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Avicii’s S.O.S: Why, a year after the DJ’s death, touring is still harming musicians
A career spent on the road can seem like a tempting life choice for a teenager. Once the reserve of grizzled travelling salesmen, oil rig workers and the occasional mercenary, it has always offered up the notion of sweet release from decades chained to a nine-to-five. But dress it up with adoring crowds, a creative outlet and the potential for stardom, then it becomes something completely irresistible.
And so it has been for generations of adolescents with dreams of careers in music and, more specifically, performing it. Since the 1950s, fresh young faces have looked to album covers to reflect their dreams of travelling the world, where images of rock and rap stars on chrome-clad tour busses and private planes have become part and parcel of the currency of fame.
But, as the industry changes, it increasingly means those artists who “make it” must spend years, sometimes decades, almost permanently on tour to survive, let alone maintain success – and more and more are of them voicing their concern about the high price that comes with never going home.
Today marks the release of the first posthumous track from the late EDM star Avicii. According to those who have heard it, the new song, titled S.O.S, includes the refrain, “Can you hear me, S.O.S.? / Help me put my mind to rest”. While Avicii was known for placing darker lyrics over his euphoric beats, it is hard not to equate this quite literal cry for help with the pressure the DJ felt in the last part of his life.
In April 2018, Avicii, real name Tim Bergling, was found dead in a hotel room in Muscat, Oman. He had died by suicide aged just 28.
Bergling, one of dance music’s biggest and most lucrative stars, is credited with transforming the EDM genre, dragging it away from the frat house-friendly raucous mess it had become and injecting it with a creative flare that sets Avicii apart from his pogoing contemporaries – it was a formula that made him a worldwide phenomenon.
But with his success came struggle. An instinctive introvert, Bergling found it hard to deal with the trappings of extreme fame and the punishing touring life that came as the requisite bolt on.
I've voiced my empathy for Bergling before. While never experiencing the same degree of fame, I too I spent a great deal of my 20s on tour with a professional rock band.
And even though I was at a different end of the spectrum from Avicii’s multi-million-dollar-making dance juggernaut, the symptoms of over-touring are crushingly familiar.
“Musician burnout” has become a hot topic in recent years, with multiple major artists speaking out about the toll a touring life can take. Justin Bieber recently announced he was stepping back from his career to concentrate on his mental wellbeing. “Music is very important to me but nothing comes before my family and my health,” he wrote in an Instagram post. Teen 'dark pop' star Billie Eilish, who has drawn much (in my opinion, unwarranted) criticism for her frank discussions on mental health, spoke about the grief that comes with touring in an interview this week. "I know how it works," the 17-year-old told Zane Lowe's Beats 1 show. "I know that you leave and it’s a little bit of your friends being sad. Then, you’re gone for long enough that life moves on and they keep doing things."
But what of those who can’t afford to “take a break”? For the majority of touring artists the financial realities of being a professional musician increasingly mean that staying out on tour for years at a time is the only way to survive.
Help Musicians, a charity that offers help to artists suffering mental health issues, sees an obvious connection between the touring life and poor mental health.
Factors such as “late nights, inconsistent pay, time spent on the road away from family members and friends” can all leave artists vulnerable, explains the charity’s head of health and welfare, Joe Hastings. A 2016 survey from the charity found 68.5 per cent of musicians had experienced depression.
I reached out to my old tour manager, Ed Hutchinson, who has over ten years experience of looking after musicians on the road. I asked about his own experiences of burnout.
“I see it all the time,” he wrote via email from his latest far-flung stop in Edmonton, Canada. It’s not just artists, he explained, but also the road crew they employ, all on freelance contracts.
“People are living from show to show, invoice to invoice from the smallest bands right up to large artists which the public might expect are rolling in money.”
As the rise of streaming makes profits from record sales a pipe dream for all but the stratospherically successful, live shows are rapidly becoming the only way to realistically stay afloat.
According to a PwC forecast last year, revenue from live music will top $30.55bn by 2022, while physical sales will tumble 9.6 per cent. Streaming, on the other hand, has become the dominant force for record labels but as executives begin to breathe a sigh of relief, the economic model for smaller artists becomes increasingly unworkable. Unless you’re streaming at the rate of Ed Sheeran, the cut from the likes of Spotify is punishingly small. So tiny, in fact, that for most artists it means almost nothing.
Streaming now dominates an industry that other than occasionally wagging a finger at the digital giants, appears to have completely given up fighting for artist welfare. The inevitability of a life, or at least a good few years, spent away from home is passed off with a collective shrug – it’s the price you have to pay, a rite of passage.
To cut back on touring at the beginning of a career means not gaining enough exposure. So, the obvious choice for all but the tiniest minority of top level artists, is to never go home. Like a shark, if a tour never stops – and carries on breaking even – its band will never starve. The moment you cease swimming, you begin to drown.
During my time in a band, to stop touring meant an almost instant return to the breadline. The memories of the coin-fed electricity meter and no central heating in my £80 a week room in Queens Park are testament to that (I stayed there between tours, but could never really call it a home).
But surely it is in no one’s interest to burn these young minds to the ground? As the cash parachutes of record sales disappear, labels and managers have fewer incentives to catch those who lose control. The democratisation of music continues to drive down listeners’ attention span, more choice, means less fan loyalty – and more opportunity for the next track in the playlist to become their new favourite thing.
If a young artist does find a way of making it work and touring does deliver the motherload, the absence of the home-building, friendships and life’s building blocks laid down by the majority of the world’s 20-something population can feel of little use. As songwriter James Blake so succinctly told Dazed: “the money is no good if you come back home and you’ve got no one to spend it on.”
So, what can be done to help? The music industry continues to be a place that supports some of our most talented and creative minds, and the obvious perks of touring should not be ignored. It can be an incredibly rewarding life, and I wouldn’t trade half the things I saw from the back lounge of a tour bus for any amount of time behind a desk.
But a career should be approached with open eyes and not treated as the dream-realising playground that is conjured on teenage bedroom walls. Financial security, as well as support with mental health, must be an industry-wide focus if we are to avoid further stories of depression, anxiety and hopelessness, which seem to seep between the boards of rock’n’roll success with increasingly grim inevitability.
Sadly, the spotlight shone on this side of the industry by tragedies like that of Avicii will be all too brief. And, as it fades, thousands of artists and road crew, must tomorrow once again push it down, suck it up, load in and move on to the next show.