It's weird that now is the time that I'm seeing arguments for artists saying they are entitled to earning a living in the music industry bc like, where?

Businesses in the music industry are currently riding out their covid grants and gearing up for a long winter. But y'all are acting like its going to bounce back and we'll be touring once the clock ticks 2021.

If this does happen, there will be so many venues/agents/promoters that have lost their jobs that touring will be more competitive than its ever been. You will all be participating in a zero-sum game where one artist's success tangibly and directly equals an other's lack of.

This will inevitably lead to less touring/booking for acts who can't compete, and artists will have to look for another means to perform and promote their work. And this is how DIY exists for a careerist musician. As a sort of AAA league for building a base to leap from.

And this is how DIY was treated by a lot of people since like 2013. For that reason, I don't expect people to have a particularly great taste in their mouth for the potential of the DIY to be subversive vessel for communism and mutual aid.

However, covid has created a rather large opportunity for DIY to start winning again, at least for a short period. While they are hibernating, scenes of artists and community members ARE meeting and scheming about how to build infrastructure in a way that has lasting power.

We want to form communities that are explicitly anti-capitalist, and imaginative, and uplifting, and subversive. We want to think up ways of agitating with colonization and intellectual property, and set up a new base for how we create affinity.

And while I understand that we've always been losing and failing to produce a desirable alternative in the past, most DIY arguments to me feel like people saying "I'm willing to sell this right the fuck out." Im willing to think of this as us thinking of DIY as different animals.

But post-ghost ship fire scenes across the country lost the infrastructure that acted as pillars to their communities. We were duped into thinking there were careers in selling out our scenes to major promo companies under new names posing as grassroots.

But that shit didn't exist, was competitive as fuck, and close to completely unsustainable. So we have a new opportunity here. Anti-capitalist DIY is not about unpaid labor. Quite the opposite.