When I was a much younger woman, I remember when the animated-only band Gorillaz went on tour and thinking something along the lines of, “Literally, how?” Maybe it was being a broke-ish college student at the time and the haze of waiting tables at a mall Italian restaurant. But paying a concert ticket price for the experience of essentially seeing a Pixar film on a bigger stage? I didn’t get it. Many years later, I find myself calling back to those days and being equally perplexed by the idea of fandom for AI “artists.”
Okay, so maybe they’ve trashed the occasional hotel room — who among us hasn’t been there? But I, for one, would choose the experience of human music and human performance any day, and my very human, in-real-life conversation with Open Mike Eagle made me double down on that. We got a chance to catch up during his first-ever sold-out, headlining show in Toronto, which was an absolute dream to see live, middle-aged back pain and all.
Open Mike Eagle: My name is Open Mike Eagle. I'm a doer of many things — music, writing, YouTubing, podcasting. Basically, I'll do anything creative somebody will pay me for.
AZW: As an artist doing all those things, are they working for you?
OME: I would say yes, all of those things are part of the game. Increasingly, as a surviving independent artist, you have to wear many hats and figure out many ways to make income streams happen — especially as music revenue gets lower and lower. Diversification is important now.
AZW: Tell me a little bit about the economics of it.
OME: As music has gone almost completely digital, we now live in an economy where most musicians are counting fractions of a penny from streaming services, compared to ten dollars a unit for a CD — and upwards of that for vinyl. Vinyl is still a healthy product. CDs are sort of waxing and waning. But for the most part, people consume music digitally and pay ten dollars a month for it, and that ten dollars gets split up by the streaming service among a bunch of artists. Most of the big artists get most of the money. So for independent artists, as that trajectory continues, we can count on income from music less and less, and we've got to figure out other ways to make it happen.
AZW: How has touring changed over the years?
OME: I did my first tour in 2009 and put out my first album in 2010. I've been through a lot of different phases. I started out opening for more established underground rap acts, then went through a long phase of booking my own tours as an independent act without a booking agent — mostly leaning on underground rap-loving people, many of them rappers themselves throughout the country who had access to venues. I booked tours like that for years. Eventually, when I got signed to a better independent record deal, I was able to get a legitimate booking agent at a well-known agency, which increased the capacity for what I was able to do touring-wise. My headlining tours started being more substantial and standardized, and I got access to better venues and better promotion.
I've also done a lot of opening for really big acts, both in and outside of hip hop. Opening for bands like Future Islands and Phantogram and AJJ has been really helpful — it exposes my stuff to different audiences, especially bands with eccentric audiences, people who come with open hearts, ready to hear whatever's happening before the headliner. All of that has been part of touring stew. At this point, most of my tours are either headline tours through my agent or tours where I'm opening for bigger acts, whether in rap or other genres.
AZW: This show is a headlining show here in Toronto, and it sold out. Talk about your audience — you seem to have a very loyal fan base.
OME: I would agree with that, with the caveat that since I've been doing this as long as I have, and my music tends to appeal to a slightly older fan base than a lot of hip hop, that loyalty also means there comes a point where many people in my fan base stop wanting to come outside. Luckily, a crop of new listeners comes along every now and then, and that helps things stay happening.
AZW: What about AI? It's a big topic. What comes to mind first?
OME: It really does depend on who I'm talking to, because there is a conversation within music about AI that's very different from how it's discussed societally. On our side, there are active forces within the corporate part of the music industry that very much want to use AI to basically replace musicians — for all the reasons that capitalism would want to do that. It just costs less to mass produce a product, and they don't have to deal with all the complications that come with human artists.
The interesting thing is that when it comes to tech, music is often the canary in the coal mine — we're usually on the front lines of the war that's going to be coming for everybody else. We saw it happen with downloading, with how physical product gave way to streaming. We then saw the same thing happen to journalism — print magazines and all those things slowly lost value as everything went digital. We were on the front lines of that one, and we definitely lost. So maybe people should pay attention this time.
AZW: You mentioned critical thinking when it comes to AI and advertising. Say more about that.
OME: There's so much money in the endeavor of tricking people, because our education system does not produce people who have the baseline critical thinking skills to see that stuff and call it out. I don't mean that dismissively — I think it's a product of a system that's in place. Our education system creates consumers, and consumers don't usually ask questions about when they're being advertised to. And there's an increased stealth element to it these days, because advertising doesn't always look like advertising anymore.
You used to watch television, see a commercial, and know it was a commercial. There are some components of social media where sponsored content has to be labeled, but there's obviously a level of engagement where a company can hire an influencer to say positive things about a product and not have to divulge that. It's intentionally tricking people, and in the environment we exist in, that's an easy trick to pull.
AZW: Community seems to have changed a lot for independent artists too.
OME: Community for me now is less localized, and I don't like that — but that's how it is. I'm having to connect with people I consider community who live all over the place. We get together and do shows, but a lot of the communication is happening over the internet, in group chats, or on Discord. I would like it to be more local than it is. I feel like community is most effective when it's local, but right now I'm having to find it across distance.
My history of community is really tied to place. In Chicago, the hip hop community met at Promontory Point, where there was a park district breakdancing class — really, it was where all the hip hop heads on the south side would meet, break dance, rap, share graffiti books, and generally build community. In LA, Project Blowed was an open mic every Thursday for years and years, and it was where the LA underground rap community gathered every week. I was also part of a greater LA music community at a place called the Low End Theory — a club night that ran for years, rooted in hip hop but also instrumental music, dance music, dubstep. The byproduct was a flourishing creative community that met there like a hub.
All of those places have gone away, and I think that's been a big contributing factor to the dispersal I'm talking about. Now we've got to connect across distance until the next hub comes around.
AZW: What are the biggest gaps between what the industry should do for independent artists and what it actually does?
OME: The biggest gap is something that looks and feels like a union — a guild, shared best practices, some way where our value can be ratified internally so that when corporations engage with us, they have to do it more on our terms. Right now we're all just independent mercenaries taking what we can get.
My experience in television gave me a lot of insight into how valuable something like the Writers Guild could be. Even though the creative work itself is often individualized, when you're in a guild, you have so much more power to define at least the floor of the experience, if not the ceiling. That's such a huge difference from what we have now, because we're all out here fighting individual battles.
AZW: Do you see it turning around?
OME: I think class consciousness is happening very slowly in our society, and I think that's where it leads. Independent musicians are going to have more incentive to move with that sort of class consciousness and help educate other people about it, because it can really mean life and death for us.
On a scale of one to ten — one being "the world is going to end," ten being "it's going to change any day now" — I make time to think about it, not only because I have a child and it's important for me to understand the world we're living in, but also because it informs my work. I'm not interested in making work that doesn't include some commentary on society, some reflection of my feelings about how things are going.
I used to be a more optimistic person. I'm not a pessimist now, but I am a cynic. I believe in the potential for all of us to get right individually — most people want things to be better. But the cynic in me recognizes the power of what we're up against: corporate power, hegemony, messaging, and manipulation are at an all-time high, operating on a scale that's hard to compete with as well-meaning individuals. As guilds, though, we're better equipped to deal with it than we are as individual mercenaries fighting for scraps. So I see conditions making those conversations and organizations feel more possible — maybe a 6 or 7. But knowing what we're up against and our limited weapons until we organize brings me back down to a 4 or 5.
AZW: Is that dispersal of power part of the design?
OME: One hundred percent. That is late-stage capitalism defined — a bunch of people selling ourselves as labor to each other, and being so busy doing that that we're not thinking about the conditions that put us in this situation: who has all the resources and why we don't.
AZW: What's the easiest place to start for an independent artist who doesn't want to just throw up their hands?
OME: Where my mind goes is that idea of place. There's a low bar of entry to establish a place. If you're a rapper and you want to do stuff with other rappers, all you need is a microphone, beats, and a room — and it can grow from there. It can start with five people, end at fifty, maybe five thousand at some point. Building locally, based on shared interests and common goals in physical spaces — I think that's the first step.