‘Hobbies? No, not really, not really… I mean, I….'‍

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Tony furrows his brow and looks off into the corner of the Zoom screen.‍

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'Swimming? No….

Chess?

Knitting? No…' ‍

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He is silent for a few seconds, I assume running through a mental checklist of all other possible hobbies. I’m speaking to Tony Nwachukwu, one of six musicians I’ve asked to talk to me about their experiences of working life. He comes back to himself, laughing–‍

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'No! All my spare time is related to music, whether it’s listening to music or writing music. Music is me.’‍

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What Tony is describing here–an activity, done for enjoyment, in a person’s free time–would fit the definition of a hobby for a lot of people. But how Tony describes his involvement in music sounds like a compulsion as much as anything else.

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I was immersed in music. If it wasn’t working on remixes or writing, I’d be in the studio myself working on music, learning how to use my equipment, challenging myself technically, setting myself challenges–trying to sync up ten drum machines and a sampler, staying up late, till four or five in the morning, working on music because that’s the thing that drove me. 

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It started with curiosity, buying records at an early age and trying to understand– ‘I keep on hearing these drum machines or instruments consistently in the music. What do they do? How do they work?’

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What do they do? How do they work?  These are, coincidentally, the same questions I wanted to find answers to about musicians. For many professional musicians, the lines between work, life, and free time are very blurry. One musician friend laughed in my face when I told her I was writing an article about work-life balance. ‘Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life’ has become a cliché in the creative industries, but the dark side of this is the equally possible, ‘Make what you love into your job, and risk making every day of your life into work, with no clear boundary between what you love and your work, apart from the one clear distinction that you’re getting money for some of it’. 

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I doubt there are many musicians in the job purely because it makes financial sense. On the contrary, most musicians I know talk about paid work as a way to fund their music habit. And if that paid work comes from making music, or doing something related to music, all the better. In the first UK Musicians’ Census conducted in 2023, Help Musicians and the Musicians’ Union found that a ‘portfolio career’ is very much the norm–the average professional musician has three to four different paid roles in the music industry. Tony is one such portfolio musician, known to many for his work in trip-hop band Attica Blues, which he co-founded with producer D’Afro (known as Charlie Dark these days) in 1994. He now works across multiple roles in music.

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I teach across all generations, whether it’s young people, you know, for arts organisations, whether it’s as a consultant for music companies, whether it’s writing library music, I’ve used my skills across a wide spectrum of the industry. 

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Trying to manage the mental juggling act of switching between jobs so regularly can be a challenge in itself, not just for the energy required to switch contexts, but for the difficulty of explaining exactly what your job actually is. I have seen the question ’So, what do you do?', a classic, very normal first date/reunion with a distant relative/in the kitchen at a party icebreaker question, give musicians an identity crisis on the spot, as they try to describe their work in a way that feels like it communicates what it needs to in that situation. Tony described the struggle to balance jobs, without always knowing where the next one will come from, as ‘like the Wild West’:

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This whole idea of a portfolio career–I didn’t even know what it meant until recently. I think most of us, when you’re freelance—part of your career is opportunity. That phone call you get or that email you get, “Hey, we’re doing this project, do you want to blah blah blah?” And if the diaries work, then you’re in. And then one job leads to another, and before you know it, you’re working in music education, you know, or mentoring people, or writing music for a theatre piece. 

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Tony’s start in music came while studying for a computer science degree, and finding a way to make music in or around his studies.

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Back then, there weren’t any music production or music technology degrees, at least not much outside of places like Kingston University. So, I ended up doing software programming, and shoehorned music projects into systems thinking, and for my final year project, I made a sequencer. It didn’t work, but it showed my enthusiasm for music. I even made a little DAW. I DJed loads, did club nights, and really got into music there. I bought a synthesiser and a drum machine—a Kawai K1 Mark II and Casio RZ1—and had an Atari 520STM computer for making music in my spare time.

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When I graduated, I worked in a music shop—Turnkey—in London’s West End, Tottenham Court Road, which was famous for electronic music stores. Because I was interested in computers, synths, and samplers, I became the go-to person. If you wanted to get into sample-based music or set up your Akai S1000 with your Creator C-Lab, you spoke to me. From there, I had a chance meeting with Michael Riley, who saw my enthusiasm and nerdiness and offered me a job as a programmer on his remix album for Bob Marley. I was Michael’s programmer for years, carrying around an Atari Stacy, an S1000, and an MPC60. My job was anything related to digital sampling and programming.

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Dutch producer-DJ Martyn, speaking to me over Zoom, describes a similarly obsessive relationship to music. 

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I never had hobbies. I had no time. Music was just life. Music is so embedded in me—it was never just a hobby. I was so obsessed with it that I couldn’t separate it from the rest of my being. When people at birthday parties would say, “Oh, so nice you made your hobby into a career”–I hated that! It was never a hobby. It’s just what I am, all my time is organised around this one thing.

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Martyn has had a diverse career in electronic music, releasing records with Ninja Tune, Hyperdub, Ostgut Ton, and on his own label 3024, founded in 2003.  Like Tony, his start in music came from his own enthusiasm, and wanting to share that with the people around him.

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I think the way I got actively involved in music was as a promoter. This was a long time ago, around 1995. Drum and bass was the thing that sort of pulled me in, and I just wanted to sort of share that enthusiasm, I suppose, by throwing little nights. In the beginning, crowds were very small, just the bartenders, the security guy and three friends. Slowly but surely, that built up to a slightly larger audience. We had no clue how any of this worked. In order to have music on the nights, we started to play our own records that we bought. I learned to DJ in front of the audience immediately–I first touched a Technics turntable when there were already people watching.

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I think the first ten years of my career, I was eating crackers with peanut butter and living a super sober lifestyle so all my money could go into buying records and organizing things. I worked at a computer store and did loads of customer service type stuff at different companies. You didn't need a lot of money to live. When I started to get a couple hundred euros maybe per month from music, I went to a part-time shift job as a customer service person. After a while, the money started increasing, and I stopped the part-time job altogether. 

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This was maybe in 2001, so a long time ago. I've been self-employed ever since.

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Also in 2001, singer-songwriter Gillian Welch released the song ‘Everything Is Free’, in which she sings:

Everything is free now, that's what they say

Everything I ever done, gonna give it away

Someone hit the big score, they figured it out

That we’re gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay

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At the time, Welch was responding to the impact of Napster on the music industry–the beginnings of the period we are in now, in which, rather than buying music as a physical copy, anyone can access nearly any recorded song in history for free, on demand–firstly through piracy, and then through streaming platforms. The new and unusual influence of generative AI on music has evolved to risk human musicians being taken out of the picture completely, a significant step down from being paid. But the problem of devaluing artists has been brewing since long before generative AI.  Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine documents how, after Napster ‘took piracy mainstream’, Spotify initially positioned itself as democratising music and levelling the playing field for artists, but led to an industry where music is increasingly seen as a commodity, musicians as "content creators" rather than artists, and careers are bound to be tangled up with precarity and hyper-commercialisation.  

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Now, typing ‘Everything Is Free’ into Spotify or YouTube will show you hours of covers of the song, performed by everyone from Phoebe Bridgers to Father John Misty to Courtney Barnett to Sylvan Esso, with performers being paid minimally per stream. Founder Daniel Ek stated in 2018 that Spotify was ‘doing the hard work of helping one million artists to be able to live off of their art’, but ‘Mood Machine’ documents a world where this is far from the reality, citing U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib–in 2003, she estimated that an artist would need over eight hundred thousand streams per month to earn the equivalent of a $15-per-hour job. The UK Musicians’ Census, in 2023, found that “nearly a quarter (23%) of musicians stated they do not earn enough to support themselves or their families and for nearly half (44%), a lack of sustainable income is a barrier to their music career. 17% of musicians also reported being in debt, rising to 30% amongst those with a mental health condition and 28% for Black/​Black British musicians.”

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While the options for musicians getting paid have changed drastically, average UK rent has more than doubled since 2000. 2001 is also the year Danny, aka Red Rack ‘Em, began an eclectic career producing and DJing, starting his own label Bergerac in 2010 and releasing breakout track Wonky Bassline Disco Banger in 2016. After several years of using friends’ studios, in 2001 he began to produce in earnest, using equipment funded by a grant from the Prince’s Trust. At the time, he was living on unemployment benefits after losing a job as a video editor.  

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Not having a normal job gave me a huge amount of time on my own, which enabled me to learn how to produce at my own pace. There's no shortcuts. Unless you're a genius, you are gonna have to do things again and again to get better at them. You have to be kind of obsessive about your art and your practice.

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Danny describes a precarious, but lucrative, way of living–and not one he recommends to aspiring musicians.

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Bar gigs–sometimes you’d have to play for four or five hours, but a lot of them were like three and a half hours for a hundred quid. Nowadays a hundred quid’s nothing, but I probably needed 250 quid a week in those days to be all right. I didn’t have to work during the week. I was completely free. So that enabled me to spend, you know, six, seven, ten, twelve hours a day producing.

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If people have a job, a real job, I’m always like, ”Do not leave your job”. Because what I explain to them is that if you’ve got financial stability and money to invest in what you're doing, you can buy decent equipment, you can pay for PR, you can pay your friend to do an artwork for you. I would say you’ve either got to be 100% a DJ, and make, you know, eight grand a month or something like that, or I feel if you’ve got a job, it’s healthier to not have all your money coming from music. But it’s quite hard to be in both worlds.

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David McFarlane is a Boltonian musician, facilitator and creative technologist based in Greater Manchester. He is also one of CDR's fantastic producer educators with our Music Producer Club programme.

This is an excerpt from a longer piece which can be read in full on David's Substack.

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