Q+A: Australian hip-hop MC Urthboy on art, money, and running the Elefant Traks record label

For a triple j mag feature story published earlier in the year - entitled ‘Music Counts For Something’; full article here - I interviewed a handful of Australian independent musicians to discuss the financial realities of pursuing their passion.

One such interviewee was Australian hip-hop artist Urthboy (a.k.a. Tim Levinson, pictured right), who also performs as part of The Herd and is manager of the Elefant Traks record label. Since he’s deeply involved in both the art and business sides of music, he was well-placed to comment for the story.

Upstairs at the Brisbane venue The Step Inn on April 30 2010 before his headline performance later that night, I asked him some questions - alongside my girlfriend Rachael, and a couple of Heinekens from Urthy’s rider - for the triple j mag story. Our full conversation is below.

Andrew: I feel that musicians are glorified in society, more than they ever have been. Everyone looks up to them as kind of an escape from the drudgery; “Hell yeah, I’d love to be a musician. I’d love to be touring and selling records.” But I have a feeling that the realities associated with that, especially in an economic sense, don’t add up to what most people would expect.

Tim: I think for young people, musicians are people you look up to, and you admire. I think for people who have a sense of responsibility and careers and whatnot, they don’t have that same perception, you know; musicians often have a reputation for being slack and lazy and you know, irresponsible. But that’s beside the point.

It’s a great common conversation between musicians and it’s something which is very difficult to reconcile, and that is the perception of status that is attached to radio play and touring and performing at festivals. It’s very difficult to reconcile the perception of where you’re at with where you know you’re at, for sure.

And then it’s across the board, musicians have this – it’s a cliché for musicians to have that conversation, just seeing old friends, schoolmates, people who – for the amount of times over the years where we’ve heard the phrase, “Well done, you’re one of the only people that went through and made it from my school”. And in my school, like more than half of the year failed their TER (Tertiary Entrance Rank), which was the final sort of test in year 12. So we were coming from a school that didn’t do very well.

So whenever I go back home, without fail, [someone says] “You’ve made it. Thank God one of us got through.” I sort of sit there and go, [sighs] “Ah, fuck if I had your security, even with the job that you’re not happy with.” It’s a difficult one. A lot of musicians would swap that in a heartbeat.

That infographic I sent you [pictured left; click for larger version] was comparing how many recorded products musicians need to sell to meet [American] minimum wage. I’m looking to frame that in terms of Australian artists. As label head, as well as performer with The Herd, and as well as a solo artist, I think you’re pretty well placed to have an accurate understanding of how tough that can be.

Yeah. (laughs) That whole idea of getting paid – look, honestly; we’re coming to an era where, as an artist, you’re expected to be thankful that someone has taken the time to rip you off.

Is it an attention thing?

Yeah - because they’ve paid attention. So, if you’re condemning the very people that are taking music for free and downloading it and sharing it, and they’re the people that you’re begging to actually be heard, to actually hear you because as an artist, there’s nothing greater than being heard. If people would take the time to actually listen to what you’re saying, that’s a great privilege but it’s gone so twisted now that you somehow are supposed to feel appreciative of it. And yeah, you do, but it’s a very… it’s a conflicted state of mind.

But you can never piece together anything resembling an income without including some sort of regular or fall back job. You can never hope to get any income off streamed music, and when we ever get our spreadsheets, which break down all of our sales, it does actually have our digital income. The physical is very simple. It’s very old school. It’s just a CD is sold, and you get the money for that CD.

Digital is crazy. You get all the streamed as well, so what Elefant Traks gets, from a label point of view, is a 3,000 line spreadsheet from our distributor. It lists all of your songs, and it’ll have income from iTunes America, iTunes UK, Bigpond, all these different parts, and all of these different spots will put little $1.23s and $5.36s. The streams will be like 3,000 streams of your song, and you got $0.39 for it or something.

Those payments come through quarterly, and you’ll have a certain sum and hopefully, if you’ve broken even and gone into a profit, then you get x amount of dollars. Maybe if you’re lucky, that’s a couple of thousand dollars from that record. That’s not very common. Any time that comes up, that’s a little chunk of money that comes. It’s like a bonus, if you earn a normal income. That turns into like, $50 a week, or $50 a fortnight.

Then you hope to put some gigs together and work to the point where you’re actually getting a decent guaranteed fee, but then you break down that guaranteed fee and because you’ve worked your way up to that point, you can’t actually play too much because you can’t keep getting those fees, so then you break down those fees, and they reduce right down.

So yeah, the challenges are pretty high. When regular punters look at artists and go, “Wow, look at that billing [on the line-up]”, and “we paid $80 to go see this festival, $100 to see this festival, yeah; these guys are on the gravy train,”…actually, it never works out that way.

It’s tricky for me to even go into the complexities of it. When you do have a little bit of success and people are buying your record, you operate on all these different lump sums of money that come in. If they came in every week it’d be great, but they come in every three months or every now and again, and you start cutting it down to being “Okay, I’ve earned this much money of the course of 6 months. If I broke that down into 26 weeks, I’ve just earned $133.75 a week. Yeah, awesome!” $133.75 a week is pretty modest. [editor's note: this is a nominal fee that Tim picked out of the air; it's not to be taken as fact]

You’re including in that fee the album sales, touring, merch, all that stuff, or is it just album sales?

It’s a number I plucked out of my head, but quite often that flashpoint… Essentially, the public is going to hear from you on the radio and they’re going to see your name in lights a couple of times. Then they go on to their own normal thing, so it’s natural that you would look at those things as being indicators of success. The reality’s far different. It’s difficult for me to even go into – I can’t break down exactly – I think I need you to be a bit more specific for me to breakdown some more detailed points of where an artist will get their income.

This article is talking about recorded music, so CD sales, digital sales, or streaming. For example, what percentage of your income as an artist would come from the sale of your music, not touring, not merch, just the sale of the music itself?

It’s so small; it’s almost not worth talking about. It presents a picture. I reckon if I plucked a figure out of my head, just a ballpark percentage, it’d probably be, of my overall income, 5-10%.

So does that mean that you believe the consumer views an artist’s recorded product as an advertisement to go and see the show, to buy a shirt? If so, that’d be a shift in mindset from buying CDs to show your support, to hearing music somehow and going to the show, thereby giving you a bit of income through ticket sales to the show itself.

Yeah, for sure. It’s like professional sport in a way. That’s giving it far too generous an analogy, but once you do crack through a certain point and start selling a lot of records, the figure changes somewhat. It depends on whether your live show is strong. That’s why you can never have a general rule. It’s partly why I looked at that graph and was like, “It doesn’t really apply to me, but I can get parts of it.” Every act is different. Some people have a really strong live show, and therefore that’s going to reflect in the ratio of their income.

But, for the most part, until you get to a certain point, you’re really seeing crumbs from your recorded sales because you’ve got so many costs that go into them. So yeah, you do hope to kind of establish some sort of live presence so that you’re able to earn some sort of regular income from the live performance. Once you get above a certain level, then record sales are real serious money and they’re regular. And going hand-in-hand with those record sales is [that] you don’t live in a vacuum. Those record sales are a result of a lot of radio play. So that radio play doesn’t quite come off the back of nothing, but you don’t have to physically go to work to get the royalties from the radio play. So that radio play will come in twice annually, through APRA, through those collection agencies. And you might see $20,000 or $30-40,000 if you’re one of the biggest artists getting played. So it’s all relative.

The Herd [pictured left] is one of the biggest hip hop acts in the country. Is that a fair statement?

At one point.

Not so much anymore?

Well, peoples’ memories are quite short, so there is a necessity for a constant presence and a relentless pursuit of participation in the music scene. If you do have that then you maintain a position. If not, then you have to work your way back up. So The Herd haven’t really done anything since early 2009, and the result of that is that you… It’s hard to say. It’s constantly changing. We’ve never reached those same heights as say, The [Hilltop] Hoods, or recently, Bliss N Eso.

Are you saying that your experience as a solo artist and as part of The Herd are similar, in terms of what we’re talking about here, the CD sales and digital sales?

Yeah, for sure, with The Herd and with the solo thing – I can’t be ‘the victim’ here. We’ve had an extraordinary run in many ways, and have been able to experience a bit of that success, and so with that, increased royalties. And when you put together a catalogue of music, then you find that just keeps feeding. A lot of musicians will say to you that these little songs become like little children; they grow up, and you get old and decrepit, and they take care of you. That’s hopefully the way that it works. Songs are like that. They live, and they breathe, and they give back to you, but you’re lucky if you come across some of those songs because they don’t come that often, like bad children.

But we’ve had some decent sales over the years and we’re independent, so when that graph said you’ve got to sell 1,800 copies of your record every quarter or whatever it was, or week or something - I can’t remember exactly - that’s completely wrong. It doesn’t apply to us. It might apply in America, where there’s such a bigger population, that’s where that graph is wonky and it’s all relative.

We would never have to sell anything close to that to make some sort of regular income. In fact, if we sold that many per week, we would all be buying houses, partly because of the infrastructure in place being independent. If we were selling that many – we don’t have those overheads that mean that 1,800 [albums] pays for multiple staff, pays for all these different promotional costs, the logistics of all the staff, all the extra hangers-on, the additional recording costs. All those costs that all just one-by-one are things that are in place to make something work, but you add them up and all of a sudden you’ve spent $400,000, therefore needing to sell that many per month, and the record label is paying for all those costs so they’re saying “Because we’re taking the risk, it’s a business principle, we’ll take [a certain percentage] more money.” The artist, at the very bottom of the rung, is getting their money at the very end, and it’s a small percentage of each CD sale.

Independently, our percentage is so much higher. And the Elefant Traks was never set up to be purely about the business. We’ve always been creative people and it has facilitated our creative needs. Now we have to be a business and be careful about that stuff, and we’re not like a charity. But at the same time, we set up our deals so that they are quite artist-friendly, because we want to treat our artists like we want to be treated ourselves.

The other artists I’m speaking to for this story are all independents, which may skew the results somewhat.

It will skew the results.

I think it would be hard to find a major label-signed artist who is willing to talk about this because they’re beholden to so many other external factors.

‘Don’t upset the apple cart.’ I think that you kinda need it, honestly. Because the funny thing is that it’s sometimes smoke and mirrors. I remember going on the [SBS TV] Insight program and talking about downloading. I was sitting next to Phrase and Jimmy Barnes’ daughter, and there were kids in the audience saying that they were happy to download Phrase’s material because he was with Universal. And I knew for a fact that Phrase wasn’t selling jack. And we were selling a lot more, so the moral question was so blurred, that these kids were thinking they’re doing the right thing by ripping off a big label, and in some ways they’re right on the money because the labels just write that shit off. They write off a million dollars, they can write off a hundred thousand, easy. But it’s smoke and mirrors because sometimes the major artists are doing a lot worse; when it comes down to it, all they’re benefiting from is like an exaggerated sense of that status that we’ve been talking about.

What this story comes down to is giving triple j mag readers who might be musicians or aspiring musicians a kind of commercial reality as to what they can expect, in terms of making an income from their art. And you’ve been doing it 15 years, maybe more? Would you like to comment on the commercial realities of being a musician?

I think that if you’re a musician and you’re instinctively passionate about it, you have no choice. You are compelled to do it. But, there’s definitely a need to have a sense of the reality of the situation and that is that you will need to get a part-time job in order to sustain yourself. And that’s good. That’s cool. I mean, in an ideal world we’d have all these artists who were so appreciated that they are put on a pedestal and allowed to just do their art. But there’s never been any research that has concluded that an artist is going to create their best art when they’re just 100% focused on it. You know, if anything it’s often the opposite. It’s the art that is created out of great hardship. It’s art that is created out of just a necessity to express yourself because maybe you are completely oppressed. And that’s a great thing.

So, it’s an ideal situation to be in, to just knuckle down and work on art, but I’ve watched so many of our young artists and people I’m involved with let everything slide because they’re just focus-less. They don’t have something that grounds them. They decide that they want to be an artist and then they just don’t do anything, yet there’s other people that have their 9-to-5 [jobs] and are so passionate about it, that they find time between 5 and 9, and then furthermore into the night. There’s that drive. So, you definitely sort out the stayers and the pretenders after they do get a sense of “Wow, we went on tour and lost 20 grand. We were supposed to be famous now.”

‘You’ve made it!’ because you’re touring, and yet what’s in your wallet is not comparable.

It’s funny because these stories, they are meant to drive home” just how hard being an artist is”, and “don’t delude yourself”. And you think about it, and you weigh it up, and you get a little bit depressed about it, and it doesn’t match your expectations of what you thought it would be. And you come back full circle, and still do it because you have to.

Rachael: This is a bit off topic. Do you think there should be some sort of government funding or program for new bands to be funded for?

I don’t ever believe that funding should go to new bands who haven’t already worked a little bit and found their own way through. Because it’s like that welfare mentality, where there’s a sense of expectation of how you’re supposed to be treated. It’s so much better in the long run, to get a sense of the nuts and bolts of what you’re doing, than to wait for a leg-up because you’re in such a better position once you finally do have a bit of momentum.

And, those grants, they’re always skewed a little bit to conventional forms of art; so often it becomes orchestral groups and jazz and all these different sort of forms of art, which are really agreeable. You can’t, as a rule, get money to people who are going to do really exciting and original things because those people are usually not familiar with the processes of grant applications, and the words you’ve got to use to be able to succeed in getting your grant. So you find, a lot of the time, people who are successful in grant applications are people who’ve done it before and know the game.

There’s these kids who could possibly tell the greatest story and tell some really amazing inner-city or outer-country story. It could be something that is so beautiful or just real, and they don’t know about the ways of getting money from the government. They are just people who have this little fucking gremlin in their brain that goes, “You should come up with these words and these melodies that make peoples’ hair on the back of their neck stand up.”

I’ve had experience with grant applications. We went for one very early on with The Herd. We put so much time in and spent so much on the logistics, and just got shut down. We were like “Fuck this, never going for a grant again,” and it was five years until we went for another one. And I was really happy about it because it just meant we relied on ourselves. We never grew faster than what we could handle. We were never one of those bands that ever had a hit. We were more surprised by things going better than what we thought they would, and then when we came back around to it, we’d proved ourselves over and over again, and we got the grant. We were in a much better position to take advantage of it.

I don’t really care for government grants. I think they’re so important. I would never dismiss them. They’re crucial for any art scene, but as far as relying on them as a young band, jeez, I reckon that’s a sign of a problem more than the fact that you don’t get [a grant] being a problem. You should be relying on your own sense of imagination. I believe that art always survives in the most grimy areas, anyway. Those flowers’ll creep through the pavement. It doesn’t matter if you get an injection of funds.

Cool, man. I’m out of questions.

I don’t even know if I answered those. All those statistics, they’re probably something. If you put together your story and you want a little bit more concrete details on that level, I’ll be happy to actually go through and work out some chart that is a bit more relevant to Elefant Traks and our artists. That’ll be fine, but as far as speaking off the top, I didn’t come prepared.

That’s fine. I spoke to Gareth [Liddiard] from The Drones [pictured left] a couple of weeks ago. He was talking on this topic about how artists are revered in society, like “Oh, you’re an artist, you’re a musician, that’s awesome.” But he spoke of the reality of that which is that he makes a bit more than what he would if he was on Centrelink, unemployed.

That’s about right.

That graph I showed you spoke of minimum wage, but to give it in an Australian perspective, I guess it would be in terms of a Centrelink, or a dole payment sort of thing.

That’s exactly right. I would agree. And the funny thing about The Drones is they are a band who are revered in the city. All the people that are musically involved revere The Drones. No one doesn’t like The Drones. Yet, they’re not a band that is a Cold Chisel and goes out and just does every venue around. There’s this city thing about them, yet they make such Australian music. They make music that makes you feel like you’re in Dubbo, and things are not right. You know? But, they wouldn’t play in Dubbo. It’s the city thing. It’s a weird thing with The Drones.

They’ve got a rule they won’t play anywhere there’s no skyscrapers.

Really?

Yeah. They’ve tried to, but no one gets them.

They can’t get out of the cities? I find that bizarre. It’s partly because they are so revered that it’s almost like they can’t put a foot wrong. They’re better off going to Europe and playing to the same sort of audiences rather than go out of the city.

Yet, we [The Herd] have just gone out of the cities the whole time because there’s no rules for us. We haven’t set ourselves up as this band that everyone’s critically bowing down to. And The Drones are in that situation. I feel for them, because you don’t go overseas, play a bunch of gigs and get rich, you go overseas and just plug away hoping that you just eventually have some sort of a career in so many territories that overall, you’re presented with this picture of a normal income.

But yeah, I will happily join in the critical appraisal of them. I watch them and I’m floored. I think they’re an amazing group. But you do also notice that when you go outside of cities that if you don’t have a foothold in triple j and you don’t have that kind of presence, then you’re fucked. Straight up.

Everyone likes to deride triple j because it’s a city thing to do, to be condescending about triple j. It’s a very city thing. You go out into the country and you realize this shit means the world to them. They don’t have community stations. It’s the world. And you’re able to brush off a little bit of that city cool and go, “I know that this means so much to you. How dare I talk down to you.”

Now that you mention it: I’m from Bundaberg, and I grew up with triple j. Then I came to Brisbane and I have no inclination to listen to it because I listen to a local station (4ZzZ).

Rachael: I grew up in Gympie, and everyone was into Nova and all the Sunshine Coast stations. We didn’t know about triple j, or want to know about triple j. I’d say I only got into it in year 11 and 12.

I hear that argument so much and it’s just like - chatter, chatter, chatter. I don’t have to like all of triple j’s music to know just how important they are. They’re just fucking unbelievably important. God knows that commercial radio wouldn’t be playing half the music they would be playing from Australia if they didn’t absolutely have to play something.

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Thanks for your time, Tim. For more Elefant Traks, visit the label’s website. For more Urthboy, visit his MySpace. The music video for his track ‘Shruggin” is embedded below. If you like it, perhaps you’ll consider buying his albums.

Tagged as: art, business, creativity, interview, money, music, q+a, tim-levinson, triple-j-mag, urthboy