‘It just feels safer’: the Australian musicians pivoting from an industry in crisis

Australian musician Ali Barter was touring her second album in New York when Covid-19 hit.

“I had gigs in America, in Europe, a residency in London; I was going on tour with another band, I was going to go to Mexico,” the Melbourne singer says.

Instead, she returned to Victoria to watch her industry crumble.

An estimated $84m in music industry revenue has been lost due to border closures and restrictions in the past two months alone, according to joint data collection from the Australian Music Industry Network and the Australian Festival Association.

With Australia reeling from the Delta strain, major festivals including Splendour and Bluesfest have been cancelled for the second year running, with an estimated 7,000 gigs and live events cancelled each week.

Strict restrictions and slow vaccination rates, coupled with unpredictable snap lockdowns, have made it impossible for musicians to plan tours and promote albums; and with many music industry workers ineligible for jobkeeper (which ceased on 28 March this year) and federal grants schemes failing to trickle down, there are rising concerns that government rescue packages aren’t reaching the people who need it.

Many of those people are musicians, in an industry that was worth $1.8bn to the national economy in 2019. And in 2021, some of those musicians are pivoting away from the industry to find work elsewhere.

Barter made the decision to embark on a psychology degree at Deakin University.

“I’m 35 and it feels like I’m looking down a barrel … being at the level that I was at, with a bit of a following, but still sort of cutting my teeth.

“I thought, if the world keeps going the way it is, I’ll be 38 before I know it. Moving myself into study right now just feels safer than hanging all my hopes on writing and producing another record.”

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Apart from a safety net, her new career path has also offered a distraction.

“Without being able to concentrate on study I think the hopelessness and the emptiness and the pointlessness of it all would become very overwhelming,” she says.

“Everything was taking off, and now it’s just stopped. Mentally, I just can’t think about that. It’s too devastating.”

‘The industry is eating into itself’

Barter isn’t alone. Earlier this month Aria-nominated Alex Lahey wrote an open letter to the prime minister, Scott Morrison, calling for a clearer roadmap out of the crisis – including an insurance scheme and wage subsidies program for the arts and entertainment industry.

“I have seen some of the most talented individuals turn their backs on what were once promising careers as performers, venue workers and crew,” Lahey wrote.

Without more support, she continued, “the industry is eating into itself” – a situation that risked “leaving our country void of a generation’s worth of live performance talent and crew”.

That musicians would moonlight in other professions to supplement their income is nothing new. A study conducted by Griffith University just prior to the arrival of the pandemic found that far from the “starving artist” myth, almost half of the 600 musicians surveyed combined music and non-music work in highly entrepreneurial ways.

But for those reliant on casual work in the hospitality industry, Covid-19 lockdowns have presented a double whammy.

Pre-pandemic, 12% of the musicians surveyed by Griffith University said they were thinking about leaving the industry – the most common reasons being financial stress, lack of income and caring responsibilities.

According to I Lost My Gig data, a national survey of 2,000 professionals working in the live music industry, including crew as well as performers, just 7% of respondents reported they were operating at a pre-Covid level in 2021.

Well over half of the respondents said they had had to look for work in other industries, although it was not stipulated whether that decision to leave the music industry would be permanent.

“Some will come back because of their passion for the industry,” says Tony Moran, a spokesperson for CrewCare, which provides a national support network to backstage and technical personnel in the industry.

“But I have numerous anecdotal evidence which suggests many of those who have sought employment elsewhere will not be returning.

“It’s chronic and not yet fully appreciated or understood, and there is already a significant skills shortage being experienced across the live production sector, despite the lack of work on offer.”

Moran says one production and staging supplier that operates down the entire eastern seaboard has reduced its workforce from 200 to 20 casual workers in the past 18 months. A major Victorian crewing supplier has recently reported a 95% drop in revenue to CrewCare.

‘Never sell out’

On the same day Lahey sent her letter, James Tidswell – the guitarist of multiple Aria-winning band Violent Soho – tweeted that he’d also found new work: driving a forklift. “Last year I got two number one albums,” he wrote. “This year I got a job.”

The electropop singer/songwriter Phebe Starr has also pivoted. Her 2012 single Alone With You has been used in a Samsung commercial, the 2015 film A Million Happy Nows, and the TV series Dance Academy and Offspring. Now based in Los Angeles, Starr returned home to Australia early in 2020 to renew her visa, but ended up spending the pandemic in her mother’s house in Bellingen when she should have been preparing for the release and tour of her debut album.

Early in 2021 Starr accepted a job in the educational unit of Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, working with adults with disabilities, with a focus on movement and music. She’s enjoyed the shift.

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“It’s reconnected me with a community again and given me more stability,” says Starr, who admits that earlier in the pandemic she was trying to overcome depression and waning self-confidence.

“I don’t have to worry about the instability of the arts for the next two years ... I just need to do something positive with the immediate response ... it’s a bit like live performance, just with a smaller audience. It’s great.”

Her debut album, Heavy Metal Flower Petal, has been postponed twice, with a new date set for 22 September.

“I spent the last three years writing that album and I didn’t want it to come out in the heat of the pandemic,” she says. “[But] I’m so sick of not releasing – I’ve decided I’m gonna have to release anyway.”

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Georgia Maq, meanwhile, had already completed her nursing degree when her band Camp Cope took off. With no tours on the horizon, she has made her way back to the profession – and is now part of the Victorian government’s Covid-19 response team, working at testing facilities and vaccination hubs. Sometimes, Maq finds herself working alongside singer/songwriter Gordi, who also returned to her medical career last year.

“When the pandemic happened, I thought, well I’ve got this skill set that not a lot of people have, that I’ve never really used,” Maq says. “And now I need to use it to meet the moment.

“I absolutely miss [live performance], of course, but I don’t get too bummed out when we miss shows because take a look around, there’s bigger things going on.”

‘As it turns out, I love it’

Some are relishing the opportunity to work in industries with physical demands that keep them fit and active – including DJ Jess McGuire, whose friend offered her work as a removalist after her income vanished overnight.

“I was an almost-39-year-old woman with no experience as a removalist so I wasn’t really prime recruitment material ... but I thought it would be a good way of getting fit.

“Weirdly, as it turns out, I love it. I have this really great job where everyone who works there is a musician or a creative or a really interesting person ... This job has been a small sanity in a very insane 18 months.

“I’m fitter than I have ever been,” she says. “Instead of just floating around during the week and waiting for the weekend when the [DJ] work kicks in, I have this job that has been a godsend in every possible sense physically and mentally.”

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Francis Fogliani is a live music technician who used to work at major festivals like Falls and Day on the Green, as well as at Melbourne’s Palais and Forum theatres. He already held rigger and scaffolding licences, allowing him to secure full-time work in a steel factory during the pandemic – but other colleagues weren’t so lucky.

“I have a lot of friends [in the music industry] who haven’t been able to find other work and they haven’t qualified for any of the [government] payments, they’ve slipped through the criteria cracks,” Fogliani says. “They’re definitely struggling.”

The Melbourne-born soprano Natalie Peluso has been an opera singer for 25 years – but her last role was almost two years ago, singing Eurydice for Opera Queensland’s production of Orpheus & Eurydice in 2019.

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She says the constant shutdowns of the pandemic added stress to what was already becoming an unliveable career, with companies tending to contract younger, cheaper singers well before Covid took hold.

Like Barter, Peluso is now studying psychology. “I guess you could say this decision for me was merely solidified by the pandemic rather than as a consequence of the pandemic,” she says. “I could see the writing on the wall.”