Artist News Business News Live Business

Santigold says touring for middle level artists is “rough”

By | Published on Monday 17 October 2022

Santigold

Santigold has further discussed her recent decision to cancel a US tour on the basis that – now that it has become possible to play live again following all the various COVID lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 – “some of us are finding ourselves simply unable to make it work”.

“We were met with the height of inflation”, she said in a statement confirming the cancellations last month. “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 [COVID] 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”, her statement added.

In a new interview with Variety, Santigold expands on that theme, explaining that: “Touring has never been great. It’s always been really, really hard. At the very top level, it works out fine. But at my level – somewhere in the middle – it’s fucking rough”.

“Even before COVID”, she adds, “the only time it was really profitable is when I could anchor tours with a bunch of festivals and some private [usually corporate] gigs. And if you get a tour support from a label or other company – I never have – then you’re in debt even more because that’s a loan. Nowadays, even people touring at high levels are taking deals, because they can’t make it work either”.

As a result, she says, prior to the pandemic “I was making some money but not enough to live off. It was that and syncs and then hustle up, you know? You’re always hustling”.

While early in her career she was single with fewer bills, and she was therefore able to shrug off the low income from touring because it felt like an important part of building a fanbase, now she has three children and more responsibilities.

“I was on stage four months after I had twins”, she says. “And why? Because there’s not really another option. If you don’t do it, you’re going to lose relevance, you’re going to lose momentum, you’re going to be out of the public eye for too long”.

“The other thing people don’t realise [is] that any amount of money that we make, some goes to your management, your agent, your business manager, your lawyer”, she notes. “That’s 40% off the top of whatever you make, plus taxes. That’s almost unsustainable in itself – I’m the only one that’s not going to get paid, because I gotta pay everybody else”.

“Even if it’s not a financial problem”, she adds, “[artists are] burning out, and that’s where the mental health [problems] come in. Because it’s not just the money – it’s the relentless expectations of this industry, where you have to constantly put out music, you have to constantly be in front of the people, making TikToks and engaging on social media, you’re supposed to be a marketing genius, you have to be constantly accessible – instead of making art! I didn’t sign up for that. If art is becoming the side note, then maybe this isn’t what I need to be doing”.

As for what could be done to make this better, she says: “I think the first step is for people to start being honest about what it’s like, and the hard thing about that is it requires you to be very vulnerable – because nobody wants to say, ‘I can’t make it work’”

“For whatever reason”, she goes on, “the perception [from fans] is that you just walk up onstage and you perform and it’s no effort and you’re in this very comfortable lifestyle, when you’re not. It’s a really difficult, unforgiving way to make a living. So I don’t have the answer. I don’t think there is a quick fix”.

Although Santigold is being particularly candid on all this, she is definitely not alone in finding both the economics and physical strain of touring challenging, despite the common narrative that live is where artists make all the money.

Some other artists have also been more open about those challenges of late, with a number of other acts who have recently cancelled shows being much more honest about the reasons why, often citing mental health reasons.

Last week Animal Collective cancelled a run of shows in the UK and Europe saying that they’d realised that they were facing “an economic reality that simply does not work and is not sustainable”.

You can read Santigold’s full Variety interview here.

This story is discussed on this edition of our Setlist podcast.



READ MORE ABOUT: