There's A Mental-Health Crisis Among Musicians. How Can We Solve It?

There's A Mental-Health Crisis Among Musicians. How Can We Solve It?




By Max Freedman


In summer 2021, three well known young pop musicians released albums at least partially about how existing in the public spotlight was harming their mental health. Though the theses of Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever, Lorde’s Solar Power, and Clairo’s Sling weren’t exactly the same, a usual thread emerged: The constant attention from their large crowds was tearing down privacy barriers, resulting in the outlandish parasocial relationships that social media fosters between fans and their idols, and making these artists feel unable to disconnect from their music careers.


In speaking with other young musicians and mental health experts, MTV News has heard similar concerns. More importantly, there’s a growing consensus that the music industry should do more to contend with how social media can be toxic for musicians’ mental health — and that social platforms should help, also. A good place to begin? Paying artists livable wages and issuing better (or just more) mental health resources.


Take it from Stella Rose Bennett, the shapeshifting 22-year-old pop musician referred to as Benee, whose 2019 single “Supalonely” became a runaway viral hit. A persons vision elevated her profile, yet it wasn’t an entirely pleasant ride — especially on her breakout platform, TikTok. “The comments are horrible,” Bennett tells MTV News. “People are so mean,” she adds, a notion that the international pop star Charli XCX recently echoed about her own experience on Twitter. Bennett says that, right after her 2020 album Hey U X, she saw people calling her an one-hit wonder and accusing her of being a flop. “It’s been really complicated to process that people will just drop off in a second,” she says, and she doesn’t hesitate to mention that these comments worsened her mental health.


She thinks social life should “filter [comments] so it's not just people being able to mention something really horrible, that's not even constructive criticism, to an artist.” She’s seen this blowback affect other musicians: “I'll watch a really young artist livestream [while] crying,” she says, “and they're saying that folks are telling them really horrible things on the platform, and I'm like, ‘How do we make it so it's not like this?’”


Even if social media miraculously transformed into a beacon of positivity, artists mention that one of their biggest stressors is the quantity of content they require to post for digital marketing and fan engagement to simply keep pace with their peers. The bedroom-pop-gone-hi-fi musician Chelsea Cutler articulated this problem in depth in a January 2022 Instagram post that racked up over 104,000 likes — and that musicians as well known as electro-folk champion Maggie Rogers and OneRepublic superproducer Ryan Tedder publicly agreed with. “It feels exhausting to be constantly thinking of how to turn my day-to-day life into ‘content,’ especially knowing that I feel best mentally Whenever I spend much less time on my phone,” reads one segment of the post. “It also feels exhausting to be told by each person in the industry that this is the only efficient effective method to market music right now.”


“Social media is people advertising their lives, advertising themselves, and advertising what they're doing,” Cutler, 25, tells MTV News. “It’s exhausting.” She calls the constant social-media engagement expected from artists a “burden.” “For that to be the onus so several artists are carrying is really stressful.”


Research into musician stress levels suggests that Cutler isn’t alone. In 2018, the Music Industry Studies Association (MIRA), the Princeton University Study Statistics Center, and MusiCares — the mental health care nonprofit run by the Recording Academy — surveyed thousands of musicians about their mental health. Half the respondents announced frequently “feeling down, depressed or hopeless.” Equally, 11.8 percent of musicians announced feeling “better off dead or hurting yourself in some way.” The corresponding number for the general population was 3.4 percent. And in April 2019, 80 percent of independent musicians 18 to 25 years old mentioned that their careers have caused them stress, anxiety, or depression (or more than one of those things).


The constant uncertainty around the safety of live shows — and frequent cancellations — in an age of ongoing COVID-19 concerns has only exacerbated these issues for artists. “I think the pandemic has been the major catalyst in all of this,” Cutler says. “I really hope the pandemic subsides and we're able to create in-person connections again with fans. I think that would restore a lot of what feels missing right now.”


Laetitia Tamko started releasing music at a young age just over half a decade ago and says her experience was stressful well before the pandemic arrived. In a now-deleted tweet, Tamko, who has recorded garage rock and electronic music under the moniker Vagabon, mentioned that the music industry is fundamentally exploitative. It’s safe to assume such an environment isn’t conducive to excellent mental health.


“We are the people on the front lines doing this really grueling work,” Tamko, 29, tells MTV News of musicians’ roles in the industry. She also clarifies that almost all people she encounters in the industry aren’t “explicitly exploitative,” nevertheless that she’s “had a lot of moments while in the last five years or so that I have been making music that I have been like, ‘Whoa, I can ask for that.’” The implication is that record labels default to keeping artists somewhat in the dark so they can maximize their profits — at the expense of healthy working conditions for the very people creating what they sell. “A way that the music industry can be more artist-friendly is for the wages to be almost livable, so artists don't have to be on tour constantly to prepare an income,” Tamko says. “And even then, artists at my level tend to prepare a lot much less cash than the people beyond the scenes.”


Musicians of all levels need to tour: A 2017 Citigroup report noticed that most of the music industry’s income comes from hitting the road. That’s exactly why touring has resumed even because the pandemic still rages, and it’s also a big reason why initiatives like Bandcamp Fridays emerged to create up for lost musician revenue. Much less cash, certainly, means more stress — how can feel OK in case you could barely afford to exist? Equally, a popularly invoked Future of Music Coalition Survey noticed that 43 percent of musicians don’t have health insurance. The picture was even worse before Obamacare — and, more recently, worsened anew as thousands of performers lost coverage while in the pandemic.


Rhian Jones, the co-author of Sound Advice, a health-focused career guide for musicians, agrees with Tamko’s assertions and opinions. “In the U.S., A 2017 study mentioned the median musician makes around $35,000 each year, with only $21,300 of that coming from music-related sources,” Jones tells MTV News. The latter number means that only about 60 percent of a American musician’s revenue comes from their music. It’s also far less than half the Average annual salary Residents of the
U.S. Made that year. Hallie Lincoln, a licensed clinical social worker and co-founder of the musician mental health resources nonprofit Backline, says that poor mental health can pose further obstacles to sustaining a stable revenue for musicians, even top-tier pop acts — and for their teams. “When people have to cancel legs of tours because they're experiencing mental health issues, that charges tens of millions of dollars in revenue” across the industry, she tells MTV News.


Lincoln partially attributes the industry’s mental health crisis to a “serious lack of [mental health] resources,” which is partly why Backline offers wellness checklists, positive-reinforcement guides, and videos detailing therapy approaches all for free.  Lincoln can't think of a record label, management firm, or other directly artist-adjacent organization that offers the same.


Lincoln also tells MTV News that the musicians with whom she’s worked often mention they’ve had trouble finding a therapist or knowing how to start the search. And while no single therapist or mental health care nonprofit can fill the music industry’s gaps, the value of a support system simply can’t be understated. Tamko adds a wonderful example.


“Having a population of artists at various levels of their career” for “discussing each other's deals or contracts with labels, brands, management, and booking agents,” Tamko says, has been “really important.” She also calls for “artists owning their work, as almost a standard.” (Tamko has only signed with record labels that give her full ownership of her masters, a rarity in the industry.) She says she would like to be able to see more “sounding boards plus a point of reference for [musicians] who are looking at contracts for the opening time… having someone else tell you, ‘This is how it works for me. This is something you're allowed to ask for. This is something you're allowed to push back on.’ I think all of that serves as protection.”


Jones also stresses that “properly reading and understanding contracts before signing [them]” should become more usual among musicians so they can avoid deals that leave them with way much less cash than the other party. “Because getting a record deal is exhilarating, some artists don’t do this,” she explains. She also says that artists could try seeking “advice from a specialist music industry lawyer [and being] wary of how long deals are for — the shorter, the better, group in attempt to leave room for negotiation in the future — and what expenses are getting charged back to the artist before they get their percentage.” She warns that some contracts “sound good on paper [but] may not be in reality as soon as you dig into the numbers.”


Where these contractual matters can sound confusing, Jones has seen musicians’ teams take much simpler steps to protect the artists’ mental health. “I have heard quite a couple of examples of teams putting an artist’s health first, and I think this is becoming more prevalent because of the younger generation’s awareness of mental health,” she says. She cites “all a persons vision [on] this distribute in recent years” as a reason beyond this change: “Awareness has right now translated into action.”


Bennett says her team acts in exactly this manner. “My management will some days make me go house early from a trip if I feel like I can't work anymore,” she says. “I've had a few trips where I have been in L.A., And I just did not wish to do anything else because I was depressed. My management could be like, ‘OK, let's send house, and also you could have a number of weeks to chill.’ That has been really helpful.”


Cutler, meanwhile, finds some comfort in so several musicians of all levels agreeing with her exhaustion about musicians feeling compelled to be content creators. Yet she’s much less optimistic any time asked what the industry could do to better protect the mental health of young musicians like herself. “I don't think anybody has a viable call to action right now,” she says. “It’s like, OK, we all feel this way, although not one of us has a solution.” She has a point: although musicians are the ones most affected by the music industry’s lack of mental health support, their job is to create excellent music, not solve these multiple problems.


That mentioned, Lincoln would “love to see… labels, management firms, promoters, and all other stakeholders that [run] this industry contribute to the financial backing that people need to access mental health care.” She notes that, up until that day comes, musicians can turn to MusiCares and the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund for financial assistance. Sweet Relief, Lincoln explains, will “approve a certain quantity of sessions [for a musician], or they plan to directly pay the therapist for nevertheless long the therapist wants to sign for. So if the therapist says, ‘I will do $3,000 [worth of appointments] at this rate [per appointment],’ then it permits MusiCares to fund [musicians] to get therapy.”


Once the industry steps in more actively, Lincoln says, “ultimately, it could be saving lives.” Social media, digital marketing, parasocial relationships, low incomes, and lopsided contracts may not immediately go away, nevertheless at least artists would finally have the support they’d need from an industry that has long neglected to allocate it. In the meantime, Tamko has a solid way to deal with the industry as soon as she’s faced with especially tough circumstances. “If I'm able to sleep at night based on the decisions I make,” she says, “then I can surrender a bit.”









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