Jinjer Bassist Laments How “[Musicians Are] at the Very Bottom” of Receiving Tour Profits
It really feels like we’ve been talking about the difficulties that our favorite bands experience while trying to eke out a living and make ends meet on the road. Rising transit costs, rising visa fees, and overall inflation already make the math hard to math, but then when you add things like venues taking out a percentage of merch sales and you’ve got scenarios where bands have to cancel tours or land in debt because it’s just not financially viable.
In a recent interview with Germany’s Moshpit Passion (as transcribed by Blabbermouth), Jinjer bassist Eugene Abdukhanov explained how things have been incredibly difficult for musicians for a while now. Especially now that the financial power dynamic between artists and their labels/managers/venue owners and others has fundamentally flipped on its head.
“It’s hard to find the proper words, and not to swear… I, of course, oppose and I deeply hate the whole idea of basically stealing money from bands, especially when venues have bars and make tons of money on booze. And especially cutting merch money from support bands who very often barely make any money on merch itself, and they don’t have anything else. And at the same time, I understand that there is no way out of the situation. Because of the whole system, how everything is made, everything turned upside down.
“Musicians, from being at the very top of the pyramid, like artists, actually everything’s supposed to work for musicians, they turn to be at the very bottom of the pyramid. Because the musicians are working for everybody else. This is how it is done. It turns out that the musicians are working for management, the musicians are working for labels, the musicians are working for booking companies, promoters. And it’s very, very obvious when you see a settlement, financial settlement of a tour. Because you start from there, and you see the money and then you see all the cuts and what you’re left with is incomparable with what was at the beginning.”
Now, it should go without saying that if you and your band are the reason people are coming out to spend their hard-earned money, you should get a pretty good chunk of the revenue. Let’s be real, given the state of most of these venues, there’s no other reason people would have to spend time in these locations and pay for overpriced drinks.
But when we live in a world where Live Nation and Ticketmaster pretty much run the game from ticket sales to owning venues all over the place, you can see where the screws start getting turned against the artist. Though he doesn’t name those corporations strictly by name, Abdukhanov points to that very fact as a main reason why everything’s gotten so hard.
“I can complain about this forever. But I see to the core and the core is just the world we live in. This is how everything works and everything is turning. So once open market and free capitalistic society turned into a deeply monopolized market where everything belongs to certain entities which control the majority of the market. I will not say names. This is definitely bad. But I just don’t see a solution.”
This whole topic was likely already on his mind when he was asked about the state of the business, given the fact that Jinjer just recently released their latest full-length album Duél. Since they’re getting ready to go on an Australian tour pretty soon and not long after that is the festival circuit, it’s got to be tough to see how much money is needed to make those shows work and how much is left for the bands at the end of the day.
