👺Greetings From Weird America

Touring musician hell, making journalism $ is hard, Amazon's low-income push: Context Collapse #159

Oct 07, 2022

In this issue: Touring musicians in economic no-good-options zone / Why media brands don’t make money from display ads / Amazon’s new interest in low-income customers.

Greetings from Ungerleider Haus. Here in Chicago, we’ve had drenching sunshowers all morning as the temperature dips from the seventies into the fifties. Chicago is a wonderful city with many upsides, with the ability to experience multiple seasons in one day just one of them.

Lots of things to discuss today. Let’s go.

Being a Touring Musician in 2022 Sucks

I’ve been thinking a lot about Santigold’s tour cancellation notice lately. Santigold, like many musicians, saw the business side of her career deeply and truly messed up by the past two years.

santigold

A post shared by @santigold

Pitchfork’s Matthew Ismael Ruiz has a good summary of what’s going on and Santi’s cancellation notice is well worth reading:

As a touring musician, I don’t think anyone anticipated the new reality that awaited us. After sitting idle (not being able to do shows) for the past couple years, many of us like everyone else, earning no or little income during that time, every musician that could, rushed back out immediately when it was deemed safe to do shows. We were met with the height of inflation—gas, tour buses, hotels, and flight costs skyrocketed—many of our tried-and-true venues unavailable due to a flooded market of artists trying to book shows in the same cities, and positive test results constantly halting schedules with devastating financial consequences. All of that on top of the already-tapped mental, spiritual, physical, and emotional resources of just having made it through the past few years. Some of us are finding ourselves simply unable to make it work.

She’s not the only one. I grew up in the punk and hardcore scenes and a lot of my teenage friends ended up as touring musicians in all sorts of genres. One commonality I hear from my musician friends is (and pardon my French) how deeply fucked touring is these days.

One COVID case from the support crew or the venue staff might mean hours added to show setup or post-show. Three COVID cases might mean canceling the concert. Ticket prices need to be more expensive to make up for lost income for musicians and venues plus inflation… at a time when many audience members—especially under 30s—are in a financial crunch. Venues closed during the pandemic. Delays up and down the supply chain mean improvising tour travel or logistics is way harder. The music is still there but touring as a musician? Way harder.

And I have no idea when it’ll ease up.

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Making Money From Journalism Is Hard

magazines on rack — Photo by Charisse Kenion on Unsplash

Fandom, the content company founded (but no longer owned) by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, just paid $50 million for TV Guide, Metacritic and GameSpot. The deal means Fandom is now one of the largest entertainment publishing brands in the world.

Fandom bought GameSpot, Metacritic and TV Guide from Red Ventures, who in turn acquired them when they bought CNET in 2020. That’s a whole lot of ownership turnover in, uhh… two years! (For context, Red Ventures also owns Bankrate, Lonely Planet, the Points Guy and BestColleges.)

All three properties have great SEO showings and are regularly clicked on by people searching for information online. All three properties also have dedicated readerships in 2022. The only problem is that display advertisements don’t generate significant revenue, which is a big problem for anyone in the media business in 2022.

This is the quandry. The general public is looking for high-quality content about their favorite games and TV shows, and you have to sort through a lot of crummy randoms on Reddit, YouTube or TikTok to get to the good stuff. However, the current business models for the “good stuff” don’t work at all.

See also: Resident Contrarian’s recent post on the difficulty of generating a living wage from a writing career. The internet vastly decreased the barriers to entry for writers in particular and media producers in general. However, this also significantly decreased compensation for writers and profitability for media producers!

This still hasn’t been resolved.

Something unusual from Amazon: The everything store is launching Amazon Access, a new online hub for Amazon customers who either have a lower income and/or recieve various forms of government assistance.

Because everything is communication, including (and especially!) ecommerce landing pages, this is Context Collapse territory.

From Amazon’s press release:

Amazon Access is a new hub that offers resources to make shopping and saving on Amazon even easier, including information on Prime’s discounted membership program for qualifying government assistance recipients.
We’re introducing Amazon Access, a one-stop-shop for customers to explore programs, discounts, and features that make shopping on Amazon even easier and more affordable. Here, customers will find information on options like payment with SNAP EBT, Amazon Layaway, and more. Key among the programs featured in the hub is Prime Access, Prime’s discounted membership program for qualifying government assistance recipients. Eligible customers in the U.S. who sign up for Prime Access get all the exclusive benefits and perks of a Prime membership for just $6.99 a month—more than 50% off the cost of a full-priced membership.

This is interesting, both personally and professionally. Personally because I grew up in a middle-class family that did a biggggggggg slide down the socio-economic ladder and I spent a good chunk of my childhood and teenage years on food stamps and other forms of government assistance. Professionally for quite a few reasons. Let’s dig into them. There are good reasons why Amazon would not only create a new set of landing pages (happens all the time), but create a whole damn press release for them.

Here are the things that pop into my mind:

Amazon kind-of, sort-of has US market saturation for Amazon Prime among customers with disposable income. To find significant growth, Amazon has to enter underutilized market sectors. From a purely mercenary capitalist perspective, welfare and SSI recipients are underutilized market sectors.
2022’s don’t-call-it-a-recession is hitting a lot of people hard. Amazon is launching this internal effort as an answer to the increasing number of Amazon customers now receiving various forms of government benefits they didn’t receive before.
Amazon has a specific regulatory and PR strategy in mind and creating resources aimed at low-income customers is part of that.

Maybe all three are fully true. Maybe all three are partially true. Or maybe none of them are true!

What do you think?