Running on Empty: Why COVID-19 Fallout Has Indie Musicians At A Crisis Point

Columbia Journalism School Masters Project 2025

Greta Kline shows up to the gig at the last minute. It’s the first night in February and she’s headlining a benefit concert for Los Angeles after the wildfires at Bushwick’s Trans Pecos, hosted by Bayonet Records. She hops on stage and, standing on tiptoes with her eyes closed in concentration, she rips through a selection of new and old songs aided only by her cream-colored Telecaster.

Those who know Kline are likely to know her as Frankie Cosmos, her primary moniker since 2012. As Frankie Cosmos, she was once described as “no less than a savior of indie pop and the poet laureate of New York City DIY” by critic Jenn Pelly in Pitchfork. Tonight, however, she plays under a different alias: Franz Charcoal. The room is packed with fans eager to see Kline up close, and it doesn’t seem to matter that her band isn’t with her.

While tuning between songs, Kline tells the hushed audience that when she was younger and in the same space, she watched R. Stevie Moore perform and was surprised he needed notes on how to play his set. Tonight, Kline stands with a little notebook and loose pages at her feet. “Now I need to read how to play my own songs, and that was just a few years ago. I’m only 19,” she says, mischievously, to the crowd.

Kline, who in reality is 30, remembers being a teenager and working the door and putting on shows in this same room back when it was known as Silent Barn, a beloved DIY venue. She used to plead with one of Silent Barn’s bookers, Jordan Michael Iannucci, to let her play there. “I asked Jordan like 10 times, ‘Can you book me?’ and he said, ‘No, you’re not a musician, you’ve never played a show,’” she says, laughing, over coffee in the Upper West Side after the Trans Pecos gig.

A native New Yorker active in the music scene and indie famous since she was a teenager, Kline has lived through a dramatic shift in the music industry in the last dozen or so years. When asked about the biggest difference between touring 10 years ago versus today, she pauses for a moment before answering like it was obvious: “Well, everything is more expensive now.”

Kline is among the more fortunate musicians signed to an indie label—she’s on Sub Pop Records, one of the most prominent of its kind—but her definition of splurging on tour amounts to occasionally buying a couple hotel rooms, instead of crashing with friends or family. She estimates the price of hotel rooms alone have doubled since she first started touring. “Five, 10 years ago it would be $200 a night for the four of us to stay, like $100 a room, and now that’s impossible,” she says. “Now it’s like $400, and it’s shitty.”

It’s harder to be a musician today than at any time in recent history. From the price of gas, to food, lodging, to nearly anything that allows artists to survive on the road, costs have risen to critical levels. The new creative class has little opportunity to make money from their work thanks in large part to the dominance of streaming services that have decimated album sales in the past decade. It’s not new for early career musicians to struggle financially, but over the past five years the economic impact of COVID-19 and post-pandemic inflation have swelled the pressure to a crisis point, creating an increasingly doubtful outlook for musicians' future in the art form.

Artists have been left with two primary methods for compensation and outreach: touring and social media promotion. Touring is one of the last income sources for artists, allowing them to connect with audiences in real time, though the cost of traveling and staying fed on the road often outweighs any earnings from ticket and merchandise sales. Alternatively, artists who promote their work on social media can do so at little to no cost, though the chances viewers are actually listening to or supporting the music is nearly impossible to determine. None of these factors are enough to deter independent artists from committing to their music, but many remain unsure if they will ever find financial or emotional stability doing the thing they love.

“It’s getting harder and harder to make a living as a music creator, songwriter, performer, touring person, anything like that,” says Henderson Cole, an entertainment and music lawyer who has studied streaming reform and represents artists like MJ Lenderman and Wednesday. “But on the flip side, it’s getting easier and easier to get attention.”

Ruben Radlauer and Ella Jane are two artists who have used different tactics to grow their audiences in the past five years. Radlauer and his post-punk band Model/Actriz prioritize touring, whereas pop artist Jane has relied exclusively on social media to build her fanbase. Kline bridges the two worlds: like Radlauer, she’s toured since 2013, and like Jane, found success on TikTok in 2021, allowing her to have a foot in each camp of the contemporary modes of making money in music. With the help of her self-described “control freak” tendencies, talent, and luck, she has found a sweet-spot career in music that allows her to prioritize her band full time.

Over a decade since she first started playing live, Kline has nearly 1.5 million monthly listeners on Frankie Cosmos’s Spotify and a Bandcamp page with over 50 releases, in addition to a slew of artist collaborations and additions to compilation albums. While Frankie Cosmos is the primary name she uses as a musician, she can also be found as Lexie, Ingrid Superstar, and Zebu Fur, all of which allow her artistic freedom.

Franz Charcoal, for example, gives Kline the ability to play shows that are smaller and less profitable without forcing her band to do the same. “I’m not gonna waste [my band’s] time, so if I’m trying to play a random-ass show, it’s fun for me to play solo and not have it be part of my business,” she says. Franz Charcoal also allows her to play Frankie Cosmos songs in more intimate spaces like Trans Pecos, whose main room has a capacity of 74 people.

Kline, who was homeschooled after 10th grade, began posting home-recorded music onto Bandcamp in 2009 while still in high school. Soon, she had dozens of releases under various aliases. “I wasn’t even showing my songs to my friends or my parents. I was whispering them in my room and putting them on the internet,” she says. Kline sent a song to someone on Facebook and was asked if she wanted to play a show in Westchester, which soon resulted in her hanging out with the nearby SUNY Purchase music scene. There, the Frankie Cosmos moniker was born and she began her first foray into touring, alongside her then-boyfriend’s band Porches.

When Kline was 19, her full-band debut “Zentropy” came out. Despite being only 17 minutes, it showcases her individual style of indie pop that is at once humorous and heartbreaking, angular and melodic, told through shimmering vocals. “Zentropy” is a more-lofi example of the seemingly naive, but keenly mature lyrics and compositions that make up her vast discography. Pitchfork’s Mike Powell gave the album an 8.0, writing, “Her simplicity is her mask: It makes her seem like she doesn't have anything to say, which is why it’s so surprising when she does.” Jon Caramancia likewise wrote a glowing performance review of the band in The New York Times. Frankie Cosmos was immediately established as a critical favorite, and their fan base grew.

Luke Pyenson was Frankie Cosmos’ drummer from 2015 to 2023, and saw firsthand how Kline was thrust into the spotlight. “She was under the microscope the whole time we were in the band, and I know she’s struggled with many aspects of that, but she handled herself just really maturely from the beginning,” Pyenson says. He remembers the whirlwind period of band hustle and music press that allowed him to quit his day job eight months into joining Frankie Cosmos. “I was always really impressed by her general composure in the face of many demands of being a front person, and particularly a female front person of an indie band who has famous parents,” Pyenson adds, referring to Kline’s parents, renowned actors Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates (both of whom Kline says she talks to everyday). Kline points out her parents were not only a “huge safety net,” but also, as actors, supported her ventures in music without judgement, both of which she recognizes were major privileges.

When Kline started to tour consistently, in 2016 and 2017, she says she was “spoiled” by playing all sold-out shows. She was on the road eight months out of the year to earn a living. At that point, streaming was just a bonus. Nowadays, she has noticed fewer and fewer people buying tickets in advance. Especially in the years after the pandemic, the turnout is much more uncertain, making specific practical decisions difficult.

“It’s really hard for touring bands to gauge how much merch they need to bring and if they’re booking the right-sized venues,” Kline says, “because of this cultural shift [after the pandemic] of, like, ‘Now if I get sick I’ll need to stay home.’ Or, ‘What if there’s an apocalyptic fire between now and next week when we buy this ticket?’” According to a 2021 study by New York Independent Venue Association (NYIVA), 80% of responding venues reported a decrease in ticket sales between 2019 and the fall of 2021, and 88% reported an increase in their no-show rate.

Carson Ehlert, the talent buyer at Elsewhere in Bushwick, says this trend has continued long after the return to live music. He says that following a brief surge after lockdown restrictions eased up in 2021, there has been a difficulty in selling tickets nationwide. “I feel like everyone got so excited to see shows after being cooped inside during the pandemic and they got it out of their system,” he says. “There is so much stuff all the time where it can all feel a little bit exhausting and overwhelming going out five nights a week—even one day a week, at certain times in my life.”

A major way Kline keeps costs down is by taking the financial side of Frankie Cosmos into her own hands. While the band has had the same booking agent since 2014, John Chavez of Ground Control Touring, she serves as their manager, keeping track of costs, doing their taxes, and paying out her current bandmates and those who are due royalties from playing on previous albums. “There are totally times where I’m doing accounting and think, ‘This is cutting into my artistic time,’” she admits. “But the fact that I do it myself is why I don’t have to have another job most of the year, because I’m not paying 10% to a manager, 10% to an accountant, and 10% to a lawyer.”

Alex Bailey has played guitar for Frankie Cosmos since 2017 and points out that Kline pays all her bandmates for rehearsal time and splits touring profits with them evenly, something made possible by the band’s streaming income. “A huge part of why our touring is so sustainable is we keep our overhead really low across the board—I do all the techy stuff for us, and we drive ourselves,” he says.

Those practices have kept her bandmates loyal, according to Pyenson. “She ran [Frankie Cosmos] really thoughtfully and fairly,” he says. “I wouldn’t have been in the band for almost 10 years if it hadn’t been like that.”

Nonetheless, Kline’s intense touring pace from 2015 to 2020 brought her to the brink of burnout. The pandemic helped give her a reset. For the first time since she was a teenager, Kline was living off the road and able to reassess the goals of touring for herself and her band. That was thanks in part to newfound streaming revenue: In 2021, a song of hers, “Fool,” went viral when it was featured in the animated Netflix show “Hilda” and users on TikTok made fan edits of the show using the song.

“Fool,” a non-single off Frankie Cosmos’ second album “Next Thing,” from 2016, showcases Kline’s signature gossamer vocals pining for someone just out of reach. “You look to me/And I look away/Though I had been looking,” she sings, flustered by her vulnerability. However, there is little that differentiates “Fool” from Kline’s other work, both sonically and lyrically; instead, it represents how a particularly catchy 15 second sound bite can change a career. On Nov. 19, 2021, she had 655,442 monthly listeners on Spotify, but by Jan. 9, 2022 that number had jumped to 1,609,405.

“I can make a pretty nice income without leaving the house from my streams,” she says. “A lot of people don’t have that experience.”

Despite her success on Spotify, Kline has mixed feelings about streaming. She has found that when Frankie Cosmos is the opening act, many audience members only know her for “Fool,” indicative of the shift in how younger audiences are discovering music. This past fall, Frankie Cosmos opened for bedroom-pop act Cavetown, and Kline perceived a lot of the audience to skew young. For many it seemed to be their first concert. “Now I’m playing shows and meeting 12 year olds or whatever, and they only know my one song from TikTok and they’re like, ‘Wait, that’s your song?’” she says. Bailey had a similar experience when they opened for Clairo for five nights at Webster Hall in Manhattan. “It’s just a lot of people who take out their phone and video during ‘Fool,’” he says.

“You can totally know a song and know who wrote it, and not know the history of the project the same way that you used to have to invest in buying a CD or album or even just researching a band that you like,” Kline says. “It’s all in a vacuum, you’re just being served, like, a 10-second sound bite with no context.”

Kline acknowledges this can be beneficial for exposing artists to new audiences, like in her case with “Fool,” but laments the lack of physical music and the tactile way of sharing it with loved ones. “Our grandchildren will have no idea what we listened to,” she says.

**

Ella Jane was in the final weeks of her senior year of high school in Irvington, New York, when she got the courage to start sharing her music. It was the spring of 2020 and, with her classes having moved to Zoom, she no longer had to fear the comments of her small-town classmates. She started posting videos promoting her self-released music on TikTok, before it was a common practice on the app. It didn’t take long for people to notice.

One video explained how Jane’s song “nothing else i could do” had spawned from an AP English prompt on “The Great Gatsby.” The song started to blow up. “That changed my life,” she says over a FaceTime call from her home in Los Angeles, where she’s lived since 2023. “I started giving up academically, because at that point I had a call a day with a label who wanted to reach out.”

“nothing else i could do” tells the story of the speaker’s hopeless devotion to a presumed Daisy Buchanan, underscored by a pulsing bassline and layered vocals. Lyrics like, “I wrecked my house a hundred times just to see you walk into a room,” are more obliquely inspired by Jay Gatsby. Jane’s voice glides against the dip of the chorus, which repeats, “Oh babe, there’s nothing else I could do,” in contented surrender.

The triumph of “nothing else i could do” should mark the 23-year-old pop musician as a digital-streaming success story. The song has gone three-times viral, amounting to nearly 42 million streams on Spotify. It was featured on the Netflix teen romance “Heartstopper” in 2022 and allowed her to drop out of college and sign to a label at 19.

Jane remembers sneaking out of her dorm room at Tufts University in Boston her freshman year to go to New York, where she signed a deal with FADER Label in February of 2021, with the assistance of her then-manager. Afterwards, she started a gap year to focus on music—but she knew it would soon turn into dropping out. She just pretended otherwise for her parents’ sake. “I think for [my parents], they were seeing what they viewed as very legitimate factors of me being a musician,” Jane says. “I was signed and got an advance and they were like, okay, maybe you will have some financial stability at some point.”

Despite one song's virality, the stream counts of Jane’s releases since “nothing else i could do” have consistently lowered. She is struggling both to return to that place of relevancy and make new work with a limited budget. Twenty years ago, if an artist had a hit, it would hopefully entice the listener to buy the album. Now, a listener could easily hear “nothing else i could do” hundreds of times without ever hearing another of Jane’s songs. It has left her confused about her future in the industry, and unsure of what her fanbase even looks like.

“I think having any previous success doesn’t really matter in the industry if you’re not having success right now,” she says. Four years after she first got signed, Jane chose not to resign with FADER. Her booking agency has since dropped her because she wasn’t making them any money, and she parted with her manager mostly due to “personal reasons.”

“I had to have the conversation with my parents where I was like, ‘I don’t know, maybe I’ll fucking babysit forever,’” Jane says. “I want to make this work, but also I want insurance. It’s super stressful—and I’m one of the luckier ones.”

Jane’s early self-promotion on TikTok means she now thinks her old videos are “cringe,” like PowerPoint presentations on why she should be the viewer’s new favorite artist. “Back in 2020 and 2021, I think people were really excited because they hadn’t seen that side of artists before,” she says. “In my case, I was literally a college student and the story of my biggest song started out as a high school project and that sort of authenticity really connected with people.”

Now, she finds, the app is oversaturated with artists telling viewers to stream their work, often at the urging of their labels. “It’s like every platform has turned into the QVC,” she says. “There are ads everywhere, and I think people like to feel like they are organically discovering someone, and the way they think they are doing that is by watching people just play their music. But I think for a lot of us who don’t necessarily have songs that catch the listener’s ear right away, it kind of puts us in a difficult position.”

Timm Donohue, one of two managers at the agency Adult Decisions, which currently manages 12 artists, has been struck by the impact of social media on the music industry, as well. “It used to be the product was the record, but now the music itself has been devalued in a way, and so it’s just about getting listens and streams and likes and growing the entire package in a way that used to be concentrated,” he says. The business model has shifted from hoping listeners will like a single enough to buy a record, to relying on a 15-second video to hook its viewer into opening a new app to stream or pre-save a song. A viral song or prominent playlist feature—whether it be RapCaviar or Fresh Finds—can get an artist a record deal, allow them to make rent, or get them out of debt, but the rules are slippery at best.

Jane thinks that writing with the hope of creating a viral hit will only backfire on the artist. “I think the second anyone writes with the internet in mind, it’s just in vain because the internet gets sick of things so fast,” she says. “It works momentarily, like those are the people who get signed, people who have instant financial gain and labels see something recoupable.”

Jane’s point of the inexplicable nature of what will do well on TikTok is apt—in 2024 hit “sounds” include the balladic “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s (2001) and the throwaway 2017 radio hit “Symphony” by Clean Bandit (ft. Zara Larson). A song seems to proliferate without reason, and is old news once the next trend arrives. A positive, however, is that at times something seemingly unpredictable can catch fire, like Jane’s “nothing else i can do” or Kline’s “Fool.”

As Sam Weisenthal, the digital marketing manager of Bayonet Records, put it, “If you can catch the attention of a DSP [digital streaming platform] editor then it’s easier to grow, but that’s impossible. That’s kind of the one-in-a-million situation.” Depending on one’s record deal, even if you can get on one of these playlists it doesn’t mean you will automatically make a lot of money. Jane, who is featured on the “young and free” and “text me back” Spotify playlists, which have 2 million followers combined in addition to her 200,000 monthly listeners, says she is making no money from the music she put out with FADER, including “nothing else i could do.” “I haven’t seen money in years,” she says.

Jane says FADER still has not recouped on the music she released during her deal, though she says because of her viral music it shouldn’t be too far into the future that they break even. Once FADER recoups, Jane will own her music and be able to make money from her streams. “That’s the reality of being a signed artist,” Jane says. “You might get a recording advance that could include some pocket money, but besides that, the money generated by your streams goes to the label.”

Ultimately, Jane doesn’t regret signing her deal. She recognizes that she did grow as an artist under the label’s direction, but finds it hard to delineate which opportunities she got from her own promotion or theirs. “It’s an unfortunate time to be a label or an artist,” she says. “Things are changing so quickly that it’s risky to put a certain amount of money into anything because you don’t know how much bearing it’s going to have on things in a year or two.”

One of the great difficulties of talking about streaming is it’s nearly impossible to actually know what music makes on platforms. The oft-repeated Spotify metric of earning $0.003 a stream is really an estimate with a number of variables, such as what cut a label or licensor takes of royalties, whether the song or album has participated in Spotify’s Discovery Mode promotion program, which takes off 30% of eligible royalties, or whether the work was streamed by a premium subscriber or free user.

Liz Pelly is the author of “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist,” a book published in January 2025 that focuses on these very issues. “The wall of NDAs that surrounds the contracts between rights holders and streaming services raises this reality that musicians and artist advocates are largely operating in the dark when it comes to even knowing what questions they should be asking or what could be done to make the royalty system more fair,” Pelly says.

The leverage that artists and the majority of labels—apart from Warner, Universal, and Sony Music Group—is negligible at best, since streaming has completely dominated the marketplace. For a label to not participate in the rat race for playlist placements could be enough for them to fold. “For most label people or artists, I don’t think any of us feel particularly great about Spotify or being within the streaming ecosystem, and having to live with these kinds of corporate entities against our will,” said Evan Welsh, the label manager at Bayonet. “It’s kind of a necessary evil, at least for right now.”

Even when an artist has good stream numbers or has gone viral on TikTok doesn’t mean they will automatically have well-attended live performances. Carson Ehlert, the Elsewhere talent buyer, points out that while he will book a social media-based artist, a primary metric he looks at before booking anyone is their previous ticket sales and turnout for other live shows.

Sam Weisenthal, who worked the door at Williamsburg’s Baby’s All Right before the pandemic, says a lot of TikTok artists were getting booked because they generated immediate ticket sales, which they later realized often went to waste. “I think what we had calculated was around a 75% drop for those artists,” she says. “People would have a pop-off moment, and in that moment people would buy a ticket, and then they would forget about the sound. They never actually cared about the music, they never even probably heard the full song.”

Even though a ticket is sold, Ehlert explained, it doesn’t necessarily make money for the venue, since ticket sales cover artist fees and in-house recording costs. The more tickets sold, the more staff the venue accounts for, so when a big chunk of those ticket holders don’t show up, the venue can easily lose money. Weisenthal added that some of the viral-artist audience members that did show up would stay in the bar area until the song they knew started playing. “They would all sing along to the timestamp and then leave, it was really horrible,” she says.

Jane had some success playing live when her audience engagement was at its height, but now worries about returning to the stage. “I’m totally in a place of trying to rebuild my career, and I’d love to be touring right now, but I’m not sure what it would be like to start at this point in time. I’d imagine it’d be really scary and exhausting,” she says.

Ethan Berlin, a booking agent for Arrival Artists, says the pool of musicians who make money from their work has become much wider and shallower than when he first started working in agencies 18 years ago. Even before the pandemic in 2019, a survey from MIDiA found that despite a 35% increase in money generated by independent artists from 2017, 74% of independent artists made less than $10,000 annually from their music. “I would say the major difference is that the barrier to entry to have your name out there and making really creative music has lowered,” Berlin says.

On top of that, general costs have gotten higher, making it harder for artists to endure the years of gigging and nearly impossible for fans to monetarily support all of their favorite artists. “There’s new bands forming everyday, like too many bands, tours are happening all the time,” says Andrew Morgan, an agent for Wasserman Music. “The people that go to shows and pay for shows only have a finite amount of money and can’t go to every show they want to go to.” With touring being the primary source of revenue for many musicians, and often the only way they can make money from their music, this over-saturation of artists, combined with a higher cost of living, creates a greater sense of strain and competition.

“It really wears on you because you have peers who are doing well on the internet, which does sometimes translate to ticket sales or streams, and it’s just like, ‘Am I just making worse music?’” Jane says. “The one saving grace has been reminding myself that a lot of my friends are in very similar positions. I have so many talented friends who make fucking excellent music and I see people who I really believe in going through the same thing.”

**

Ruben Radlauer is in the midst of a nearly seven-month break from tour—the longest he’s had since the pandemic. With all of his extra free time, the Model/Actriz drummer is attempting to re-establish some healthy routines, which tend to be elusive during his touring lifestyle. Right now, that means a sewing project. “I’m cooking again and trying to figure out what my hobbies are, because it’s not music; I can’t do that as a hobby anymore,” he says, while walking around the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn on a Wednesday afternoon.

Since graduating high school in 2014, Radlauer has done tours of various sizes, but after the release of Model/Actriz’s 2023 album “Dogsbody,” he has been on a sort of perma-tour, playing 105 shows in 160 days last year. Now 28, he describes touring as an incredibly destabilizing force, even though it is a choice. “Just to be gone all the time and not have much money all the time” can be hard to reckon with, he acknowledges. “From the stretches of downtime and boredom on the road versus shows, and just intense stimuli versus no stimuli feels fundamentally unhealthy.”

Radlauer’s been a musician for as long as he can remember. He started drumming with pots and pans on the floor of his parents’ kitchen after he watched Queen’s tribute to Freddie Mercury at Wembley Stadium on VHS when he was only 2 or 3 years old. His father, Dan Radlauer, is a composer, scoring VH1 reality TV shows like “Surreal Life” and “Flavor of Love” when Radlauer was young, so he grew up in a house with a home studio where he would go to hangout whenever he was allowed.

When he was in high school, Radlauer played in the local L.A. DIY circuit along with Jackson Katz, who now performs under the name Brutus VIII. Katz says that, in retrospect, they were incredibly lucky to have such a big music community and all-ages performance spaces at their disposal. “Since we were 15, when we were doing these little L.A. garage rock things, and [Ruben] was one of the best ones for sure,” he says.

Radlauer went on to go to Berklee School of Music in Boston after taking a gap year to pursue a band in L.A., and while at school he met his future Model/Actriz bandmates. Cole Haden, the band’s vocalist, says that the band first met in passing walking from campus to a venue in a big group, which was common in the Berklee music scene. “There was a whole street with houses that would have shows. It felt like walking around a mall,” he remembers. “Every house had a different thing you could check out and it was all very tight knit, and a lot of them went to Berklee.”

Model/Actriz is known as a touring band. Their music, which is vicious post-punk imbued with the rush of dance music, is helmed by Haden, who’s gay and has noticed an increase in the band’s queer fanbase since the release of “Dogsbody.” “Especially in the kind of music we play, it’s a cliché, but representation matters,” Haden says. This is a major reason Radlauer feels it is important to keep playing live, especially outside the major cities where there is less queer visibility. “The thing that kind of keeps me going, and makes it worth it, is playing a show and feeling how important it is to people and how much it is bringing people joy,” he says.

Model/Actriz’s music is not the type that tends to thrive on streaming, which notoriously favors more mellow, background music for optimal streams and editorial playlist placement. Liz Pelly says the concept of passive listening in streaming began around the time Spotify launched in the U.S. and the company was trying to grow beyond music enthusiasts and early adopters. “[Spotify] commissioned a research agency to study their own user base and found that, whereas previously, they thought their target user was looking for a product that would replicate the experience of file sharing, instead this new type of user they were trying to draw was actually looking for more of a lean-back, Pandora-like experience,” she says. As a result, mood-based categories like “Chill,” “Focus,” and “Sleep” are all listed as official genres on Spotify’s browse feature, but not post-punk.

When asked about money made from streaming royalties, Radlauer, like many musicians, is not quite sure on the numbers. “I think we have recouped or almost recouped from streaming [on recording costs], which is not much, like 10 grand or something,” he says, which his bandmates corroborated. As a result, touring is the grind that keeps the band’s momentum building.

Radlauer says touring has only started to get profitable once the band reached a headlining level. “All the opening tours we did were either a loss or break even, and we were driving my mom’s old minivan and being scrappy with it,” he says. “There is no budget for support even on big tours, really.”

This is especially the case for musicians hired to tour with a band or artist, especially if that band is the opening act of a tour. Wyatt Kirschner, who releases music as Paris Archives, is in his first year of being a touring guitarist, completing two tours with Daffo before the end of 2024, opening for Sir Chloe and Illuminati Hotties. He is realizing that certain luxuries of midsize tours make the road easier, but this doesn’t make it sustainable for his bank account.

“I lost money on the first tour I did, everyone, the other hired musicians, all lost money doing that tour,” he says. “I also lost money on this last tour, though not as much. It basically covered rent and bills for the time I was away, but I came back to New York with slightly less money in my savings account.” The hope is that at some point, more headlining gigs will enter into the equation, since losing money on every tour is hardly sustainable.

“Before we started having success on the band front, I was like, “Okay, this is the push and then it will start to become easier,” Radlauer says. “And then the EP comes out and it’s like okay this is the push and things will start to become easier. And now, the album’s been out a year and a half and it’s just been the push to get the second album so we don’t lose the momentum. I have my doubts that we will ever fully be able to relax into it.”

From the outside, it is easy to see a band like Model/Actriz playing major music festivals like Primavera Sound in Barcelona or headlining venues like Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn and assume they must be financially secure. Radlauer now realizes it continues to be a sprint even when one’s dreams are coming true, that the threat of a lukewarm album response can easily send the band backwards. Stability is the carrot dangled just out of reach. “When you look into the future and the only way you can really make guaranteed money is touring, I think it’s hard not to get a little bit anxious about the next 10 or 20 years of your life,” he says.

Pelly says the fear of the future in the music industry is not a new phenomenon, but these circumstances are. “What’s different is we exist in an era where the gap between the rich and the poor is growing and the cost of living is much higher,” she says. “What I don’t agree with is people who are like, ‘Shit has always been bad.’ It’s like, your rent was $200 when you were in a band in the ‘90s. The cost of living is so much higher [now].”

According to a 2024 infographic published by The National Independent Talent Organization, after looking at expense sheets shared by musicians, an artist is likely to take home $8 of a $100 concert ticket after fees, venue costs, touring costs, promoter profits, and touring expenses.

“It does just keep getting less profitable with inflation and merch cuts and there’s definitely a palpable fear that touring income is kind of going to start to be eaten away at, just kind of like every other form of music income,” Radlauer says. “We are dreading having to add another member to the team, like a tour manager, which we need desperately, because it’s been difficult to maintain doing it for half the year ourselves.” A tour manager generally takes a 15 to 20% cut off of what the band is making, according to the blog Lawyer Drummer, resulting in a real price tag for a band’s lessened responsibilities, which includes driving, booking hotels, and selling merch.

At higher levels of touring, Live Nation and its dynamic pricing keep fans paying higher prices, money that the artist will never see, and despite a recent push against merch cuts, they remain standard.

“Ultimately, the venue and promoter are the client of the ticketing company and not the artist,” says Randy Nichols, an artist manager since 1998 who advocates for ticketing reform. “The artist gets very little say or impact on what happens with ticketing because the artist and fan are not the customer of the ticket company, the venue is the customer of the ticketing company.”

Some artists have tried to evade the traditional touring infrastructure altogether, and instead have sought out unconventional ways to perform their music. Carolina Chauffe, who performs as hemlock, was on the road nonstop from November 2023 to May 2025, playing in majority house and DIY spaces, and driving herself across the country in a 2014 Nissan Rogue.

“I try to avoid venues as much as possible and find alternative show spaces,” Chauffe says. “It seems like the general sentiment people need more in this moment: more intimate spaces where they’re still able to feel restful even if they’re leaving their house. Not so much if they go out to spend $20 to get in and then $40 on drinks.”

Chauffe didn’t pay rent for the nearly two-years she spent on “permatour,” but she calculates spending somewhere between $40 and $80 on gas most days, a number that can quickly resemble a monthly rent payment. She estimates only having to buy one hotel room the whole year. Otherwise, she sleeps on friends’ and acquaintances' couches or stays in her car, which she only had to do a few times. She makes anywhere from up to $60 on a bad night and $100 to $300 more typically, which is heavily predicated on the amount of merch she sells, and estimates playing a show one in three nights in the last year.

“I feel like I’ve made a profit this year, which is a marginal profit. Like, I’m still on food stamps,” she says. Because Chauffe travels solo, she is often seen as less of a burden to feed, and does her best to buy groceries to avoid spending more eating out.

Chauffe’s close friend and touring musician Lily Seabird says of her own eating habits on tour: “I basically eat a bunch of nuts and fruit. And then maybe one meal a day I get something from a place.” Seabird was on the road eight months of 2024, but only spent around six weeks of those playing her own music. “I don’t think everybody’s cut out for it, because you basically make no money and do a lot of work,” she says. “For me, it doesn’t really feel like work most of the time, because I love playing music, I love people, and I love traveling.”

Chauffe feels similarly. “I think the reason I kept doing this is because it's really heartening to know that we will show up for each other,” she says. “I can throw a dart at a map now and have someone that I cherish or love in pretty much every town or at least every state.”

Despite a grander feeling of community, Chauffe has had to sacrifice a lot of day-to-day comforts, like sleeping in a bed surrounded by familiar posters, or having a best friend’s hug. “I think emotionally it’s as miraculous as it is exhausting,” she says. “One of the emotional costs is just this kind of immediate loneliness, like an acute loneliness of not having consistency of a cast of characters on a weekly basis.”

Radlauer says that touring impacts his relationships negatively without destroying them. “The first year of intense touring was very hard. My girlfriend suffered,” he admits. “There’s no conflict other than it’s a bummer for both of us, and I feel guilty for putting her through it.”

Colin Miller, a solo artist and the touring drummer for MJ Lenderman and the Wind, says that for him, the hardest part of the tour lifestyle is reckoning with being away from his fiancée to make money for their future family. He compares it to being a long-haul trucker. Aside from this concern, tour is an experience he embraces. “I love tour at any level: I loved it when I got paid $100 for a 10 day run, I love it now when I’m on the road for longer and making more. I love the companionship that the road brings on and the thrill of playing music in a place I’ve never been in front of people I’ve never met.”

Like Miller and Chauffe, Radlauer suffers the emotional strain, but ultimately thinks that touring, and creating a meaningful experience for strangers, is greater than his personal feelings. “Even when it’s miserable and I’m like, ‘I hate doing this right now,’ that’s why I’m doing it, because we bring value into people’s lives and bring something for people to imbue their own meaning into, and that’s the one infallible reason that keeps me going.”

**

A few weeks after her show as Franz Charcoal at Trans Pecos, Kline sits outside a combination plant store coffee shop on the Upper West Side. She was recounting a conversation she had had with a friend about how Chappell Roan recently used her Best New Artist acceptance speech at the Grammys to advocate for musicians, and then donated $25,000 for developing artists. “Record labels need to treat their artists as valuable employees with a livable wage and health insurance and protection,” Roan said from the Grammys stage, making headlines and receiving praise from her colleagues. Suddenly, a musician’s subsistence was a hot topic.

“My friend, who's not in the music industry at all, asked me what do you think [$25,000] is of her income, and I was like, ‘Honestly, that’s probably a lot of money to her,’” Kline says. “I was doing my taxes, and I was thinking it’s totally possible that I make more money from streaming than Chappell Roan because of the nature of her deal. I’d love to teach her how to self-manage,” she adds, laughing.

It’s been over 10 years since Frankie Cosmos’ inception, and Kline now fantasizes about using what she has learned to empower musicians to manage themselves, citing the importance of transparency. “[Musicians] should tell each other what your advance is, how much you get paid to play a venue, or how much you get paid to play in a band, because there are a lot of people getting ripped off,” she says.

Jane is a perfect example of someone who may have benefitted from Kline’s advice. Despite the setbacks she’s encountered in the industry, she still feels like there is nothing she’d rather be doing than making music. “When I have moments of clarity and I’m not like, ‘I need to go back to college,’ I’m like, ‘Well, I love songwriting, I love performing, I love knowing people resonate with what I do,’” she insists. “I’ve always just written songs to get through life.”

This is a primary reason Aaron Edgcomb, a composer, got involved with Musician Workers Alliance, an advocacy group for independent artists, after the pandemic. “Why I’m interested in organizing is looking at this thing, [music,] that I think is valuable and important and does have the potential of economic stability, but a lot of that money, power, and labor is given for free,” Edgcomb says. He fears a future in which only musicians with support from major labels or who come from generational wealth will be able to afford working as a musician, which precludes a lot of marginalized communities.

Despite the rising costs, oversaturation of artists, and distortions of social media, musicians aren’t abandoning the art form. For them, nothing can replace the catharsis of writing and playing music, or the adrenaline of sharing your work with others. Kline has no doubts that the rewards of making a living in music outweigh the setbacks, and has no aspiration to stop playing anytime soon.

“It’s really hard to plan anything in the future, and I’m trying to not assume that I’m gonna be able to do this forever, but right now it’s working,” she says. “My band is all in our 30s, and my oldest bandmate is turning 38 this year. I guess in 10 years, she might not want to be touring at 48, but it just depends on how you feel.” Recently, Kline shared a bill with a band she used to play with as a teenager, and realized that now, all of the band members are either married, parents, or both. It gave her a new sense of perspective on what might lay ahead.

“Who knows what's going to happen to our bodies in the next how many years?” Kline wonders. “I’m just grateful for all the time we get to do it.”