finance our own pressing. But it also means we can promote our bands to each other’s fans,” Farquhar says.

“I’d love to be able to do this fulltime,” he says, “But the music industry now is so tough. Bands don’t make as much as they used to, but it’s easier to promote your music. It’s a double-edged sword. But we do it because we love it. Success for me would be to put our music out there and have people anywhere be able to hear it.”

Agnes Charlesworth

Agnes Charlesworth approaches music as art. Trained as a classical pianist, she took to composing in college. From there, she got interested in contemporary experimental music that includes electronic instrumentation and a broadening of classical ideas.

While living in San Francisco, Charlesworth worked as a sound artist and put together several experimental events, including a car horn concert. Last year, Charlesworth developed the Seacoast’s first gallery installation of sound art, “Lullabies for the Cradle of Civilization,” for the George Marshall Store Gallery in York. She has also composed for the local stage, creating a score for the New Hampshire Theatre Project’s 2006 production of “The Odyssey.” As a main source of support, Charlesworth teaches piano at her studio in Kittery’s Wentworth-Dennett School building.

Recording, she says, is vital to her career. “Like painting a picture, it’s the way you record your work. It’s the only way you can bring it life aside from live performance, which is only a moment in time.” Charlesworth records on ProTools in her home studio and uses the albums for project proposals.

“Occasionally, musicians really hit it big, but by and large I don’t really know any musicians who make a lot of money,” Charlesworth says. “You have to be prepared to make a moderate income. But it’s something so culturally rich, and you have the opportunity to keep it going in your own community. Traditionally, music wasn’t a job. It was a role in the community, and it really still is.”       

Dave Hunter

Known locally as lead man for “rock ’n’ roll with twang” outfit The Molenes, Dave Hunter counts the band as the latest in a lifetime of musical projects. The Molenes play plenty of “straight-up gigs,” but the band isn’t a fulltime pursuit for any of its members, who pursue careers like teaching, stonemasonry and journalism.

Beginning in his days with English indie-pop band Drugstore, Hunter has used writing as a way to stay involved in music without depending on it to survive. When record labels began hovering around Drugstore, Hunter re-evaluated. “I started to realize I wasn’t going to have much of a life out of it,” he recalls. By then, he knew that even bands with high media profiles and record contracts might not make a decent living, so he decided to balance live performance with his budding career in music journalism. Today, he writes books about guitars and gear, and his work appears in Guitar Player and Vintage Guitar magazines. He’s also written soundtracks for TV documentaries in the U.K.

The Molenes’ 2006 CD “This Car Is Big” is selling at shows, at retailers like Bull Moose Records, on iTunes and CDBaby and through the band’s Web site. Despite all these outlets, Hunter has seen sales slow down. “It’s difficult to sell a product when everybody seems to be able to expect to get music for free,” he says.
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till, the band is working on a second release, recording basic tracks at Jon Nolan’s studio in Newmarket. “(Recording is) a very important part of the creative process, and it’s more in the hands of musicians and bands these days. That’ll be a good thing for creativity and for music in general, but it’s a shame, because it may be harder for an artist to make a living.” Fortunately for The Molenes, he says, success is mainly measured “project to project and show to show, in a string of gigs that make us feel happy.”

Cynthia Chatis

Flutist, singer, and traditional instrumentalist Cynthia Chatis plays just about everything. “Multi-cultural or world, classical, baroque, jazz, meditative, New Age, Celtic—you name it and I will try it,” she says.

Her ebullient creativity overflows into a rich array of musical services. “I play for weddings and ceremonies of all kinds, including memorials, anniversaries, art show openings, receptions, garden parties. A few years ago, I began playing live for yoga classes—an especially interesting experience, since the focus isn’t your typical performance where an audience is present solely for the music. It’s a unique collaboration.”   

She’s played background music on spoken word recordings, performed in the Jazzmouth festival, and regularly plays Beat Nights at the Press Room in Portsmouth. Chatis complements music with work as a watercolor artist and recently added seasonal employment as a gardener to the mix to help support the purchase of her first home.

Her recently released solo CD, “Wind,” was recorded professionally with Steve Friedman at Melville Park Studio in Boston. “Recording is playing a bigger role in my career now than it ever has,” Chatis says, as she works to add studio musicianship to her resume. Chatis looks ahead at the music industry with a yogic confidence. “It’s just changing,” she says. “Like everything else, it’s part of an evolution.”

Bob Lord

Bob Lord’s performing and recording credits wouldn’t fit on most billboards. He’s had experience with almost every facet of the music industry. He’s a custom composer for film, radio and television, and is music director for The Music Hall’s “Writers On a New England Stage.” His rock band Dreadnaught was voted New Hampshire Magazine’s best rock band of 2007. He also produces and manages the label MMC Recordings, a classical company concentrating on chamber and orchestral music.

Lord calls recording “the primary focus of my career.” Recording is necessary to composition work, which depends on getting work to the client in finished form. In the classical genres, he adds, “there is an acute sense of the definitive historical implications of recording a particular performance of a particular piece by a particular composer. At this juncture, classical music as a whole clearly revolves around recordings, regardless of format. As long as there is money to be made and copyright to be exploited, the industry won’t die.”

For Lord, it’s a full living. “I work in the music field 24/7, and I’m delighted to have the opportunity to devote all my energy toward music,” he says. “Just be prepared to sleep very, very few hours for the first, oh, 15 or 20 years or so.”

Craig Werth

Craig Werth’s story is an inspiration to those who dream of breaking away from the norm. Werth recently left a 24-year career at UNH’s Center for Academic Resources to work as accompanist and co-arranger for Canadian singer-songwriter David Francey.

“Music is my day and night job now,” Werth says. “Most of the time, if I’m not performing somewhere, I’m preparing for or traveling to or from a performance.” Time management keeps him ready for “the twists and turns, the opening and closing doors of the music business.” Between tours with Francey, he’s also working on his next CD, “Regard With Grace.”

Although the schedule is demanding, Werth says he’s thankful for the opportunity. “I’ve been a writer and performer for most of my life, but always within the context of at least full-time employment in other domains. Now, it is at the forefront for the first time in my life.” Werth jokes that his commute to work has gone from 10 minutes to sometimes 10 hours, one of many lifestyle shifts. But he’s happy to make some sacrifices with the support of his wife, Liz, and the backing of David Francey. “This is one of the most exciting, gratifying, creative and fulfilling times of my life,” he says.

Werth still believes in hard copy CDs. “It’s part of an intimate exchange to perform the music live, talk with people, answer questions and personalize and sign CDs. It reminds me of the value of a good book in hand versus an electronic publication. There’s a tactile experience that’s not replaced by vaporous forms.”

Larry Simon

A walking musical catalyst, Larry Simon came to Portsmouth from an active music career in New York City. There, he composed music for theater, independent film and dance companies, working with top-tier artists in jazz, blues and world music. After moving to the Seacoast, he started his bands Groove Bacteria and The Larry Simon Ensemble and created the monthly music and spoken word series Beat Night, held at the Press Room. “It’s certainly not something someone can make a living from. It’s artistically fulfilling, but purely aesthetic,” Simon says.

Simon also helped create Jazzmouth, the jazz and poetry festival that will run for its fourth year next April. The emphasis on big projects is part of a plan to cut back on late-night club gigs and touring and to choose projects that blend with his job teaching music in the Newmarket school system.

Simon is critical of Internet distribution, and he is not sure that the demise of major labels is a good thing for professional musicians. Now that anyone can record and distribute music at virtually no cost, Simon wonders how great music will find the sizeable, paying audiences its creators deserve.

“One of the predominant traits of human beings is that they’re lazy,” Simon concedes. “You listen to what you’re familiar with. In a capitalist culture, that’s what major labels go after.” By selecting and promoting the artists likely to be most successful, labels efficiently deliver music they’re sure audiences will buy.

“The downside is aesthetics. It’s antithetical to creativity,” he says. But he points out that artists, from Elvis Costello to Philip Glass, have always found alternative ways to be heard, often by starting their own record labels. “There’s nothing new about people avoiding the mainstream. Nothing about major labels versus indie is a new dichotomy.”

But Simon encourages an appreciation for the ways even a smaller label can put a stamp of approval on musicians. “For a jazz musician that’s on Blue Note, whether you like their art or not, you know they can play their ass off. It’s not luck.”

Making a living at music is success in itself, Simon says. “The better the living, the more successful you are.” But, with the music world poised between obsolete systems and future unknowns, Simon smiles and offers this wisdom to musicians hoping to make it pay: “Same advice as ever: Don’t quit your day job.”