You don’t have to fall ill to the coronavirus for it to kick you in the spleen.
Please Remember:
The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.
Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.A couple of weeks ago, I had gigs coming up I could count on.
The IAMA LCS had two more installments in the season, plus an “extracurricular” with the Utah State Instrument Championships. Samba Fogo had a spring concert.
Now we’re in a soft-quarantine, where gatherings of 10 or more are prohibited. It’s for a good reason: If we can slow down the spread of COVID-19, we can prevent the need for medical care to accelerate past the capacity to provide that care.
It’s entirely appropriate that we keep the outbreak under control.
It’s also entirely true that a chunk of my income has been wiped out.
And I’m lucky. I have another job that seems to be rolling along for the time being. I have lots of liquid, monetary reserves I can use. I have a family that can help take care of me.
But I’m still nervous. I’m nervous about what will happen down the line, because we don’t know how long this will last. At least one, big, summertime contract is potentially under threat because of the indefinite nature of these (necessarily) drastic measures.
I’m worried about my profession as a whole.
Sure, livestreaming is a tool available to us to keep live music going – but does it have the buoyancy to keep a whole segment of the music industry afloat? I don’t know. Plus, all the modern-economy perks that can keep other folks rolling are essentially unavailable to the live-sound engineer.
“Work remotely.” (We can’t. We almost always have to be in close proximity to the performers.)
“Sign up for unemployment.” (Do you know how many of us are 1099 contractors, inhabiting this bizarre pocket of interstices where the government thinks we’re employed as far as taxation…but ineligible for unemployment insurance?)
Beyond the short term, there’s some discussion of how a normal flow of business might never return. There’s a possibility that mini-quarantines will always be looming whenever we get a spike of disease. That we could be shut down, again, at any time, over and over again.
Plus, my industry relies quite a bit on people having disposable income. If the economy really goes in the toilet, we will absolutely go with it. Entertainment has a certain kind of recession resistance, but if we really fall off the cliff we will all fall off together.
I have a sense that this will all turn out better than my pessimism is telling me it will, but also that the world changed forever when we weren’t even looking.
All is vapor.
Funny how that works.