Re: Why SHOULDN'T musicians be paid?

["Travis Hartnett" <travishartnett@gmail.com>]

What I do as a musician is very useful--to me.  Fifteen years of public performance has led me to the conclusion that it's not terribly useful to most people, certainly not when it comes to them paying me money for what I do.

When plumbing goes wrong, people get sick and die.  Clean water flowing in and dirty water flowing out without a problem is a necessity for living.  If I get hit by a bus on my way to a gig, they play the in-store CD player that night.  When my sewer line breaks because a tree root has broken a pipe under the front yard, I need a lot of specialized information, tools, time and smelly effort to set things right again--or I pay someone else a thousand dollars to do it better and quicker than I can.  When people don't have any music, they turn on the radio and the problem's solved.  Music is incredibly easy to find, plumbing less so.  Thus the average plumber makes much more than the average musician.

TH

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 8:39 PM, paul <phaslem@wightman.ca> wrote:

If you want a decent chance of getting people to pay you a working wage for something you do 8+ hours a day, consider doing something really useful--like plumbing.

I found this to be a very interesting statement; does that mean that you don't consider what you do as a musician to be useful?



Oh and by the way, I only make $25.00 an hour as a plumber, which does require a 5 yr apprenticeship, a license that has to be renewed every few years and lots of additional training and seminars to keep up with the current changes to the codes and equipment.