Waiting for the Next Bus Call
The coronavirus has kept musicians off the road for a whole year now. How are they trying to get back in the bus?
“We were on the road while shit was hitting the fan,” recalled Zyon Cavalera, the drummer for the Phoenix, Arizona based heavy-metal band Soulfly. The band was in the middle of their U.S. tour dates in February 2020 when COVID-19 began to rapidly spread throughout the country.
“I started stocking the bus up with random stuff as I started to see news of everything on Instagram. We only had a few shows left [before lockdown orders began] and we were able to finish the tour sometime in March in Texas. But it was weird because it felt like the world was in flux with no valid information or answers and I’m pretty sure a lot of us got sick.”
Now, the world hopefully has some valid answers to the pandemic, with millions of people across the world getting access to coronavirus vaccines and restrictions on gatherings slowly loosening as conditions improve.
Musicians itching to play in front of a crowd again have already set their sights on future shows. But as the old normal begins to slowly come back, those who are plotting their comeback tours are going to face a litany of new challenges while the last hurdles of the pandemic are overcome.
As the music landscape has evolved over recent years and sales from physical albums have diminished due to streaming, being on the road is more important than ever for musicians.
According to Billboard’s “Money Makers” a yearly review of the world’s 50 richest musical artists, over the last five years, tours made up at least 75% of the yearly income for even the most monied musicians.
For Soulfly, 2020 was supposed to be a promising year. They were slated for some big gigs last summer, but instead major European metal festivals like Grasspop, Download Festival and Hellfest were cancelled and according to Cavalera, Soulfly missed out on potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in tour revenue.
Without touring, musicians have been mostly relying on publishing royalties from songwriting and streaming revenue during the pandemic.
The Recording Industry Association of America reported a record $5.7 billion in streaming revenue for 2020, but often musicians will sparsely see royalty checks and sometimes the amount that comes in can be paltry at best.
“I don’t get too much from publishing. A few times a year I see a check, it’ll be anywhere from $50 to $2,000. That’s just kind of my situation because I’m more of a hired gun. You have to be a really big band to survive off of royalties,” Cavalera said.
Touring has been a major crux of life for the 28-year-old, whose father is the heavy-metal icon and Soulfly frontman Max Cavalera. Growing up, Zyon Cavalera spent his summer breaks from school in a tour bus with his family while his dad played to crowds of thousands of moshing metalheads all across the world.
He then became part of the action and joined Soulfly in 2012 when he was 19 years old.
Now, getting back to that old way of life is already proving challenging for Soulfly.
Dates in Europe that the band had booked for the summer are constantly being pushed back as venues grapple with health orders, and the only remaining date on their tour schedule is on Sept. 11, 2021 in Orlando, Florida.
“It’s basically just been a bunch of setbacks. They’ll give us a date [to play a show] and when it gets closer to that date, they just keep pushing it back and most of our shows have been like that. We do have plans to go to Australia but I personally don’t see it happening in 2021,” Cavalera said.
Many other bands are facing these same issues, according to a report by Billboard that chronicles the tours and festivals that have been rescheduled in 2021.
What a tour looks like in the future could be significantly different as well, with the majority of venues planning to be kept at limited capacity to accommodate ever evolving health regulations.
At a basic level tours are a combination of physical, mental and serious financial endeavors that need to be accomplished over a period of one to two months by a small group of people.
According to The Royalty Exchange, running a basic month-long tour ranges from $17,000 to $50,000 depending on a number of factors like transportation, crew salaries and insurance.
Tours need a booking agent to set up the dates and promoters to draw the crowd, busses need a reliable driver, musicians need a professional crew to set up and repair their equipment and tour managers need to keep everybody on the tour content while also handling business and media.
While musicians with recording contracts can get most of these funding costs covered by their record labels, for a tour to be profitable musicians need to ensure that performance fees for each venue and sales from tickets and merchandise net them above the money needed to start the tour.
With venues limiting capacity for the foreseeable future, the profit margin for every show could shrink dramatically.
As that profit margin shrinks, history has shown that the music industry will pass on the cost of that shortfall in the form of higher ticket prices.
According to Statista, worldwide ticket prices for tour concerts rose by almost $20 since 2013 when music streaming began to become mainstream and revenue from album sales gradually declined.
Cavalera agreed that a rise in ticket prices would ultimately be inevitable for fans.
“The only thing that I could see working out is making tickets more expensive. There’s probably a lot of people who want to be that 25% of people who can go and will pay for it.”
For some musicians though, the absence of shows during the pandemic has given them opportunities to explore other ways that they can capitalize on their music.
Moreno Valley, California rapper Fze is one of those musicians who recognizes the importance of the intersection between music and technology.
“Digitally you can do your thing and still run your numbers. The aspect of performing is always going to be a part of it, but the internet really lets you do your numbers and grow,” Fze said.
“You can become an overnight celebrity on TikTok nowadays. As a musician, now I’d just focus on dropping as much music as possible with visuals and do live stream shows. I’d use this time to my advantage to do different things.”
Recently, the digital realm has also created a new avenue for musicians to generate revenue.
Non-fungible tokens or NFTs, a type of authenticated digital collectible that can be created and traded by anyone, have emerged as a lucrative financial option for musicians as well as a new outlet for creativity.
Artists like Grimes have sold art pieces in the NFT format for millions of dollars worth of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, and Kings of Leon recently raised $2 million worth of Ethereum by selling NFT copies of their new album.
However, even Fze agrees that live music has an irreplaceable place in the music industry.
“We’re in an interesting time and it’s going to be dope to see how all this plays out. I feel like the in-person interaction is always needed when it comes to doing music and when [concerts] are back, they’ll be booming again,” Fze said.
“I’ll do a tour. Just allow me to break even, I don’t even have to make anything. That’ll be worth it to me. If the fans are there, Fze is there.”
Musicians and their fans miss each other desperately and although there’s reason for optimism, it’s going to be a long and drawn out process to get the tour bus on the road again.
The old adage says that absence makes the heart grow fonder and Cavalera knows that in that absence, there’s a silver lining.
“When you’re on the road every few months you don’t have a lot of time at home. This was actually a really good opportunity for musicians to have some time at home with their families and spend quality time with their loved ones. It was a tough time for the world, but as musicians we had more time to sit down and relax than ever before instead of blasting through tours, ” Cavalera said.
“It’s a great time for people to be musicians. There’s a lot we just went through and there’s going to be a lot of ways to tell the story of this time.”
