loading . . . The Death of the Middle-Class Musician Rollie Pemberton was barely a teenager when he started rapping. His hometown, Edmonton, didn’t have much of a hip-hop scene in the early aughts, so he honed his craft online. He plugged an old-school microphone into his mom’s desktop computer, recorded a few verses, later turned them into tracks, and sent them out into the burgeoning music blogosphere. Within a few years, he’d adopted the emcee name Cadence Weapon and earned a reputation as a shrewd critic and sharp lyricist.
This work didn’t pay—until, all of a sudden, it did. In 2003, while Pemberton was in university, the American music magazine _Pitchfork_ began paying him to write album reviews. Then Edmonton radio stations started spinning “Oliver Square,” a Cadence Weapon song stuffed with choppy synths and hyper-local references.
A Toronto-based indie label called Upper Class Recordings took notice and offered Pemberton recording, publishing, and management contracts. The so-called 360 deal came with a $1,000 advance, barely enough for him to record his first full-length album, and it entitled the label to take a cut of all his future revenue streams, including album, ticket, and merch sales. Even at nineteen, Pemberton knew the terms weren’t ideal. But in 2006, he signed the deal, reasoning that it could be his only shot at stardom.
And Pemberton’s star did rise. His debut album, _Breaking Kayfabe_ , earned him a cover story in _Exclaim!_ magazine and a nomination for the Polaris Prize, which recognizes the best Canadian album of the year. He released more music, played the legendary Glastonbury and Lollapalooza festivals, DJ’d Sacha Trudeau’s birthday party, and performed for Queen Elizabeth II at the 2010 Canada Day festivities on Parliament Hill. By then, Edmonton had selected Pemberton as the city’s poet laureate, and the CBC had picked him to sit on the panel of its battle-of-the-books show, _Canada Reads_. He was everywhere. From the outside looking in, it seemed that Pemberton had made it, and then some.
* Am I Being Priced Out of Making Music?
* The Rise and Fall of MuchMusic
* How an International Student Became a Truck Driver and Rising Pop Star
Behind the scenes, however, he was scraping by, living off earnings from freelance writing gigs, informal DJ sets, seasonal retail shifts, and $11,130 worth of additional advances that Upper Class paid him for his second and third albums. All the other money he made was being collected by Upper Class; per Pemberton’s contract, the label was entitled to collect his portion of revenues (20 to 50 percent, depending on the source) until they’d fully recouped his advances as well as tens of thousands of dollars the label had invested in recording, marketing, and touring, including covering the costs of Pemberton’s flights, car rentals, and hotels. As a result, he was playing hundreds of shows a year yet making no money.
Pemberton calculated that between signing in 2006 and 2015, he’d made Upper Class more than $250,000. The label had collected the $25,000 he earned on the _Breaking Kayfabe_ tour, his $10,000 poet laureate fee, and six figures worth of grants—that he knows of. Apart from the $12,130 in advances he’d received from Upper Class, he’d seen only a tiny sliver of royalties.
Pemberton pushed back: When would he begin making money? Dozens of emails to the label went unanswered. “I was starting to suspect that my career was built on a house of cards,” he wrote in his 2022 memoir, _Bedroom Rapper_. By then, the label was essentially defunct. In a statement to The Walrus, Upper Class claimed it “never recouped its investment [in Cadence Weapon] and remains out of pocket” and that “all expenses were borne by the label and any earnings were reinvested toward his development as an artist.” The label continued: “We too were disappointed that despite our shared ambition, things didn’t unfold as hoped. The sad reality is that most musicians in this country do not make money. This is also true for most independent record labels.”
In 2021, finally free from Upper Class, Pemberton released _Parallel World_ , which won the $50,000 Polaris Prize. Fortunately, his new label, MNRK Music Group, let him keep it.
By then, fans had almost entirely migrated from vinyl records and CDs—formats that once earned artists roughly 10 percent of profits—to streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, which were paying at most half a penny per listen. On streaming platforms, only a handful of Pemberton’s songs earned more than a few hundred dollars. Even his most commercially successful single, “Connor McDavid,” a pump-up anthem that’s been streamed more than a million times, has earned him less than $3,000 over seven years.
Before COVID-19, Pemberton could rely on live-performance revenues to offset the decline in physical media sales. But for a time after the pandemic, touring became just another way to lose money. In 2021, Pemberton played twelve American cities in support of _Parallel World_. It was a lean operation—no tour manager, no road crew, no backing musicians. He did his own PR, sold his own merch, and drove his own tour van. Still, with inflation driving up the price of gas, food, and accommodations, Pemberton ended up $2,100 in the red. “If you try to do a headlining tour as a middle-class act nowadays—unless you have a really good team and a lot of solid planning and a [group of artists] you’re rolling with—it’s a fool’s errand,” Pemberton told me. “The margins are getting thinner and thinner.”
A thriving cultural ecosystem is crucial to a prosperous economy. Musicians employ managers, agents, publicists, audio engineers, producers, and other artists. Live music keeps venues afloat, provides paying work for ushers and security guards, and sells lots and lots of beer. In 2023, there were about 19,000 concerts in Canada, and the people who attended them put money in the pockets of local taxi drivers, restaurants, and hotels. The tourism nonprofit Destination Toronto estimates that Taylor Swift’s six-night stint pumped more than $150 million into the city. That’s just a slice of the nearly $11 billion that live music contributed to Canada’s gross domestic product in 2023, creating or supporting more than 100,000 jobs.
The ongoing health of this ecosystem depends on working artists’ ability to create art. When musicians can afford to pay rent, put food on the table, make music, and play shows, everyone benefits. When they can’t, the entire economy suffers. Venues close, artists abandon their craft, and Canada’s cultural fabric tears.
IT’S NEVER BEEN easy to “make it.” Your best hope used to be recording a killer demo or playing an unforgettable show, winning over a label scout, signing a lousy contract, churning out records, and hitting the road for half the year. Radio controlled what listeners heard, and labels decided how much or how little to pay their acts. In 1962, the Beatles’ first contract earned them (and their manager) a total of one penny per record sold. Good thing they sold a few.
But the late 1990s saw a peak, when the CD boom enriched the industry. A record-breaking 2.5 billion CDs were sold worldwide in 2000, at which point the global music industry was worth $37 billion (US). Back then, between physical album sales, merch revenue, tour earnings, and radio play, a domestically successful musician—a member of, say, the country-rock band Blue Rodeo—could earn a beyond-healthy salary every year.
Those halcyon days didn’t last. Throughout the 2000s, Napster and other illegal file-sharing sites flooded the market with free mp3s, contributing to the decimation of physical media sales. By 2013, the number of CDs sold in the US had fallen 84 percent from its Y2K high. These were bleak years for record labels in every way but one: the downturn allowed the big three—Sony, Universal, and Warner—to buy up scores of struggling labels at bargain-bin prices, eventually amassing approximately 70 percent ownership of the market for recorded music.
All that catalogue proved extremely valuable as the industry entered the streaming era. Streaming platforms sold themselves as saviours—affordable, user-friendly apps that would get listeners to pay for music again—but the big three held the bigger bargaining chip: the music itself. Spotify, Apple Music, and their ilk had no choice but to pay labels billions of dollars to license all the music they owned. Labels were raking it in again. In fact, half of Universal’s digital revenues come from overhead-free music that was recorded more than three years ago. Every time someone streams “Hey Ya!” by Outkast, Sony makes another ounce of pure profit.
The big three’s all-important catalogue also gave them the muscle to negotiate a cumulative 17 percent ownership stake in Spotify. As streaming revenues grew—they surpassed $20 billion (US) in 2024, accounting for 69 percent of the industry’s earnings—so did labels’ war chests. Warner and Sony have collectively made more than a billion dollars selling Spotify shares. Altogether, a UK parliamentary inquiry found, between 2015 and 2019, major labels’ operating profits grew by a whopping 64 percent.
These profits trickle down to a small number of Canadian artists who fit the major-label mould—young, stylish upstarts like Calgary pop songstress Tate McRae, BC-bred Punjabi rapper Karan Aujla, and Saskatchewan country singer Colter Wall. For these hard-working hopefuls, the appeal of a major-label deal is the same as ever: they want to be the next Weeknd or the next Shania, and the majors have the resources, connections, and know-how to help them get there.
“The carrot that’s being dangled in front of an artist is their dream,” says Kurt Dahl, a Saskatoon-based entertainment lawyer who cut his teeth drumming in One Bad Son, a rock-and-roll road band that opened for the Rolling Stones and Judas Priest in the late 2010s. “When people’s dreams are in play, they’re often not as rational or reasonable as they might be in the regular business world.” Dahl says he’s reviewed contracts that require artists to pay thousands of dollars in “signing fees” or bizarrely charge artists for “breakage,” an outdated charge meant to cover costs of LPs and CDs physically damaged before sale.
Labels get away with these kinds of contracts because their support can make or break careers, especially at a time when anyone can record their own music, upload it to Spotify, and promote it online. More than 100,000 songs are uploaded to streaming services every day. Each of those tracks has to compete not only with 99,999 other new ones but also against basically every song ever recorded. “You’re up against everything, from everywhere, all the time,” says Patrick Rogers, chief executive officer of Music Canada, an organization that represents the country’s major labels. “And if you’re willing to take on that challenge, the industry is in a position to help you.”
The majors can better get artists’ tracks onto popular Spotify playlists and license those songs in films, TV series, and video games. (Mid-tier musicians often get paid a one-time fee of $1,000 to $10,000 and piddling royalty rates when shows use snippets of their songs—nice but not life changing.) Labels can also help artists line up opening slots on big-budget tours and handle the marketing, legal, and administrative work that goes into building a blockbuster career. But if artists don’t blow up as expected? They get dropped. “Sadly,” says Dahl, “for a lot of those artists, it doesn’t translate to longevity or a reliable career.”
This is a moot point for most artists, however. Globally, the big three signed just 650 acts in 2017, the last year for which data is available. They’re not interested in working with the majority of Canada’s 37,500 professional musicians. Likewise, most of Canada’s musicians aren’t particularly interested in playing stadiums or posting multiple TikToks a day.
“Most creators are not looking to be superstars,” says Jennifer Brown, CEO of SOCAN (Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada), an organization that manages rights, licensing, and royalty payments for Canadian songwriters. “Artists want to be able to support their families. They want to be able to make a living and have that be respected. They are working hard. And when they have a million streams, they want to see more than $600 coming through.”
For artists like these, the advent of streaming has been both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it democratized music making. Instead of trying to impress label scouts, artists can inexpensively upload their music to a streaming service and build international fan bases on social media, all the while retaining ownership of their music and the revenue it brings in. It’s a bit like self-publishing a book: apart from Amazon, nobody else is taking a cut of the profits. “The middle class of music has gotten way bigger,” says Ryan Gullen, who manages and plays bass in the Sheepdogs, a Saskatchewan roots-rock band. “There’s more opportunity to carve out a career than there was previously. It used to be that you couldn’t even record at a recording studio unless you had a record contract.”
Take Oshawa-raised R&B singer Daniel Caesar. After independently recording and releasing his debut album, _Freudian_ , he won a Juno and a Grammy, collaborated with Justin Bieber, and earned shout-outs from Barack Obama and Stevie Wonder. When he ultimately negotiated a deal with Universal-owned Republic Records in 2022, he had the upper hand.
“Today, as long as you’re ready to work and roll up your sleeves, all the information you would ever want or need to build an independent career is all online. It’s all free. It’s a Wi-Fi connection,” says Chris Taylor, who founded Last Gang Records, the label that launched Metric, and who now manages Arkells, Lights, and others through his company Hall of Fame Artists. At the same time, Taylor acknowledges, “the increasing tidal wave of music that’s coming out every day—it’s unrelenting. Especially for developing artists, how do you make a mark?”
FOR MANY CANADIAN artists, the answer is simple: you don’t. While Spotify paid out a record $10 billion (US) in royalties in 2024, fewer than 1 percent of artists made more than $6,000 from the platform. In 2021, according to SOCAN, the average Canadian songwriter earned just $67 from streaming that year.
Yet artists have no choice but to obsess over their streaming numbers. Talent buyers and festival programmers largely decide who to book based on Spotify’s “monthly listeners” metric. “This number is the bane of my existence,” says Pemberton. “It is the number-one metric that every promoter, every booker, every label, every entity in the music industry looks at to decide whether or not you’re someone they should care about.”
Artists now need to make money elsewhere—but other revenue sources, too, are drying up. Artificial intelligence can now create high-quality songs in any genre, mood, or language, a development that threatens to rob artists of commercial opportunities, including producing backing tracks, scoring films, and writing jingles. It’s not hard to imagine a music supervisor prompting a bot to create an “instrumental upbeat indie-pop song in the key of D major” instead of hiring the human artists on whose music the AI trained.
Satellite radio, which pays around $50 a spin, was once considered a viable income source for independent musicians. (FM radio plays mostly major-label artists.) But when SiriusXM abruptly dropped four CBC channels in 2022, there were suddenly vanishingly few satellite stations playing—or paying—mid-tier Canadian musicians.
All these shifts have left many musicians dependent on grants. Various levels of government invest tens of millions of dollars into the music industry every year through granting agencies like FACTOR (Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent on Recordings), Musicaction, and the Canadian Starmaker Fund, as well as the Canada Council for the Arts and its provincial counterparts. Their highly competitive bursaries, often in the range of $1,000 to $25,000, typically fund albums, music videos, concerts, and tours—not artists’ living expenses.
Griping about grants is a favourite pastime among musicians: “Why the hell did Grimes get $90,000 in grants while dating Elon Musk?” and “How did $10 million in stolen FACTOR funds end up in a crypto bro’s bank account?” (Both are true stories.) But most musicians will concede that grants are a lifesaver. Polaris Prize–winning Colombian Canadian artist Lido Pimienta told me that she has wondered about moving to another country—most of her shows are in foreign markets—but that arts funding makes it hard to leave Canada. The dark cloud in this otherwise sunny sky is that the federal government decreased its investment in the Canada Council for the Arts by $3.63 million in 2024/25, and it will cut $7.33 million in 2025/26 and $9.88 million in 2026/27 and annually onward.
Private money could conceivably patch some of these holes. RBC, TD, and philanthropist organizations such as the Slaight Family Foundation, among others, fund individual artists, music-video grants, Canada’s Walk of Fame, and awards shows like the Junos and the Polaris Prize. One well-known indie rocker told me that his band has taken money from more unusual sources: a tech mogul flew them to play his daughter’s birthday party at a climbing gym, and a cigarette company paid them to perform at a tobacco industry event. “We had a lot of conversations about that, because ultimately that’s blood money,” he says. “But we needed that blood money.”
Helpful as these funds may be for cash-strapped artists, the ongoing survival of the Canadian music industry cannot hinge on token corporate social responsibility handouts and the whims of the ultrawealthy. “I don’t want us to get into an era where you need a benefactor or a trust fund to be an artist,” says SOCAN’s Jennifer Brown. “That’s not what artistry is about.”
If streaming, freelance gigs, satellite radio, grants, and corporate dough can’t sustain Canada’s independent music scene, what can? For years, the industry’s last best hope was live performance.
OVER A SUCCESSFUL two-decade run, the Newmarket, Ontario, indie-rock band Tokyo Police Club performed on the _Late Show with David Letterman_ , played major festivals, and toured alongside their childhood heroes like Weezer. But by the mid-2020s, they were getting married and settling down. Rather than fade into obscurity, they decided to go out with a bang. As they started booking a farewell tour, however, they discovered the landscape had radically changed. The pandemic had shuttered numerous venues, leaving fewer places to play, and plenty of support staff—tour managers, roadies, live sound and lighting technicians—had left the industry. And with practically all the world’s artists trying to catch up on cancelled shows, there were more acts than ever competing for the same stages, crews, and tour buses.
“Also, part of the effect of the internet is that there are now more bands getting out there and making a go of it, and that means there are more tours happening simultaneously,” says Tokyo Police Club keyboardist Graham Wright. “The music industry didn’t necessarily evolve to support that many things all happening at once.”
This high-demand, low-supply environment cranked up the price of every aspect of touring. Insurance rates spiked after COVID-19 hit, and rampant inflation drove gas, food, and hotel costs skyward. Canadian artists were hit especially hard, because, to tour in the US—a necessary step to building the kind of fan base that sustains a career—they needed to pay for visas. Applications used to cost $460 per person. But last April, the American government increased the fee up to $1,655, plus an optional $2,800 for expedited processing. Altogether, a tour that might have cost $100,000 before the pandemic now costs four times that.
This has upended touring’s entire cost-benefit analysis. Over the past few years, dozens of acts, including Animal Collective, Santigold, and Little Simz, have cancelled tours because they didn’t make financial sense. UK singer-songwriter Kate Nash funded her latest tour by selling semi-nude pictures of herself on OnlyFans as part of a campaign she called “Butts for Tour Buses.” For those with less in-demand derrières, touring can be hard to justify. Why work round the clock, eat endless fast food, sacrifice sleep, and battle homesickness just to end up in the hole?
“All I’m trying to do is put a roof over my children’s heads.”—Grammy nominee Lido Pimienta
Independent Toronto singer-songwriter Skye Wallace confronts this question every time she goes on tour. “Sometimes, the gamble has paid off,” she says. “A couple of times, it really hasn’t.” Though her latest stretch of shows was one of her most successful tours to date, she feels no closer to reaching a state of financial sustainability. “With the cost of living, the cost of touring, and everything else, it just gets further and further away.” It’s hard, Wallace says, not to interpret financial struggles as personal failures. “In this industry, it’s so easy to feel like you’re being shrugged off, like, ‘Oh, I guess you don’t have what it takes,’” she says. “There’s a constant expectation to give your absolute everything until you crumble.”
These stressors have driven Canadian musicians into a mental health crisis. Last September, Catherine Harrison, president of the leadership and mental health consultancy Revelios, launched “Soundcheck,” a pioneering national study that included a survey of musicians and other industry professionals.
Preliminary data of the first 800 respondents included some sobering results: 86 percent have personally experienced mental health challenges, including anxiety and depression (compared to the national average of about 20 percent), and 43 percent have had suicidal thoughts (compared to 12 percent of Canadians at large). Four in five respondents agreed that working in the music industry, and the financial stress that entails, was not conducive to mental well-being. Only 6 percent reported a sense of job security; the other 94 percent exist in a state of chronic uncertainty.
Late last year, as Tokyo Police Club embarked on its final tour, I asked Wright what he might do next. “I have no idea,” he admitted. “I don’t even know how to think about it. I didn’t go to university.” He’s dabbled in broadcasting, working for CBC Radio 3 and hosting a music podcast called _Major Label Debut_ , but he’s not sure how that might translate into a second career, much less finance a down payment on a house. “Luckily, we’ll get home from this tour with enough money in the bank to not need to get a job immediately,” he says. “I could probably live off this money for eighteen months just fucking around. But regrettably, I now have to be responsible.”
OVER THE COURSE of 2024, I asked a wide array of artists, label heads, and industry executives: Given all the headwinds, what can possibly restore music’s middle class?
I heard one answer more than any other: the government should introduce universal basic income. This would indeed afford artists the security to create art, but it’s also extremely fanciful. Ontario premier Doug Ford cancelled Canada’s only basic income pilot program, in 2018. And Prime Minister Mark Carney seems uninterested in UBI.
Nonetheless, the state has a role to play. The government has long forced commercial and campus radio stations to play at least 35 percent CanCon—that is, music that meets two of the four criteria of MAPL (music, artist, performance, lyrics): that the music was composed by a Canadian, performed by a Canadian, and recorded in Canada, with lyrics written by a Canadian. But imposing such requirements on internationally owned streamers has proven challenging.
Spotify, Netflix, and Amazon, among others, have filed lawsuits challenging the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s implementation of 2023’s Online Streaming Act, which would force them to promote CanCon and contribute 5 percent of their revenue to funding Canadian media productions. The future of that bill—and what, if anything, it means for middle-class musicians—is unclear. Besides, most working artists want something simpler: continued investment in grants and live-music infrastructure.
“What the Canadian government puts into the arts and music is better than anybody else has in any other country,” says Shauna de Cartier, president of the Toronto indie label Six Shooter. “But it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to what they might invest in, say, electric batteries.”
Government alone cannot solve the fundamental problem plaguing the music industry: recorded music has been stripped of its monetary value. There is simply no way for middle-class artists to succeed when, for a monthly fee of less than what a single CD used to cost, anyone can instantly listen to all the music ever recorded.
“Society at large knows, consciously or subconsciously, that it cannot live without music,” says Harrison, who conducted the mental health study. “It’s in soundtracks, commercials, road trips, weddings. And yet we don’t want to pay for it. We expect this thing that is so fundamental to our lives to just be there in the ether for our use whenever we want.”
Most of the artists I spoke to were resigned to a harsh reality: the current power structure works just fine for streamers and major labels, who have no incentive to fix what, at least for them, is not broken. Effecting change, they believe, will be the job of artists themselves. The musician and actor Torquil Campbell, who sings in the indie band Stars, told me that the only solution “is to stop trying to make your money via ubiquity and via relationships with middlemen who claim they will go out into the world and make you wildly successful. Because even if they do, you’re not going to see any money.”
The fix, he continued, is for artists to “reassign value to what you do.” As an example, he told me about how, locked down in early 2022, he half-jokingly tweeted a solicitation for musical commissions: he’d write and record a personalized song for anyone willing to pay $1,000. “I expected a couple of people,” he recalls. “Within three or four hours, I had something like thirty-five commissions.” Now, he’s at roughly 200. That’s $200,000.
Campbell also removed his solo discography from Bandcamp, an online music marketplace that takes a 10 to 15 percent cut of all album and song sales, and told listeners to instead purchase mp3s directly from him for $1 apiece. People were astounded by “this seemingly incredible idea I had of charging money for art,” Campbell jokes. “It’s what we did for 600 years before a couple of tech bros decided that what we did was worth nothing and that they could use our intellectual property to create their own things that had value.”
Campbell thinks these particular strategies may not work for emerging artists who have yet to build substantial fan bases. “But,” he says, “I don’t think that means it’s impossible for a beginning musician to at least try to be guided by the same principles,” rather than grovelling to social media or tech giants. “If you’re going around telling your friends how shitty Spotify is, but then you’re going on your Instagram and saying, ‘Thank you, Spotify, for playlisting me on your Coffee Cappuccino Playlist. . . that has to stop,” he says. “You don’t have to be unpleasant, but you have to turn down offers that are undignified and that don’t offer you any chance of success.”
In their 2023 book, _Chokepoint Capitalism_ , authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin suggest that successful musicians have the power to turn the tide in artists’ favour. Taylor Swift, for one, negotiated a record deal with Universal stipulating that, when the label sells its Spotify shares, it must disburse some of the profits among all the artists on its roster. Imagine, then, what a critical mass of influential artists could achieve: increased subscription fees, higher per-stream payouts, a return to a pay-per-song or pay-per-album model, even an overhaul of how streamers compensate artists. Currently, Spotify pays musicians on a pro rata basis: they pool all subscription revenues, take a 30 percent cut, and divvy up the remaining 70 percent according to artists’ overall market share. While Apple Music pays more (a penny per stream), it reportedly takes around half as its cut.
In other words, Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, and Billie Eilish make millions off people who’ve never listened to them. Even if you exclusively stream the Regina-raised indie musician Andy Shauf, much of your subscription fee still ends up in Drake’s pocket. A groundswell of artist activism could conceivably convince streamers to allocate individual subscribers’ fees directly to the artists they stream. As Doctorow and Giblin write, “What if two hundred leading recording artists refused to make their music available on platforms that didn’t meet minimum ethical standards and begged their fans to boycott them too?”
Campbell confesses he’s scared what the future holds for musicians—scared but not hopeless. “My honest belief is that artists don’t give up, no matter what it costs them, no matter how much they have to suffer for it, because music is absolutely intrinsic to their existence,” he says. What comforts him is that, among the artists he knows, there is a mounting unease with the status quo and a bubbling urge to fight back. “We’ve done the autopsy. We’ve had the funeral,” Campbell says. “It’s time for the resurrection.”
If it’s up to artists to shape the future of the music industry, no one has risen to the challenge quite like Rollie Pemberton. In 2022, he launched the #MyMerch campaign, calling on venues and bookers—many of whom began demanding 10 to 35 percent cuts of artists’ merchandise sales—to let musicians keep their merch revenue. One hundred and eighty venues across North America made the pledge. That year, he also published his memoir about “surviving the music industry.” He intended for _Bedroom Rapper_ to serve as a guidebook for young artists. Lately, he’s been treating his career itself as an act of protest.
“One of my guiding principles is: when I find out what people in the industry seem to not want me to do, that’s what I do,” Pemberton says. Rather than trying to rack up monthly listeners, amass TikTok followers, and play stadium shows, he’s going back to basics and devoting his time and energy to efforts that might actually make him a living, albeit a modest one. “If you create enough of a following where you can make a small run of vinyl, sell it to your fans, and play to a couple hundred people in every city you go to, that’s success.”
Pemberton’s most recent feat of defiance was “The Entertainer,” which he billed as a weekly series of “no-holds-barred conversations with artists about the realities of creative life.” Last October, in Toronto, the fourth and final event featured an interview with Lido Pimienta. Despite having been nominated for a Grammy and performing at the 2021 awards ceremony, she was “barely making ends meet” in London, Ontario. “All I’m trying to do is put a roof over my children’s heads,” she said. “I don’t have any aspirations of owning a mansion, multiple cars, a jet.”
Pimienta has no illusions of breaking onto the Billboard charts. She’s a Spanish-speaking provocateur in a country that speaks English and French. “If I kept the same beats and music, but instead of singing about land back, I sang about wanting my boyfriend back, I would be mainstream,” she joked. But that would be inconceivable. “I want to be an independent artist, on my terms, on my schedule,” she later told me. “It takes stumbling down. It takes making mistakes. It takes being ripped off. It takes being lied to. It takes being taken advantage of. It takes legal fights. It takes a lot of hardship and exploitation until you wake up. Because it’s not obvious that this industry is evil.”
Wrapping up the interview, Pemberton offered listeners some instruction. “I think the takeaway is: if you have an artist in your life, if you have an artist that you love in Canada, then go home, buy a ticket to their show, buy an album, because we’re going to need it,” he said. “We could be hitting a very dark period for Canadian culture.” Just then, the DJ started spinning a tune and lightened the mood.
Luc Rinaldi
Luc Rinaldi is a contributing writer for The Walrus. https://thewalrus.ca/the-death-of-the-middle-class-musician/
