Come the summer and the big-selling pop and rock music acts (and related genres) are flying around at Glastonbury, BST Hyde Park and the dizzying arena concerts at Wembley, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium or Co-op Live in Manchester.
Concerts headlined by the top names in the business are also a coveted chance for younger musicians in Britain seeking to reach a wider public.
I spoke to two artists, both in their early 30s, to hear their take on the joys and challenges of their profession. Alice Merton will appear as a support act ahead of Neil Young’s concert at BST Hyde Park on 11 July. Joe Armon-Jones will be touring extensively in Europe and the UK in the autumn, including headlining a show at Hackney Church on 24 October.
In a nutshell, Alice and Joe both tell me, it’s not an easy path but they wouldn’t be doing anything else.
Alice Merton, citizen of the world
As a child, Alice moved around Germany, North America and the UK and her first mainstream success, ‘No Roots‘, released in 2016, directly addressed that lived experience. “A lot of my music is based around emotions that I’m not really sure how to deal with myself”, she explains.
She’s released two albums so far, ‘Mint‘ in 2019 and ‘S.I.D.E.S‘ in 2022, as well as an EP, ‘Heron‘, in 2024. Alice has toured around Europe and the USA and in 2018, she received the EU-sponsored European Border Breakers Award. However, says Alice, “I try not to see awards as highlights of my career, as I don’t have much influence as to whether I get them or not. Highlights for me are very much in concerts.”
Independence also means uncertainty
At this stage in her career, what are Alice’s main concerns? For a start, unsurprisingly in a very crowded field, simply earning a living. She releases her work through her own independent record label, Paper Plane Records International, started with her friend Paul Grauwinkel. “We earn money through the label. There’s moments when I think ‘should I be saving this money for… a home, a family, all that kind of stuff’ and instead we always re-invest the money into music… That definitely creates uncertainty.”
100,000 new songs uploaded every day
Yes, every day. This is the unbelievable figure quoted in the music industry for the number of songs uploaded to music streaming services. “You can create music in your own bedroom [now]” explains Alice. “So, the biggest difficulty [as a professional artist] is standing out of the crowd, finding an audience and carving your way. The best way of doing that is through social media. But what if you’re not someone who likes social media or wants to be involved with it? Social media has made it easier but also harder. I don’t really want to be in the limelight. I just want to live my own life but create music.”
“Write me an Alice Merton song”
Alice is also very wary of new technology such as SUNO, one of several AI-based music-generating tools which can instantly create a song in the style of any artist. While Spotify, for example, strictly prohibits AI-generated music that impersonates artists, there’s a grey area where music created by AI was clearly influenced by existing artists but did not directly impersonate them. “People like songwriters are losing jobs because AI is doing it instead of them”, says Alice. “Back in the day, being a songwriter was a good job because you’d write lots of songs and you’d get paid. Nowadays earning money as a songwriter is very difficult unless you are the top.”
Living off the energy of the crowd
Alice shows me the picture of a little boy at one of her concerts, cheering and wearing an ‘I love Alice Merton’ T-shirt: “That’s what keeps me going. I love living off the energy of the crowd. I just want to continue making music that I think people might like. If I still feel I have stories to tell, I want to keep telling them, putting out songs that others can relate to.” How does she feel about playing BST Hyde Park, as opening act to Neil Young and Yusuf/Cat Stevens? “Very special to play in London, my favourite city in the world. Especially as one of my first memories is dancing in the kitchen to Yusuf Stevens!”
Joe Armon-Jones, fingers on many keys
Born in a jazz-loving, jazz-making family, Joe studied music at conservatoire and soon developed his own distinctive voice. He is a keyboard player and composer, as well as a producer who launched his own label, Aquarii Records, in 2021.
In his solo work, Joe experiments with jazz, dub (an offshoot of reggae), hip-hop, funk and soul. Earlier this year, he was invited to headline the Cheltenham Jazz Festival and he will be touring in European and UK cities in the autumn to promote his new two-part album, ‘All the Quiet‘, his third album in seven years. He is also a founding member of the Brit Award-winning Ezra Collective and will be playing with them at Glastonbury and BST Hyde Park.
Endgame scenario
How most musicians struggle to make a living from their craft is also a major concern which Joe explores in his latest album. In the storybook he wrote that accompanies All The Quiet, Joe depicts “a fictional future world where music has become very scarce… it’s like an endgame scenario of what I see happening now, when music is getting less and less of a look-in when it comes to funding, or how we look after it.”
Joe observes that the live side of music, touring and playing gigs, has become a lot harder in the last 10 years or so for many bands, and that touring is seen as more of an investment than something you can make money from: “Most tours don’t make money any more, even for bigger bands. Most artists are going through this, not just the smaller artists… There’s a lot less money in music, so everything is more squeezed.
Throughout the chain, people are charging more for their services, because the cost of living has gone up. The only ones who are not charging more are musicians.”
Signing up with big brands
Between record sales generally plummeting for many musicians, and streaming pay-up money often no more than a trickle, one option that remains for musicians is brand deals. In 2017, Vodafone used an Alice Merton song in an advert in Germany. In the UK, it is now common for bands to sign deals to appear as the face of famous drinks or fashion brands.
What’s Joe’s view? “Pretty much everyone does it at the moment because it’s one of the only ways you can keep your music career intact, finance tours and do all the stuff that you want to do. Sometimes it’s people’s image that big brands want, sometimes it’s their music. It’s not a bad thing at all, it’s great to have your music in an advert. It doesn’t upset me that it’s happening, it upsets me that it seems one of the only ways that people can make music.”
Singers who can sing? Not a lot to ask and yet…
As regards the actual process of making music, Joe flags the threat from pitch-correction software such as Autotune: “Sounds like a positive thing but in effect, it means people don’t really need to be able to sing to be viable for a music career. It opens the gateways for another type of world where labels basically just look at what someone looks like, what their social media following is and whether they can get brands in.”
I put it to Joe that ‘girl’ and ‘boy bands’ confected by record label scouts are not a new phenomenon: “Yes, but they still had to find people who could sing” Joe noted. “Whether you like him or not, Robbie Williams can actually sing. Doesn’t sound like a lot to ask but…”
Not giving over to a computer
Nevertheless, Joe is resolute about his path: “I have plenty of music to release. I want to keep building my independent label, Aquarii Records, and sign on a few more musicians. I’m not finished learning. I want to keep building my craft, learning more about production. And I don’t want to give it over to a computer.”
I will be hearing both Alice and Joe live this summer. Tours and concerts might not be the big money-spinners for many musicians that they used to be. But these are the places where they meet each other, bond with their audiences, and keep the flame of live, authentic music burning in increasingly adverse times.
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