Working for the man every night and day

So I took my first ever Uber ride this week, quite inadvertently, as the car dealership where I was getting a “free” oil change has eliminated its courtesy van and replaced it with Uber rides. Still, I thought of Erik and felt very transgressive — not slathering ketchup all over a plate of fries transgressive, but bad enough to feel guilty about it.

I decided to take advantage of the sociological moment, Tom Friedman style, and started chatting with the driver (60ish with a thick accent). I asked him where he was from. Iran. Did he do this full time. No, only a few days a week for a few hours. What were his typical working hours when he was doing this? I usually drive from four in the morning until eight, and then again from two to six in the afternoon. How many days a week do you do that? Four or five. What else do you do? Real estate agent. Divorced six years ago. Volunteered that the car wasn’t his, but rather he rented it through some Uber program. How much does that cost? $450 per week.

Now this blew my mind a little. How do you make money as an Uber driver after spending nearly $2,000 a month on car rental? And why? (I realize driving your own car has lots of hidden costs, but $2,000 a month?) Unfortunately this part of the dialogue was only in my head so I didn’t get an answer to these questions.

He said real estate is hard right now because nobody wants to give up their 3% mortgage. I have no stats but I assume real estate is one of those fields where a handful of agents are making bank while the great majority are making little or nothing. Kind of like being a sole practitioner in the law rackets.

Speaking of the money pyramid, when I wrote the other day about how nobody can money writing books any more, I assumed that the way musicians all make money now that nobody buys records any more (is “record” even the right word now? Give me five bees for a quarter!) is by constant touring. About that:

“Greater transparency is needed,” says Lily Fontaine, lead singer of Leeds band English Teacher. On paper, the four-piece appear to have made it. They are signed with a major label, Island, have played on Later With … Jools Holland, get healthy BBC Radio 6Music airplay, their debut album has received five-star reviews and they are about to embark on their biggest tour to date, which includes an 800-capacity home-town show.

“The reality is that it’s normal for all of these achievements to coexist alongside being on Universal Credit, living at home or sofa surfing,” says Fontaine. During the making of their debut album, she and bandmate Lewis Whiting did the latter while unable to afford rent.

In their four years of existence, English Teacher have yet to turn a profit from touring. “We’ve never directly paid ourselves from a gig,” says Whiting. “A headline tour usually comes out with a deficit. The only thing that we ever make any kind of profit on is festivals, because the fees can be higher, but any money left over just goes towards the next outgoings.” A successful show for the group in the past has been defined by whether they can flog enough merch to afford a supermarket food shop.

So how do they survive? “In the world of artists, we’re in a lucky position,” says Whiting. “We try to pay ourselves £500 a month each from the band pot.” However, they’ve been reliant on their advance for this, which is now gone. “We’re now in that stage where we’re gonna have to figure out where that £500 a month is gonna come from,” says Fontaine. “Because the gig fees won’t be able to cover that.” The band estimate that their 16-date UK tour in May will generate roughly £800 profit. But, says Fontaine, “realistically, I don’t think there will be any profit because things always go over budget”.

Note that this is a highly successful band by any reasonable metric.

For this article, the Guardian has seen 12 tour budget sheets for various bands and artists varying from up-and-comers to firmly established and successful acts, all of whom regularly undertake headline tours across the UK in venues ranging from 150 to 2,500 capacity. Almost all of these result in losses. Understandably, most shared their balance sheets on the condition of anonymity. One four-piece indie band, whose last two albums went Top 10 in the UK charts, reported a loss of £2,885 from a six-day UK tour. The only tour that shows anything resembling healthy profit was a 29-date tour for a solo artist who came away with £6,550. Not bad going for a month’s work but, as Martin points out, “that’s then his touring done for the next six months. So it’s not enough money.” . . .

The gap between those who are flying and those who are floundering has become even more stark. “It feels like the top 1% have become the top 0.5%,” says Martin. “The level of artists we’re talking about here that are struggling to make things stack up financially would really surprise people.”

In 2022, the Grammy-winning Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab posted on X: “Touring has been amazing. We headlined a ton, had massive turnouts and have proven ourselves in all the markets. Yet still, running tens of thousands in debt from the tour and I’m being told that it’s ‘normal’. Why is this normal? This should not be normalised.”

I’m told that one US artist – who released one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2023, which went Top 10 and placed very highly on numerous year-end polls and was nominated for a major award – worked out that the only way she could make her UK tour work was by sub-letting her home.

Yikes. Sounds like the Ariana Grande theory of economics would be even more depressing than the politics version.

I get it: It’s incredibly hard to make a living through any kind of creative endeavor, But it’s also hard out there for your divorced Iranian Uber driver with a real estate side hustle. Or vice versa I suppose. I bet the reason the Uber model even works, to the limited extent it does, is that there are so many people who are wedded to the idea that they’re entrepreneurs and self-employed and not working for the Man, even though the Man is actually some Uber exec who is getting paid seven figures to light other peoples’ money on fire. (Uber actually made money last year for the first time ever, mainly because of Uber Eats.)