Have you ever gone to — or played — a show that was so good that you stopped and reevaluated what’s possible?
That happened to me when my band played an October gig at the Maintenance Shop in Ames. We celebrated the release of a brand-new, four-song EP of original music. We split the bill with Strong Like Bear, another Ames-area band also releasing new music. We promoted the show hard: we plastered Main Street with posters advertising the show, collaborated on a homemade zine to hand out for free during the performance, did interviews on the local community radio station, and promoted the gig on our social media channels to get folks in the door. We kicked it old-school, just like our DIY music heroes who forged a grassroots alternative network in the 1980s — a network that nurtured acts like Husker Du, Fugazi and the Minutemen.
When the show ended and it was time to settle with the always-friendly M-Shop management, we found we’d sold enough tickets to trigger an overage in our contract with the venue.
We felt like bona fide rockstars, and the show left me wondering: Would it be possible to scrape together a decent living as an independent rock musician, without the safety net of a full-time job? Are the tactics that worked in the '80s and '90s — zines, independent labels and grassroots marketing — still capable of building an audience? They worked for that one show, but maybe that was an isolated incident.
And that made me wonder: What does it take in 2024 to chart a sustainable career in rock music without major industry support? Is such a thing possible in Iowa?
Michael Azerrad, author of the seminal Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 and The Amplified Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, called it “extremely rare” for independent musicians to earn a steady living with music, but he said agonizing over profit potential might miss the point.
“[Independent musicians] do it because they love to make music, so they figure out a way to do it and yet stay fed, clothed and housed — which usually involves either a day job, an understanding partner or a trust fund,” Azerrad said.
Bands as small businesses
The infrastructure that supported the independent movement of the 1980s and 1990s has undergone a metamorphosis over the decades, driven to a large extent by changes in technology. Physical zines gave way to blogs, which then gave way to social media as the most common DIY medium for disseminating alternative ideas. File sharing and then streaming rewrote the social contract between independent record labels and artists. Bands no longer require a label for distribution when they can make their music available worldwide from their laptops.
Influential independent record labels such as Touch and Go, Dischord and SST still exist, but rely heavily on their legendary back catalogues. Sub Pop, the flagship indie of the Seattle scene, remains a premier independent label, as Azerrad pointed out. Many of the venues that functioned as waypoints on the underground circuit have closed, with new spaces springing up in their place. While a few, like the Maintenance Shop (which attracted The Replacements, Firehose, Bob Mould and the Smashing Pumpkins), still host performances.
A similar DIY ethos now animates artists in a wide range of genres, not just guitar-driven rock. Azerrad said spiritual successors to the independent spirit have sprung up in electronic, hip-hop, dance, avant-garde, metal and folk circles.
Franz Nicolay is the keyboardist in long-running indie band The Hold Steady and the author of the new book Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music, which explores the realm of independent music from a variety of vantage points, including how musicians make ends meet.
Nicolay said the technologies used to distribute music have shaped the economics of making it as an independent artist. Before the advent of online downloads, when physical media was required to own music, bands enjoyed a major revenue stream by selling compact discs at live shows. CDs were cheap to make, easy to transport and in high demand among fans, making them excellent merch to sell at shows. Today, that revenue stream has slowed to a trickle for many acts. Modern listeners tend to stream their music rather than own physical copies. While an uptick in the popularity of vinyl has helped, it's not nearly enough to offset the void left by the decline of CDs. Plus, transporting vinyl albums in a touring van or airplane is much less convenient than CDs.
Nicolay said artists sometimes adopt an entrepreneurial mindset to come up with innovative products for their merch tables, everything from visual art to handwritten lyrics sheets, to supplement their income on the road.
“In the streaming era, you have to be in the business of being a dry goods merchant. What can you slap your name on and sell?” he said.
Nicolay, who happens to be a faculty member at Bard College in New York, even advises his aspiring artist students to cultivate a portable skill they can rely on in addition to music. For instance, he said learning audio engineering can help musicians make connections in the music industry and get plugged into a local or regional scene. And trade skills like plumbing, electronics and carpentry offer income options between tours or enable touring musicians to pick up work quickly when they move to a new market. Nicolay himself raised a few extra bucks as a young musician by tuning pianos.
Iowa musicians sing for their supper
Jake Turner, a Des Moines-area troubadour who records under the name Casey Joe Collins, has carved out a livelihood by writing and recording his original songs and booking shows relentlessly. He quit a steady job and graduate school roughly seven years ago to focus on music. He supplements that income with occasional production work on television ads, but, for the most part, he sings for his supper.
Turner spoke to me over the phone from somewhere between Stillwater, Okla. and the Arkansas border during an eight-shows-in-nine-days tour with fellow Iowa songwriter Jordan Messerole. He described the thrill of seeing new parts of the country and meeting kind folks at each stop. But he also said putting together a tour as an independent musician requires countless hours of preparation. And with no industry or major label backing, Turner and Messerole take on all the costs of travel and lodging themselves, leaving them with thin margins and no small amount of financial risk.
“We’ll make a little bit of money, but gasoline and hotels and food eat up a good chunk of that. We’ve had five-to-six-hour drives between a lot of our shows, so a lot of money goes right back into the gas tank,” Turner said.
Going and standing in front of people and playing your songs is how you make connections and get them to follow along on your story and your creative journey.Jake Turner
Messerole did most of the legwork in booking the dates the two musicians shared for the tour. Booking the shows involved sending a flurry of emails to potential venues in a “shotgun spread” fashion in the hope that a small fraction of the venues would have dates available. Most of those emails go unanswered, and some venues answer only to say they don’t have any of the desired dates available. Messerole estimated about 5% of his emails result in gigs.
But the benefits of touring — such as spending the night in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico and making new fans at an art space in North Platte, NE — exceed the risks and costs, Turner said.
“Going and standing in front of people and playing your songs is how you make connections and get them to follow along on your story and your creative journey,” Turner said.
But what happens when he gets back to Des Moines? Is he able to catch his breath? Well, not really.
Turner said he planned to get in a recording studio soon after the tour’s completion. Messerole had a busy gig schedule in Iowa that started up as soon as he got home. Earlier in his career as an independent musician, Turner would schedule 200 shows a year, many of them on the road. Keeping up that pace quickly burned him out, so he adjusted. Frankly, that relentless churn of dates would exhaust anyone.
The legacy of the indie movement... is that you don't have to be a star to be successful — all you have to do is make exactly the music you want to make, for as long as you want.Michael Azerrad
Turner said having a reliable home base in Iowa makes the independent musician life possible for him. The Iowa music infrastructure provides reliable work, that includes the concert series at the Goldfinch Room in Ames. The state’s reasonable cost of living also helps.
Turner has forged a path for nearly a decade paying his bills while making his musical vision a reality, though he cautions it’s not for the faint of heart. It takes hustle, endless hours on the road and a lot of rejection. But he’s done it his way, and that’s how he defines success.
That attitude’s in keeping with the legendary indie bands of the 1980s and 1990s, Azerrad said.
“The legacy of the indie movement that I wrote about in Our Band Could Be Your Life is that you don't have to be a star to be successful — all you have to do is make exactly the music you want to make, for as long as you want,” he said.
Using that as my yardstick, it’s certainly possible to be a successful independent rock musician in Iowa — and most anywhere else, for that matter.
