D.C. punk band Priests will headline a benefit show Friday at 411 New York Ave. NE, the location of the arts facility slated to become a boutique hotel. Also on the bill are experimental duo Janel and Anthony, synthesizer musician Adriana-Lucia Cotes and Ian Svenonius‘ solo project, Escape-ism.

The building on New York Avenue has operated under the name Union Arts since 2013, serving as a work and practice space for musicians and artists. Before that, it was used regularly for underground concerts and dance parties. But property taxes on the building became too high for the previous owners, and they sold the property last summer.

D.B. Lee Development, Inc. Construction and Brook Rose Development, LLC, purchased Union Arts in June 2015. They later announced plans to transform 411 New York Ave. NE into a high-end hotel with eight studios and other art spaces managed by the nonprofit CulturalDC. But up to 100 artists use the building on a rotating basis, according to supporters, and the new configuration is likely to push many of them out.

Supporters of Union Arts packed a zoning commission hearing Feb. 1. Many offered testimony about the scarcity of affordable arts space in D.C., which has rapidly gentrified in the last 15 years.

Janel Leppin of Janel and Anthony says the outpouring of support inspired her, and she decided to organize a show to bring attention to the situation.

“More than anything,” Leppin says, she wanted to “raise awareness for the need for spaces for artists in D.C.”

A flyer for Friday’s Union Arts benefit show

Leppin has performed at Union Arts numerous times. She says when choosing bands for the benefit concert, she picked acts who have been involved in the space in some way.

Priests fit that description. The band’s members have set up shows at Union Arts and two of them testified Feb. 1 on the importance of Union Arts to local music.

“It’s definitely a hub of music activity,” says Priests singer Katie Alice Greer in an interview. “It is a unique building right now in D.C. in certain ways. There aren’t a whole lot of other spaces left that are not private homes or businesses. … There’s not a lot of middle-ground spaces where people are actively making art and putting on shows for any band that they think is cool and interesting — in a way that’s not really driven by alcohol sales.”

But saving the building as it is now may not be feasible. According to Gail Harris, managing member of the LLC that sold Union Arts last year, the rent paid by artists did not cover the building’s property taxes. The new owners have asked the current tenants to vacate by Sept. 1. (Though at the hearing, D.B. Lee President Dennis Lee said that date may be flexible.)

CulturalDC says the new studios will accommodate “up to 20-plus artists” who can apply in an open call. Developers point out that musicians will also be considered for art spaces.

But current tenants are still challenging the redevelopment plans. Leppin says proceeds from Friday’s show will help the building’s artists with “whatever cost[s] they are faced with.” She later writes in an email that funds should go to help artists who are trying to find new studio space.

“We will raise the money to help Union Arts continue its work as an arts venue and basically a community center for the public — for as long as it can,” Leppin writes.

Desirée Venn Frederic, founder of vintage shop Nomad Yard Collectiv, which operates out of Union Arts, says that means lawyer’s fees. “In our current fight we acknowledge we need legal support and legal guidance,” she says.

The number of people who signed up to give public testimony Feb. 1 was so great that a second zoning commission hearing was scheduled for Feb. 23. Leppin says she hopes Friday’s show sparks enough interest to overwhelm that hearing, too.

The benefit concert for Union Arts takes place Feb. 19 at 411 New York Ave. NE. 8:30 p.m.

Top image: Protestors at a Feb. 1 zoning commission hearing on the planned redevelopment of Union Arts.

DIY musicians work hard. A lot of time and effort goes into writing, recording, releasing records, planning tours and executing them. But when we talk about the economics of being a DIY artist — as I have in this series’ first two installments — how do we quantify musicians’ time and labor?

If we calculate the potential costs of a touring DIY musician, we can factor in hard expenses like gasoline, merchandise and food. And there are other expenses that some artists choose to take on, like hiring a publicist or booking agent.

But this other question of labor — the work artists put into making their music and booking tours, plus the time they spend on tour — is harder to talk about. It’s the least quantifiable expense, but it could have the greatest impact on DIY musicians’ day-to-day lives.

So why do musicians like myself rarely factor it into our economic picture? Is it because it brings up bigger, existential questions about how DIY musicians relate to our craft?

When we start to count the hours of unpaid labor musicians put into our work, and when we look at how intensely musicians structure our lives around accommodating those hours of unpaid labor, it raises the question: Doesn’t it seem strange that we should work so hard without compensation?

To shed light on these big questions, I talked to some of my musician friends about how they look at labor, the invisible expense.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

Can’t tour with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.

In a music economy where even successful bands aren’t paying their bills from tours and record sales, most DIY musicians are working day (and night) jobs when they’re not on tour. Time away from work means money lost, and it’s a serious consideration for bands when calculating how much time they spend on the road.

Sam Cook-Parrott of Philadelphia’s Radiator Hospital tells me about a tour he wrapped up in October during which the band earned what they considered a decent profit.

“But was it as much as if we worked a s****y minimum wage job?” Cook-Parrott wonders. “Basically. And then we lost our s****y minimum wage jobs. So it’s complicated.”

Job security is tricky for touring musicians. Some are lucky to find the rare job that lets them work from the road, but the more common tale is that of the musician hustling between different service-industry jobs.

“If you want a job that’s good to you, then you can’t go on tour.” — Gabrielle Smith of Frankie Cosmos

Gabrielle Smith of New York indie bands Eskimeaux, Frankie Cosmos, Bellows and Told Slant finds herself on the road constantly. She tells me about a job she worked at a coffee shop that would let her return whenever she needed work, but had a high turnover rate due to unbearable conditions.

“They would have kept taking me back over and over again, but they were very, very awful to their employees, which I think is the trade-off I’ve been finding. If you want a job that’s good to you, then you can’t go on tour,” Smith says.

“At this point I can’t get a regular job. I play in four bands,” says Chris Moore of D.C. punk bands Coke Bust, Sick Fix, DOC and The Rememberables. “What job is going to allow someone to leave for four to six months out of the year? No one.”

Between the instability of losing jobs to go on tour and the fact that jobs with flexible schedules tend to pay less, many musicians structure their entire lives around reducing their expenses.

Cook-Parrott’s money-management plan involves living a certain low-cost lifestyle.

“I live in a house with five other people. I don’t have a car. I walk or ride my bike or take public transit everywhere,” Cook-Parrott says. “Who knows if I’m gonna get another paycheck or if I’ll have a job or something? So it’s like, get used to living cheaply.”

Especially for musicians living in an expensive city like Washington, D.C., living cheaply might be taken to further extremes. Group house full of musicians? Think twice about heat in the winter. Don’t have much money for food? Get creative.

“For a while I was scamming manufacturers’ coupons,” Moore says. “I was calling up every single company I loved food from, and I’d be like, ‘Uh, I got sick,’ and they’d say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll give you a coupon.’”

But when the coupons start running out, plenty of questions remain about how artists can sustain themselves while pursuing music.

Hobbyist vs. Professional

When do you cross the line?

“The only financial burden I’ve run into with music is when things are going well,” says Jeff Rosenstock, the New York songwriter formerly of Bomb the Music Industry. It seems counterintuitive, but it’s a common sentiment.

“You’re like, ‘Oh, OK. Now I want to chase this thing that’s doing well,'” Rosenstock says. “But then you’re not home for long enough to actually maintain a job and be able to pay your bills.”

Knowing when your music’s success is enough to warrant the leap into financial instability is increasingly tough these days.

Much ink has been spilled over the Internet’s supposed democratization of art and culture. One thing that rings true is that musicians who might not have found an audience before can do that online now. But how do they know when the success they’ve found among niche online audiences is worth chasing full-time?

“The only financial burden I’ve run into with music is when things are going well.” —Jeff Rosenstock

“In a way, the newer machinery of how music is distributed has given us a way to quantify success,” says Daoud Tyler-Ameen of D.C. indie-pop project Art Sorority for Girls. “You can look at your retweets and check your premium Soundcloud stats and maybe there will be a spike and you’ll feel a little bit more validated that day.”

But numbers can paint an incomplete picture. Fans connect to music in intense ways, some of which can’t be measured by analytics.

“A deep connection to one person as opposed to a superficial connection to thousands of people can be more important and more meaningful, and even lead to greater success,” Tyler-Ameen says, “but there isn’t a way to quantify it.”

Musicians might find themselves receiving daily messages from fans. They might get glowing reviews on blogs or requests for performances from all over the world. But that doesn’t guarantee a sustainable career in music. So how do musicians calculate when the risk is worth taking?

And when does the term “hobby” not quite fit reality? When DIY musicians are suffering through day jobs they aren’t invested in to make ends meet, while they put as much — if not more — work into their craft for which there is palpable demand, it’s hard to call it a hobby.

“I work in a restaurant. That’s where I spend most of my time,” said Priests vocalist Katie Alice Greer, onstage with author Astra Taylor at the Future of Music Policy Summit last fall. “I’m not sitting in the restaurant wondering how I’m going to become a famous star. I’m wondering, ‘How am I going to live a life where I can actually get paid for the work that I want to create and not waste away in this industry that I don’t care about, serving food?’”

Cultural Value of Music

Do we think musicians should be paid?

The $5 punk show is the five cent Coca-Cola of the 21st century. That low door fee was set by consensus in the 1980s as a way to keep punk and indie concerts affordable and accessible. Thirty years later, it’s still the standard fee at house shows across the country. Prices for just about everything else — food, rent, gas — have soared since then. Yet musicians are getting compensated at the same rate they were 30 years ago.

There are plenty of reasons to keep DIY shows cheap. Technology has enabled a saturation of the music scene that wasn’t possible in the 1980s. Showgoers who are often low-income themselves are paying more for living expenses with less disposable income. But the $5 show model doesn’t account for touring bands’ costs.

“I wish we lived in a world where $5 was enough to sustain a touring band,” says Erica Freas of Olympia, Washington, punk band RVIVR. “But instead of doing something to change that, we just act like it’s already changed.”

It’s a nice idea that bands shouldn’t have to worry about money. Sometimes DIY communities act as though things already are that way and ignore unavoidable economic realities. Freas calls it “a dystopic discordance with reality.”

Beyond DIY politics, though, there just seems to be a universal expectation now that music should be as cheap as possible, if not free. When even the Platinum-selling anomaly Taylor Swift can’t sell tickets to her concerts at market value because fans expect a lower price from musicians, what does that say?

“If your concept of your musician is Led Zeppelin in a Jacuzzi full of money, it’s easier to excuse the whole music economy from having to figure out a way to compensate people sustainably.” —Daoud Tyler-Ameen of Art Sorority For Girls

Some DIY musicians tell me creative labor should be valued just as highly as “regular” work. “Making money off music would allow me to play more music, and that’s what I care about,” Freas says. Greer agrees. “I absolutely think musicians should be able to live off their work,” she writes.

But some musicians — like many consumers — hesitate to assign monetary value to musical labor.

“I put more energy into [booking shows and tours] than I do my actual job,” Amanda Bartley of Columbus, Ohio, band All Dogs says. “But I don’t really view it as labor. It’s just something I enjoy doing.”

Why is it so easy to devalue or dismiss this particular type of labor? The same expectation doesn’t seem to apply to most other work. Is it because of a cultural expectation that you shouldn’t enjoy the work that you do?

Maybe. Tyler-Ameen also thinks it could have something to do with an antiquated cultural understanding of who musicians are.

“If your concept of your musician is Led Zeppelin in a Jacuzzi full of money,” Tyler-Ameen says, “it’s a little easier to excuse yourself or excuse the whole music economy from having to figure out a way to compensate people sustainably.”

There’s also a sense that artists are more authentic if their work is untainted by an expectation of compensation.

“We don’t analyze or think critically about the arts as an industry in the United States,” Greer writes in an email. “Artists themselves expect to be poor to authenticate their work.”

Rosenstock maintains that making music can — and perhaps should — be its own reward. But he says there are other factors that artists have to be realistic about.

“Obviously, the reason you’re doing it is because you’re reaching people, and that’s awesome,” Rosenstock says. “But reaching people doesn’t pay for your rent or get you enough gas to go to the next city.”

New Models For Getting By

Do sponsorships and crowdfunding make sense for DIY musicians?

As the music economy shifts, much has been made of new models that could help musicians survive on their music, but little of it seems to have resonated among the touring DIY musicians I’ve known over the last decade.

One of those proposed models: corporate sponsorships for indie bands.

“The only way we can make a living off our creative work, it seems, is to do the bidding of a larger corporate business,” Greer writes. “That, for me, is typically an inconsistent reality with the themes of my work. Musicians shouldn’t have to degrade themselves to taking money from sources that make them feel uncomfortable in order for this to happen.”

Other new-school models like crowdfunding have gained some traction, but ultimately don’t come across as a sustainable solution.

“If you’re the kind of person who can make a Kickstarter video where you look totally natural and not uncomfortable, you’re more likely to find something sustainable [now],” Tyler-Ameen says. “A lot of people feel like they don’t know necessarily how to compete in that world and still feel and sound like themselves.”

“Musicians shouldn’t have to degrade themselves to taking money from sources that make them feel uncomfortable.” –Katie Alice Greer of Priests

Freas says she didn’t find the amount of work involved in crowdfunding to be worth the trouble after her band RVIVR funded a relatively cheap trip to Europe on Kickstarter in 2011.

“The amount of [blowback] we got from the DIY community in balance with how much work it was to fulfill the Kickstarter rewards made us wish we just bought the tickets on a credit card and saved ourselves the hassle and the attention,” Freas says. “It’s one skill to write music, and it’s another skill to manage a hustle that can even come close to being sustainable while holding on to your values.”

Musicians who don’t thrive on those new earning models can face a particular kind of crisis.

“There’s a kind of emotional dysphoria that a lot of creators feel in this economy because they are told over and over again that all they have to do is be really good,” Tyler-Ameen says. “It’s a really lonely, miserable place to be to be told that all you have to do is be good, and then you do your best to be good and you can’t make a dent in anything. You just sort of assume you must not be any good.”

For most bands, the only viable pathway toward making a career out of music is to simply never stop touring. If tour sustains musicians — and keeping a job in the interim is too difficult — just stay on the road. But that lifestyle can be exhausting, and it certainly isn’t for everyone.

“I don’t think I would want to be traveling all the time for much more than a year or so,” Bartley says.

“Personally,” Freas echoes, “I don’t think being on the road all the time is good for my mental health.”

Our Identity

Are we musicians first?

When I talk to musicians about the value of their creative labor, the idea that loving one’s work invalidates it as “work” comes up again and again. What I hear across the board from musicians is that music is what they love, and they’ll find a way to do it, whether or not it’s validated by outside sources.

But even musicians who believe their work is valuable — and worthy of fair compensation — are not necessarily ready to call themselves professional musicians.

“Up till this day, if somebody asks me what I do for a living, I tell them I’m a graphic designer. I still don’t tell people I’m a musician,” Rosenstock says, even after he points out he earns more from music. “Playing music is a thing I have to do. A thing I love doing.”

Even musicians who believe their work is valuable — and worthy of fair compensation — are not necessarily ready to call themselves professional musicians.

Plenty of musicians aspire to make music the center of their lives, but that doesn’t mean they call it their job.

“Maybe it’s sad to say, but I never really had any professional aspirations outside of playing music,” says Moore. “I never really had an aspiration to play music professionally, either.”

Is it possible that, on a subconscious level, music consumers know that the Chris Moores of the world will keep pumping out blast beats whether or not they’re getting paid for it? And could that contribute to the idea that musicians’ labor isn’t worth paying for — among consumers and musicians alike?

“It’s a weird thing, I think, for us as humans to take such a natural, pure impulse as opening up your mouth and singing and try and make it into money,” Cook-Parrott says.

When there’s a pairing of money and music, cognitive dissonance comes into play for both musicians and fans.

For now, though, Cook-Parrott is trying not to worry about it.

“Most people have s****y jobs for their entire life and then they die. If that’s my alternative to playing music, then I’m going to f*****g play music and go to weird towns and barely make any money and have fun doing it and then leave a good-looking corpse,” Cook-Parrott says. “That’s the plan.”

Photo by Flickr user Patrick Gruban used under a Creative Commons license.

“It seems like a useless word to me because if you’re doing a band, aren’t you already doing it yourself?” says D.C. punk vocalist Katie Alice Greer, 26. “It’s a word that has totally lost its meaning, except that it’s a marketing term. It’s marketable to people.”

But “DIY” fits Sister Polygon, the label that Greer and her bandmates in Priests have been running since 2012.

“We just wanted full agency over how our music was coming out,” Greer says.

With Sister Polygon, Priests certainly has that — down to the smallest detail. Greer usually handles the imprint’s publicity; bassist Taylor Mulitz deals with design. Drummer Daniele Daniele (a pseudonym) oversees accounting, which sometimes includes tempering her bandmates’ expensive ideas.

“When the rest of us are like, ‘This is a great idea to print on sparkly, glow-in-the-dark paper,’ Daniele will be like, ‘Beautiful. That’s not possible,’” Greer says.

Priests guitarist G.L. Jaguar (also a pseudonym) handles the process of packaging each release and slipping them in the mail. If buyers find Cyndi Lauper trading cards in their packages, that’s because he found them recently and thought people would really enjoy them. (He also came up with the label’s name. It’s a reference to a song by Sicilian band Silver Bullets.)

This month, Sister Polygon celebrated a milestone of sorts: It put out its 10th release, Pinkwash’s Cancer Money 7-inch. The heavy Philadelphia band is friends with Priests. So is Cigarette, the slocore ensemble from D.C. that has a 7-inch coming out on the label, possibly this year.

But for Greer and Jaguar, running the label isn’t just about supporting their pals — it’s also about finding music that speaks to them, made by people who are just as passionate.

“When we see music and people who are putting in their all, it’s not just bleeding out your guts with your emotions — that’s important, too — but people who are really trying to express something where there is not space or dialogue for already. That is stuff we want to get behind and try to support,” Greer says.

It’s important to Sister Polygon that it picks artists who have some praxis behind their politics. One of the label’s bands, Downtown Boys, includes members involved in advocacy work.

“We’re a very political band and label, to a certain extent,” Greer says.

Yet Sister Polygon seems fueled not just by ideology, but by its own enthusiasm. Running the label is a labor of love that Priests seems more than willing to do.

“Sister Polygon: very stoked,” Jaguar says, improvising a tagline for the label.

Greer agrees. “Probably annoyingly so,” she says, laughing.

Stream Sister Polygon’s label sampler via Soundcloud:

“DIY.” It’s a term you can stick in front of any music genre to indicate a way of doing things. It doesn’t describe a particular sound. It doesn’t just mean “punk.” Really, it’s just the idea that we musicians don’t need the backing of the music industry to make music. We can and should seize the means of production. We should do it ourselves.

In 2015, doing it ourselves is easier than it’s ever been, thanks to technology that eliminates barriers between musicians and listeners. But today’s crowded creative environment has also prompted artists to begin rethinking the way they define and practice DIY.

What are the boundaries of DIY? Are you doing it yourself if you’ve hired someone to do publicity for your band’s tour? What if someone booked the tour for you? Is playing a traditional music venue DIY, or do you strictly play houses and nonprofit show spaces? At what point does the stability of your project depend on outside involvement?

When considering the costs of DIY touring, bands often bump into and wander back and forth across these ill-defined boundaries. They ask themselves questions like, “What effect does it have economically and experientially to hire a booking agent?” and “To what extent should courting media coverage factor into our tour budget?”

I don’t have answers to these questions. But I chatted with several musicians who have been mulling them over while they attempt to produce and share their music in a sustainable way. Here’s what we talked about.

Publicity

The ups and downs of playing the promo game

Artists have an incentive to get out the word about their shows: They want people to see them play. But first, people have to know about the show.

Good ol’ word-of-mouth can go a long way, but in a world where Facebook and Google algorithms dictate who sees what about which bands, having the endorsement of reputable music blogs seems to play an increasingly large role in artists’ promotion strategies.

The problem is DIY publicity is next to impossible. Media outlets are bombarded by tons of press releases and inquiries every day. Necessarily, some of them are more likely to check out music sent by entities they already know or trust, and often, those entities are PR companies.

That means that even DIY labels and artists will sometimes a hire PR firm to promote a record or tour. Daoud Tyler-Ameen of D.C. indie-pop project Art Sorority for Girls says pro publicists try to strike a balance between inundating and intriguing media stakeholders with pitches for their clients’ music.

“They will spend a year building it up in such a way that you keep getting hammered with the name,” Tyler-Ameen says. The goal is that “the media coverage rolling up to a release is spaced apart far enough and novel enough each time that you don’t get sick of it.”

Confusingly, though, sometimes publicity just happens on its own.

“People think, ‘Oh, they’re doing fine. They got written about in Rolling Stone.’ But that doesn’t translate to money. It’s a cool thing to show your parents, but it’s not a real, actual thing.” — Sam Cook-Parrott of Radiator Hospital

“We played mostly local shows for the first year of us being a band. Then someone from Pitchfork and someone from Stereogum each wrote about our band, and suddenly it was like, ‘Whoa, a lot of people know about us!'” says Amanda Bartley, who plays in Columbus, Ohio, band All Dogs. “We had a lot of people contact us about doing PR stuff for us and we haven’t pursued any of that, which is kind of a testament to the Internet doing that for us.”

But the fickle Internet is nothing to bet on. Waiting for accidental exposure can be like playing the lottery. Jeff Rosenstock, formerly of Bomb the Music Industry, has been touring in bands for 15 years. Despite various other measures of success, he rarely used to catch any attention from music blogs.

Rosenstock told me last fall, “I don’t know what blog buzz is like. I bet it’s awesome.”

That changed this year, when Rosenstock put out a record on a label with an in-house publicist. Quickly he found himself written about on Consequence of Sound, Noisey, Stereogum, A.V. Club and Spin.com, just to name a few.

But getting attention in the music media can lead to an inflated outside perception of success, says Sam Cook-Parrott of Philadelphia’s Radiator Hospital.

“People think, ‘Oh, they’re doing fine. They got written about in Rolling Stone. Don’t f*****g worry about it.’ Does success mean getting written about in a cool blog or in Rolling Stone? Because what does that mean? That doesn’t translate to money,” Cook-Parrott says. “It’s a cool thing to show your parents, but it’s not a real, actual thing.”

Plus, there’s a feeling among some bands that the promo cycle can lend an empty glaze of marketing to the art of writing and producing music.

“I think that bands are way more short-sighted than they used to be,” Cook-Parrott says. “It’s like with blockbuster movies and it’s all about the opening weekend. That’s not how making a record should be.”

Booking Agents

When they’re cool (and when they’re weird)

There was a time when hiring a booking agent was considered the definitive line between whether a band could be called DIY or not. But putting together a tour can be draining for bands, particularly in the DIY world, where booking networks are informal and constantly changing. The time and energy that goes into organizing a tour can feel like a full-time job, which is especially tough for musicians who already have one.

When are house shows better than club gigs? (Photo: Michael Andrade)

Tyler-Ameen, who works full time, says he felt exhausted by booking two of his own tours in 2014.

“They kicked my ass,” Tyler-Ameen says. “It really did feel each time pretty consuming, where I would get out of work and go and send emails until I was tired. And that was the case for weeks. Which doesn’t seem sustainable.”

Katie Alice Greer, who sings in D.C. punk band Priests, writes in an email that her band’s decision to work with a booking agent had a lot to do with time management — particularly making time to earn money.

“I had a very low-cost living situation and a job with flexible hours [in 2013],” Greer says. That meant she and Priests’ drummer were able to book most of their tours themselves. But when they both had to ramp up their work schedules, she says, they hired a booking agent.

“House shows are always a lot more fun while you’re playing. But sometimes on tour I don’t want to have a meet-and-greet every single day.” — Gabrielle Smith of Frankie Cosmos

“It certainly helps to have an extra head (with a lot of experience) involved in the process of mapping out a tour that will make sense,” Greer writes.

But some DIY bands choose a combined strategy: They book some of their own shows, and leave others to a professional. That’s the method familiar to Gabrielle Smith, who plays with indie bands Eskimeaux, Frankie Cosmos, Bellows and Told Slant. Two of her bands book their own tours and two work with booking agents. When those worlds meet, she says things get a little strange.

“It totally is weird when we play a house show and the booking agent asks for a W-2 and a headcount,” Smith says.

When bands work with professional bookers, they’re more likely to play commercial spaces like bars and clubs, and that transition can be a little jarring. For one thing, there’s an experiential difference between the two kinds of shows.

“House shows are always a lot more fun while you’re playing. The entire interaction beforehand can be really amazing and really warm and welcoming, but also can be really uncomfortable,” Smith says. “Sometimes on tour I don’t necessarily want to have a meet-and-greet every single day. On that level, having the booking agent and playing at a place that’s not a house every single day can be more comforting.”

Then there’s the question of how money is handled.

“The houses don’t take money most of the times, and a bar will. Or they’ll say, ‘We’re gonna give you $100′ and maybe they make more, but you’ve agreed to that amount,” Cook-Parrott says. “A house show is pretty clean. They tell you, ‘This is the money we made’ and sometimes it’s way more than you’d ever make if you just played some $100 guarantee show at a bar.”

When playing house shows is working optimally, it can feel magical, like an alternate economy worth putting faith in. But it’s also precarious.

Smith describes a common experience of playing a house show, where no effort is taken to collect money at the door: “They give you $10 or $15, and they’re like, ‘Hope this is enough. Thanks for playing. Bye!'”

If no explicit financial arrangement has been made, there’s not much you can do but fill your gas tank up one eighth of the way and hope the next show pays better.

Talking About Money

Mum’s the word

Sometimes income itself isn’t the only economic obstacle to a DIY tour. Conversations about money — or the lack of them — can be a huge factor in a tour’s economic success.

Bands can feel uncomfortable talking about money with show promoters, especially when they’re relying on an informal network of people exchanging favors. Take Bartley, who says she didn’t talk to anyone about money before booking her most recent tour.

“I just kind of assumed that everyone I talked to was kind of on the same page,” Bartley says.

But that assumption can leave musicians vulnerable.

“When it is uncomfortable, I remind myself that it is absolutely necessary,” says Greer. “I will not be in a position where I am not paid fairly because money was not explicitly discussed.”

Rosenstock says he has a way of conducting conversations about money on the road.

“When we would play house shows, I’d talk to the people at the house beforehand and be like, ‘Hey, I don’t wanna be a d**k, but I think somebody should be at the door making sure everybody gives six bucks or five bucks or whatever it is,” Rosenstock says.

“When [talking about money] is uncomfortable, I remind myself that it is absolutely necessary. I will not be in a position where I am not paid fairly because money was not explicitly discussed.” — Katie Alice Greer of Priests

He thinks money at shows should be going toward bands, not beer for the party. “I’d rather that money be able to sustain us to go on tour again next year than for that money to fuel this ‘You need alcohol to party so put another bunch of dollars in this huge company’ thing. Don’t you think it would be nicer if we got that money tonight instead of Anheuser-Busch?”

Rosenstock says that approach has worked for him. “I would never, ever ever get a response that was like, ‘F**k you.’ It’d always be like ‘Yeah, you’re right. Totally.'”

Still, hiring someone else to handle the money side can be a sufficiently attractive reason for some musicians to work with a booking agent.

“We’re all very polite people, so we’re not that good at getting paid maybe what we know certain places have budgets that they can afford to pay us, and we’ve definitely been shorted in a lot of ways,” Smith says of her bands. “With the booking agent it’s always pre-arranged. There’s a guarantee or a very specific percentage that we’d get of the door … and if they tried to give us less, we had the backing of someone else.”

Guarantees Vs. Door Deals

Punkonomics!

When a venue commits to paying a band a certain amount of money no matter how many (or few) people come to see a show, that’s called a guarantee. They can be pragmatic. But they’re also deeply stigmatized in the punk and indie-rock scenes.

In a network of show promoters where anti-capitalist (or at least anti-commercial) ethics have been central to their community identity, it can come across as arrogant to demand a fixed amount of money to play a show, especially if that means a promoter will be paying out of pocket at the end of the night.

On the other hand, promoters don’t always understand the costs of tour — or worse yet, they do understand and still pay too little. A guarantee can offer protection against that.

“The guarantee is set in place so [bands] are able to sustain a tour and are able to do future tours. It’s taboo in the punk scene to even consider something like that.” — Chris Moore of Coke Bust

But Rosenstock says that politics aside, some bands are better off doing a door deal.

“Say you’re asking someone who runs a house,” he says. “You’re like, ‘Hey, we have a $250 guarantee,’ and you bring, like, 10 people to the show. That promoter’s going to be like, ‘OK, I’ll pay this band 250 bucks, but I’m never gonna book them again because this was a nightmare.'”

Guarantees are typical when bands work with a booking agent. Professional bookers tend to prefer it that way so they can assure their own percentage and a cut for the band. But if the booker’s only criteria is a venue that will agree to a guarantee, other important factors like finding the right place for a band’s audience can fall by the wayside.

“I played in a band for a little while and we did a big tour and it was booked by this guy. We played shows every night, and we played $100 guarantee shows that no one came to. If we would have booked the show ourselves, a bunch of people would have come,” Cook-Parrott says.

So on Radiator Hospital’s last tour, the band did things differently.

“We did it all ourselves and the shows were consistently f*****g awesome. Because we were communicating with our friends and with people who understand our music,” Cook-Parrott says. “Not just the dude at the bar down the street who needs to fill entertainment every night.”

Chris Moore, who plays in D.C. hardcore bands Coke Bust, Sick Fix and DOC, says none of his bands have a guarantee. But he doesn’t fault anyone for having one because guarantees serve a purpose.

“The guarantee is set in place so they are able to sustain a tour and are able to do future tours,” Moore says. “It’s taboo in the punk scene to even consider something like that.”

* * *

Regardless of where bands stand on booking agents, publicists, bar gigs or guarantees, sustainability is the key issue in these conversations. Few people in the DIY music community expect to strike it rich, but when pursuing music is keeping musicians broke, considering compensation for their labor comes into focus.

To what extent should music be the labor of love it’s widely understood to be? In the face of a music economy that’s being reshaped on every level, to what degree can musicians expect to be paid to keep making music? And what happens when the answers to those questions mean the difference between having a band and not having one?

We’re still talking about it.

Stay tuned for Combs’ next installment in a series of essays about the DIY music economy. Read Part 1, “These Are The Real Costs Of Going On A DIY Tour.”

Photos, from top: Young Trynas at the Dougout, July 2014; modified iPad email inbox used under a Creative Commons license; Swimsuit Addition at the Rocketship, July 2014; modified donation jar used under a Creative Commons license; donation bowl used under a Creative Commons license.

Yes, D.C.’s own Priests, the punk-rock fourpiece fronted by (recent Kojo Nnamdi Show guest) Katie Alice Greer. This is what the ever-bespectacled power-pop celebrity had to say about the band’s “Doctor”:

There’s a lot of guitar riffage without a real chord progression – but there’s also super-interesting and unique counterpoint between the instruments. And the lyric “You put your fingers in other people’s mouths” is super-provocative. With the sound of her very raw, unpolished vocal performance, the net result is very charming and attractive to me. It seems like they’re not super-interested in melodies, and I was wondering if they came up with the lyrics on paper first, before she sang them. That would be my guess. I also wonder how Morrissey wrote with the Smiths – it’s almost like there were pages of writing and he almost talked them over the music.

“Charming” and “attractive” strike me as misplaced descriptors for a sociopolitical punk band, but hey—Rivers Cuomo just compared Priests to The Smiths. Super-sweet.

Hear Priests play Cuomo’s new favorite song in the band’s recent Bandwidth session:

The last two years have brought a huge resurgence of interest in the scene’s bygone days, exemplified by the “Pump Me Up” exhibit at the Corcoran last year, Lucian Perkins’ Hard Art DC 1979 book, the fanzine archive at University of Maryland, two recently launched punk-rock archives at George Washington University and D.C. Public Library, the D.C.-themed episode of Dave Grohl’s Sonic Highways HBO series and a whopping five documentaries—one of them still in the works—related to D.C. punk music. (And I admit that Bandwidth has been a gushing faucet of D.C. punk coverage lately, so as the website’s editor, I play a role in this, too.)

But why is all of this reflection happening now?

Today’s Kojo guests—Positive Force co-founder Mark Andersen, Priests singer Katie Alice Greer, the GWU music archive’s Tina Plottel and myself—grappled with that. Andersen rejected that nostalgia alone is driving the deluge. (Because punk isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about the present, he said.) But the activist couldn’t explain why the recent past has been such a fertile period for, well, the past. Cynthia Connolly—the Banned In D.C. co-creator who called into the show—didn’t seem to think this moment bears special significance. She said it seemed like a coincidence, because many of the aforementioned projects took shape years ago and happen to be wrapping up now.

But here’s a theory I neglected to bring up on the air today: In an interview back in July, Punk the Capital filmmaker James Schneider told me that folks should try to preserve the past now because redevelopment is erasing D.C.’s cultural history. “With the city changing so fast, on so many fronts, it’s more important than ever now to ensure that the city’s identity is firmly anchored before a remodeled city takes over,” he said. When these films, archives and other projects began coming together, was it because their creators saw gentrification beginning to erase history? Or is the barrage, like Connolly said, coincidental?

In the hourlong segment, Andersen also made key points about punk rock’s relationship with activism and gentrification’s impact on the very poor (versus the less-urgent effect it’s had on middle-class artists), and we mulled over whether D.C.’s current scene has maintained the sense of social responsibility that’s depicted in the forthcoming documentary Positive Force: More Than A Witness.

Ultimately, today’s show wasn’t all about nostalgia, even though that’s what we set out to discuss. But like many of the ideas revived in these allegedly nostalgic films and archives, we found that talking about the past brought up issues musicians and activists are still wrestling with today.

Listen to the segment over on the Kojo Nnamdi Show website.

Image by Flickr user rockcreek used under a Creative Commons license.

None of that has changed now, expect for one important thing: “Right Wing,” a song just released from Priests’ forthcoming debut EP, is the best thing the band has done yet. The overall effect is less sledgehammer, more rubber mallet. The band sounds practiced after months of touring; they crackle, with a discernible sense of control. The intensely smart and performative vocalist Katie Alice Greer—who’s truly convincing as a punk singer, but would shine as a human-rights panelist—doesn’t pull out all the stops on “Right Wing,” but she’s joined by backing vocals that Priests fans might not have realized they wanted. It all sounds like a subtler and more coherent version of the group’s earlier, scrappier self.

The vastly improved production (the EP was recorded both at Inner Ear Studio with Hugh McElroy and Kevin Erickson and Fancy Time Studio with Kyle “Slick” Johnson) could make the biggest difference of all. Listen to “Right Wing” back-to-back with the band’s previous “Tape Two,” and you’ll find that it doesn’t differ that much from some of the songs on that release. But it sparkles in ways the band hasn’t before—and it sticks around much longer. Which raises the point: Hey, maybe all this time, Priests just needed to record in a nicer studio to sound like the great band it is.

The EP, Bodies and Control and Money and Power, is out June 3 on Don Giovanni Records/Sister Polygon.