Hans: Cool. Well, welcome back to another Campfire Music Foundation interview. Today we are honored and lucky to have the one and only Dessa here with us. An incredibly talented artist, producer, writer, poet, kind of do it all. So we're here today to talk about how you make it work, how you make the business work, what’s working, what isn't, specifically around music streaming, what kind of challenges that presents to you in your career. So just, I guess, right off the bat, how is streaming working for you?
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‍‍Dessa: Yeah, I think in some ways, whether it's like a long term solution or not, I don't count on a lot of revenue from streaming. I think, for better and for ill, the music that I release is more and more an advertisement, unfortunately, something else for a live show, maybe for a piece of merchandise. But I think increasingly, people think of music as free or almost free.And you know, from the consumer side, I have Spotify on my phone. Do I know why there's an appeal to it? Yes, absolutely. Instantaneous access to this world of important music from everywhere, like parts of the planet that I won't ever go to and from eras in which I wasn't even alive. But you know, as a creator, the compensation model is just not working. Yeah.So we've invented something phenomenal. Something phenomenal has happened to the way that people access music. So there is a democratization of access, that’s great, but there's also this unintended or not, this disincentivizing, serious headwind for the people who are making music. How do you make a living if you can't sell your music for money? 

Hans: So you obviously have a very diverse career -  is that partially because you can’t rely on recorded music and need multiple revenue streams? 
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‍Dessa: I think partly, yeah. But I admit. Okay, so you and I, we're at a conference all about power and our tax laws and the systems that we create as a society, as a government, foster or frustrate creative, creative arts.I understand that. To be honest, I understand the systems of it a lot less than I understand the practice of it. I'm good at saying, okay, if I'm planning a concert, I'm good at figuring out the deal, the business part, to figure out how to get everybody paid and how to structure a deal such that you're incentivized, right, that if a lot of people come, we both get a big cut. Or if not that many people come, then we get a smaller cut, then ok we've created a low key cushion, and here's how the merch person is going to get their cut.But I don't understand it as well from that political science vantage point. And I'm aware, too, I've heard some people say, the 100 years in which people could be compensated for recorded music was a really weird 100 years. It wasn't that way for most of human history. You got paid for performing live, and then we had the blip where there was records. And now that blip seems to have ended.I don't know what to make of that. I don't know how this moment of ours fits into the broader, the broader trends in time.But it does seem like there's still money being made on recorded music. It's just that the musicians aren't making it.

Hans: Yeah. And it’s not like people aren’t paying for music. I mean, you have tens of thousands of fans who listen to your music daily, but the money that they're paying to listen to it isn't coming back to you. ‍

Dessa: Right, and then you also have the tension, right, between the freemium and premium economies, which is to say, sometimes they're paying not with money, but with attention. So they're willing to be subjected to a series of advertisements in return to have access to my song, which is the same way that most of us use YouTube.I will sit through and mute the first 15 seconds, but that's what I'm paying. That's my fare to ride that ride. So I think that the way that the attention economy intersects with the fiscal economy is complicated.And that area of dovetail where everybody's hoping that eventually this will pay something is.. increasingly speculative.

Hans: Totally. Was there ever a time where you could rely on your recorded music as a consistent revenue stream since you've been a musician, I mean, I know you kind of started your career at the earlier days of the digital streaming revolution. Like did CDs work better for you?‍

Dessa: Okay. Yes.Good question. And I want to answer it two ways. One, it's really easy for me to bemoan how busted, in a lot of ways, it feels like the music industry is. How is it that you can make a thing that people really like, that somebody else sells, and you don't get a piece of it? But I think I make about as much as a pharmacist in a small town, which is amazing! Do you know what I mean? You know, I'm stable, fiscally. That’s awesome – it’s huge.

Hans: Not a lot of artists can say that.
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‍‍Dessa: You know what I mean? That in and of itself is amazing, I don't want to position myself as a starving artist. I have roots as a starving artist, but I'm not now.But it's not because I feel like I've cracked some code on exactly how to monetize my music. Like you said, I think it is a product of the fact that I have developed a myriad of income streams in some way.I mean, Sims and Doomtree always joked about it. None of us are musicians, if you’re talking about identifying yourself by the way you make money. In that sense – we were all traveling t-shirt salesmen.  So, yeah, I think on the last tour I made the most of my money at the merch booth, not from my brand new record, but far and away from dish towels.And in one way it feels like, hey, cool, high five. We've sold a bunch of dish towels. But on the other hand, it's like, I sold a bunch of dish towels.They're cool, they're clever, you know what I mean? They're tongue in cheek. I'm proud of them. But I don't know shit about dish towels. That’s not my field of expertise, naturally.And so it would be nice to do that because it's fun, not because that's the only way to keep your fingers in the dam [financially].But the other ways I make money, hm, I write sometimes. To be totally frank, like I had one really good book deal which provided me like a year or two of flexibility to take bigger risks with other stuff. Did my publisher make money on that book? I’m not sure, super volatile industry, and I'm not a bestseller. I had one really good deal where it was like, okay, I've got the time to create more work.

Hans: Interesting. So say you were starting your career today. Do you think you could make it work? ‍

Dessa: It's interesting. I mean, your earlier question was like, were CDs more reliable? Yeah, they were more reliable.But it's weird because I feel like in some ways, my trajectory as a musician has grown at the same time that physical music sales have fallen. So even if the line was like, you know, low, it was tempered by that. But I remember when I started being terrified because when I released my first-full length album, a few days later it was on [illegal streaming] sites in Russia where you could get either the song or the whole record for fifteen cents. I felt like the sky was falling. I was like, why would anybody ever buy it from us? And now, of course, like $0.15 a song! Wow, that’d be a lot. What a windfall that’d be.I remember that being like, oh, no. It was like the hull had been breached. So I was right on that cusp where the musicians who had made it, I think, to approximately my level, four years before me, were buying houses for their parents. Not great houses, but to be like mom, you're not a renter anymore, I got you… that kind of helping.So, yeah, in some ways, I probably was spared the huge heartbreak of watching the music industry crumble, because I was arriving on the steaming ashes of it. It had already kind of toppled. But I caught, like, those last two stories of decline.

Hans: What would you like to see different about the way artists are treated, about the way they're compensated for their work? 
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‍‍Dessa: Frankly some of this I have so few solutions to, because you don't want to fault any one particular artist for finding a way to stay afloat and make their stuff, and at the same time, there's some systemic stuff that sucks that artists do have to participate in.So, like, the fact that one of the best ways to get paid from a song now is to have that song synced to a major car company or to a soda company. Some sort of ad placement, like a big one. So, in some ways, it feels like we can't be mad that all the music sounds like jingles when the only people paying for it are soda companies.

Hans: Yeah, that's true. What's been the motivation for you to remain independent throughout your career?
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‍‍Dessa: A lack of interest from major labels.. haha. No, I would say it’s twofold. I mean, if I had been 25… it's like, I want to be careful because I do take it as a point of pride, and I also just have to check myself in that I was never in a position where a huge company was like, we love what you do, we want to compensate you very well for it, and put you on great stages in front of people who will probably like you.I never had that, so I didn't have to turn it down. I did meet once with the VP of, like, a very fancy label, and my pride surged a little bit. But the way that I was greeted the first thing out of his mouth, it wasn't crass, but it had to do with the way I looked, and it didn't have to do with, like, a song that I wrote. So I just thought, I've always been, at best, ambivalent and more accurately, distressed by how much attention is paid to image…. in our culture at large, in the music industry in particular, and to women in the music industry in hyper-particular.Beauty, awesome, sex, yeah. They’re great. But to have either of those be the table stakes to participate in the first place. Like, hey, what if I'm not interested in those things? What if I want to be a musician with a different aesthetic, that doesn't leverage [those things], that's a much harder game to play.I think that my pride, but also my interest in being self-directed, like a lot of the stuff that I do, when I first explain it to someone, I like to swing big. And a lot of it, there isn't proof of concept that I present. Like I’m not like “Hey, I want to develop a symphonic concert based on brain science. That was a project that worked really well, commercially, that works. But that’s a hard pitch because what the fuck are you talking about? Do you know what I mean? That's not because people are out to get me, that's just because people don't really know what I’m talking about. They haven’t seen it yet. So it's hard for someone to throw their full weight of enthusiasm behind it.If I want to explore those ideas that aren’t guaranteed to make money, I think a risk averse funder like a major label is going to be hesitant to help. They want to know that what you're going to do now is going to work, but I like to jump lanes a lot. And I think it would be hard for me to tamp that down and heed the counsel of people telling me where to go [if I was signed to a major label].

Hans: One of the things I talked to Lazerbeak about was that he felt like the quality of his music was affected by the economic realities of the marketplace, for example having to release more music just to stay on top of people's minds, which impacts the quality of it. Do you feel like the art you put out is impacted by the economic realities of the music marketplace in some way?
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‍‍Dessa: True – I've definitely felt that pressure. I think for the most part I've tried to meet it in other ways, which is maybe a strain of perfectionism that has sometimes hamstrung me too. I've made a lot less music in total than a lot of people who've been in the game as long as I have.So maybe I set that dial a little too tight… but for the most part I've kept it pretty tight.What I enjoy about streaming and digital music is how songs are getting shorter in general. I actually like that length of songs. I happen to like short songs, but I feel like outside of the punk genre, there's a sort of an expectation usually that a pop song should be at least three minutes long.And I've actually liked the fact that that expectation, which I think was forged from at least a part, the circumstantial truth of how much music could be pressed on a vinyl. So now that we're less concerned with that, do you know what I mean? Like what's a full length? I think people are a little bit more flexible with that nowadays. Oh, it's ten songs. They're all sort of short. They're not worried about how it's going to look on my vinyl.

Hans: What about albums? How do you feel about releasing full-length albums in today's digital world? I know a lot of artists feel like the concept album is kinda done… Do you feel that way?
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‍‍Dessa: Yeah, I've also heard that. I've never made concept albums in that way, so I tend to just believe the testimony of the people who are reporting like, yo, it doesn't work. And obviously, as a user, I can feel myself advancing through a song that doesn't catch me. I do that. So I’m sympathetic to that. And at the same time, I guess that I was never particularly sanctimonious about an album as a special quantum unit of music. I remember I dated a guy who used to be an opera singer, and I had never heard the term song suite before, where they used to, in art songs, they would have like, hey, here's three songs that go together really well, or here's four. And I love that. I'm a miniaturist at heart. Like an ep, I guess. But I like those short collections. So I like the idea of, however it's presented, of a work being scaled according to its merit and intent, as opposed to the form factor of how it's presented. What do you think? Like when I think about concept albums, sometimes I think about stuff that was slightly before, like the era of concept albums as being slightly before my time.But then I do think of, like, Jean Grey, this rapper Jean Grey had this really cool album where it was like a choose your own adventure. So depending on what you chose at the end of one song, you would then advance to one of two songs on the album as you develop, like a choose your own fortune book. I don't know if that would work as well in today’s environment where all the songs end up cannibalized on a.. you might run across them on a thousand different playlists and not in the package that the artist envisioned them in.

Hans: So how much of your time do you spend making art versus managing your art and managing your brand and your business?‍

Dessa: I would say that if we go by the clock, it varies for sure. But I say right now on average it's 10% art making and 90% managing. It's a lot. What’d Lazerbeak Say?

Hans: 5% and 95%. 
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‍‍Dessa: The same way?

Hans: Yeah.
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‍‍Dessa: Yeah and in some ways, I feel like I found ways to find or insert some art into the managing part too. I admit I'm better at that now than in the past. Like I hated social media when we first started. I didn't want to do it. I was like, I'm not a photographer. Why would anyone want to go to Instagram to see what I take pictures of? I'm not good at that. I'm a musician.Now, I think, if social media is where I'm meeting people or that's where we're engaging, you know like, is there a way to turn what might otherwise be a relentless task into something artistic, something artful?

Hans: I think it's great that artists have so much control over their own careers nowadays, but that being said, what would it look like for you to be able to spend more time on your art and less managing your business.
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‍‍Dessa: Exactly, I think the idea that artists have so much control of their careers is awesome, but their career really does control their art, too. 

Hans: If streaming paid more, would that allow you to have more creative freedom in your career? 
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‍‍Dessa: I think so… it's like if streaming paid more… okay… I am parroting something that I resonate with. Which is I think there can be also, I think, a gendered way that streaming impacts artists.There is a gendered way that the decline and the disruption of the music industry due to lossless digital media technology and streaming affects women differently than men. It doesn’t affect me this way because I don't have a kid… but when I think of the guys in Doomtree, when they had babies, very often I was with them while their wives were pregnant, because I was in the van with them, but they were still on tour. And unless you really are making money, I think a lot of people who are pregnant are not trying to like hop in the van and share that. At least in the later stages of pregnancy and… in the early stages of after having had a kid, which very often falls differently.So the idea that pregnant people can still write music, record music, but tour life is tough. It's tough on a body, you know what I mean? It's not a great place, usually, schedules are weird… bad sleep… bad diet.So it affects women's careers if they want to have a family in a way that it doesn't always affect men's careers. Because if we were all making money off music that we had made and recorded   then that would be passive income that could sustain a break from music. But if the primary way that you're earning is on the road, which is true for most people, then you don't have that opportunity.

Hans: Yeah there's no HR department for the music industry… and there never has been. It’s so hard to have consistent revenue streams , and like you’re saying, so many artists have to live on the road nowadays just to sustain themselves. ‍So if you were paid more for streaming, what would that do for you?
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‍‍Dessa: So I think a lot of my life is lived kind of without a clean partition between this is personal and this is professional, and this is my artist life and this is my personal life, that sort of blurs together. And in part, like touring is a lifestyle that you don't do just professionally. It means your off hours are in Des Moines. Do you know what I mean? Your body is still on the road when you're not playing a show, it's not like you're at home after your day job at the office. And part of that I love.  I love being able to see the country. I love getting to kind of like Peter-Pan-it for a while with friends and family. I think that if I were making more money streaming, I could be more strategic about what I tour.If there was more money all around [particularly in streaming], I don’t think about how it would affect my lifestyle. I don't have super expensive tastes in the first place so I don't know if it would affect it much.But what I do think about is how it would affect my art. I would love it. Right now, there are songs on my new record that are best done with four damn voices. It's four part harmonies. It's four part four, five part vocal ranges. I can't run around with that many singers. So I'm layering it myself. So here, you do the high part. Now I'm going to do the mid part. The next chorus, I'll do the low, you do the mid, and it'll feel as if we have all.But I remember the first time when my manager (she knows my songs, she's seen a million shows, right?) For the first time, we had four voices on stage because I booked Lady Midnight, who is this great performer from Minnesota, to open for us. So I said, would you be game to sit in on three songs during my set, the ones that need a lot of voice. She was like, yeah, I got you.So the first time she came up and my manager just went, (remember she’s seeing these songs every night) and it was, like, sweet to see her turn and go during sound check: “what's that?: She just looked at me and said, “I want four voices every night.” And it made me feel good to hear my arrangements like that. And it made me so sad that the difference was apparently that big, even not just to my ear, that she, who's busy working and counting merch, turned around and went “that’s so much better than last night.”And you know, I want that every night. I would love to add more strings, I would love to tour with more players. I would love to do lights. I would love to do costumes. I would love to take risks… but that takes money. And if streaming paid more, maybe I could do that.

Hans: How do you think that we as a society value music right now?‍

Dessa: Well we're not getting a report card with any vowels on it… I’ll say that.I think, again, I'm sympathetic to it. There are things in my life that I think of as free, that in other places aren't necessarily free. I think of water, like where I rent or whatever I don't get a water bill there. So I think of that as free. I think of driving on the highway where I grew up as free. Well, that’s not the case on the East Coast with their tolls. That's not a free public service. That's a produced service. Our expectation about what is valuable is so often informed by the policies in play with our culture.Right now, when we think about how the free market works, we think that it's going to function as a meritocracy, essentially, where the cream rises to the crop and, oh, if that's the amount of musicians that can be supported, then that's what the market will bear. I'm not saying there's no truth to it, but that truth is not absolute.When you think about how much of the way that art and music is informed by specific laws who had to be made up by specific people. So, like, the fact that if you're a folk artist and I'm a folk artist and I want to cover your song, legally in the US, you can't say, no, I can just do it. And I pay you 9.5 cents every time I sell a physical copy of it or whatever it is. So when I covered Bruce Springsteen, there's a fixed rate that was congressionally determined for that. But if you are a hip hop artist and I'm a hip hop artist and I want to sample your song, that doesn't function the same way at all. People made those laws.That's not a function of the invisible hand of the market. This is not Adam Smith at work. This is people deciding how to build the world and the fact that we have legislated these rules that none of us feel in real time, right, unless you're actually paying the publisher of, you know what I mean? To do it. I think we forget that.And so, similarly, when we look at what seems to be an unregulated market, right, like how streaming services are… Most of its competitors are heavily regulated, and, yeah, we're not operating in a vacuum without law and the balance of human interest in society.

Hans: And I would argue the music market today does not resemble a free market whatsoever. Because if you're a small business owner who wants to start out either as an independent label or as an artist, the barrier to entry is so high already and because it’s dictated, by, like you're saying, by the people who write the rules. In their pursuit of a free market for themselves, I think they ruined it for everyone else. ‍So what are your priorities? What would you like to see different about the way we value music? Because obviously the value of music and the way it's reflected in the marketplace, there's a huge dissonance there. How do you think we bridge that?
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‍‍Dessa: Right, and I think this might be valuable only as a metaphor, but in some way, I do feel like we've started to think about music as this commodity. By that, I mean, of course we know that there's a difference. You like some bands, you don't like others. You think some are underrated. But before Apple priced fixed, we didn't have that before. I could pick how much I thought this song was worth. I remember then I had written this song later for this record I put out called Chime, and it ends with like a little goofy 45 second songlet. But now, all of a sudden, all the songs are equally priced. Well, I would never have sold that song for $1.25. Right, so there's pressure that the market is exerting, and I think now that all of us, we probably do value music way more, at least in how often we interact with it. We all have our phones and our headphones. It almost feels like… I value clean air, but I never expect to pay for that out of pocket. That's something that is somehow provided to me, ethereally. And I feel like right now, with music, people are like, “I value it, it’s super important to me. It makes me feel connected to other people, but I don't want to actually spend money on that… like I want that to be solved in a different way.”It’s almost like a faucet, like a drinking faucet. And I don’t know if it is the expectation that has to change or if we do just have to handle compensation in a different way. But, yeah, that's the sense that I get, too. People value it. They just don't want to pay for it.

Hans: I like your point. Music is valued socially, arguably more than it ever has been. The role that music plays in our lives is greater than it ever has been. I mean, every part of our life, from driving in the car, to hanging out with our friends, to going on social media, all of it has to do with music. Maybe it's not that we don't value music, but it's that we don't value labor and that we don't value musical labor. I mean, like you're saying, if your labor was valued more by streaming platforms, then you'd have more creative freedom.

Dessa: Right, and I think this might be valuable only as a metaphor, but in some way, I do feel like we've started to think about music as this commodity. By that, I mean, of course we know that there's a difference. You like some bands, you don't like others. You think some are underrated.But before Apple priced fixed, we didn't have that before. I could pick how much I thought this song was worth. I remember then I had written this song later for this record I put out called Chime, and it ends with like a little goofy 45 second songlet. But now, all of a sudden, all the songs are equally priced. Well, I would never have sold that song for $1.25.Right, so there's pressure that the market is exerting, and I think now that all of us, we probably do value music way more, at least in how often we interact with it. We all have our phones and our headphones. It almost feels like… I value clean air, but I never expect to pay for that out of pocket.That's something that is somehow provided to me, ethereally. And I feel like right now, with music, people are like, “I value it, it’s super important to me. It makes me feel connected to other people, but I don't want to actually spend money on that… like I want that to be solved in a different way.”It’s almost like a faucet, like a drinking faucet. And I don’t know if it is the expectation that has to change or if we do just have to handle compensation in a different way. But, yeah, that's the sense that I get, too. People value it. They just don't want to pay for it.

Hans: Just to come back to streaming revenues…. Do you make any revenue off of streaming at all?‍

Dessa: I do make streaming money. I would say I can pay for a phone bill, okay, maybe two phone bills every quarter.

Hans: So like what, $150 every quarter?
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‍‍Dessa: Yeah, something like that. And I have some good quarters too. I will also say that I felt a boost, which I'm grateful for, but it's not representative of my career, for some of the kind of income that I earn now, per quarter for a song that I recorded for the Hamilton mixtape.So I'm grateful for it, but it's also just not like I didn't do that. Do you know what I mean? Like, the reason that Hamilton is such a worldwide phenomenon, I'm lucky to have participated in, but I didn't.

Hans: And well it’s interesting, like that’s a major label track, and that’s where a majority of your streaming revenue comes from.‍

Dessa: Well not a majority, a chunk. You know, I don’t have songs that are licensed very often. I get airplay on non-com radio, like the Current or KEXP. But my lyrics are not really flexible for different marketing scenarios… my lyrics are random. It’s like “an archer went to…” but that’s the lyrics I want to write. You know so it doesn’t end up in those places that might be most compensatable.

Hans: But that’s also artistic integrity.‍

Dessa: Totally, and if I were compensated in a different way by the people who are enjoying it.. You know I had 6 million streams last year.. That’s so many people. And like I do enjoy some of these quarters where I get like $250 bucks, but that’s because of the Hamilton track that stands apart from the rest of my work. And I totally get it, it’s easy to be impacted by market forces and make music that you care about less.. And that can be rad. But the idea of feeling like what’s more important to you artistically, which is also resonating with fans, can’t be fiscally viable because listening isn’t how you make money any more, so you have to get into business with a third-party that otherwise you might not want to get into business with.

Hans: So how can we as an artistic music community start to address these issues?‍

Dessa: I wonder about groups that try to advocate for indie musicians, if there’s a way to say hey, there’s so much value in streaming, we just need to increase the rates.. They're just not high enough. The technology is great, it’s not the technology that’s the issue, it’s the economic model. These rates just aren’t quite high enough, how do we rectify that? I don’t think that’s fundamentally impossible. We set minimum prices for all sorts of areas in our economy, we subsidize corn, why can’t we do that with music? To my knowledge, we haven’t legislated any minimum rate for artists. 

Hans: No we haven’t. Well we’re running out of time, so thank you!‍

Dessa: Depressing. 

Hans: It is depressing. But I think change starts by talking about it, by having these sorts of conversations. So just thank you for taking the time.. You’re such an inspiration for so many people and we’re honored.‍

Dessa: Thanks for the conversation. Now go fix it!

Hans: That’s my plan!