Spend an hour on TikTok, and depending on your own intricately curated algorithm, you might see a dozen singers you’ve never heard of before, creating the illusion that new music is everywhere, all the time. Social media creates virtual environments in which ‘anything is possible’, where artists can gain traction through music soundbites and the sharing of their lives on TikTok, for example. However, many of these musicians finding new listeners online are, crucially, individuals. TikTok, as ripe with opportunity as it might be for individuals, is not particularly so for bands. Even in terms of mainstream music, scour the charts, and you are hard-pressed to find any relatively recently-formed bands; only four new songs from groups made it into 2022’s Official Top 100.
There are several reasons for this. Perhaps social media, the ultimate tool of self-promotion, is best used when working alone. Aspiring solo artists can forego tricky band dynamics or even the hassle of going to a studio – as quoted in the Guardian, Ben Mortimer, co-president of Polydor Records, explains, “you could download Ableton, shut your bedroom door and get creating straight away.”
If, then, social media is not geared towards bands, it would seem they should try and do it the old-fashioned way, hoping that a record label’s talent agent is watching from a dark corner of their gigs. This, unfortunately, is where the crux of the issue can lie. While high-profile artists and mega-tours have thrived since the Covid-19 pandemic, smaller British venues are struggling to keep their doors open. In 2023 alone, 125 UK venues had to stop providing live music, with half of this number fully closing. Moreover, over 42% of grass roots music venues that closed in 2023 were for reasons cited as ‘financial issues’.
Every gig involves a collaboration between various components and people, including the venues, the promoters, artists’ teams and, of course, the artists themselves. Pair this with low revenue from streaming and the unavoidable high fees from management, which is part of the offering, and I started to wonder, how on earth can any new bands stay afloat?
Manchester-based band Hungry agreed to talk to me about their experience of the taxing financial pressure of being in a band, the hostility of social media towards group ventures, and their commitment to the craft regardless.
Hungry is a four-man band, straddling several genres including post-punk, rock and garage, who came to Manchester to study two years ago, marking a new chapter for the band. The band first formed in Cambridge in 2018, where, in frontman Jacob Peck’s words, “there’s not really a lot going on, and there’s not… a huge enthusiasm” for music in comparison to Manchester. They describe the beginnings of the band as a lot of asking people for gigs and ultimately filling slots which meant they “consistently got booked with bands we don’t sound anything like.”
“there’s not really a lot going on, and there’s not… a huge enthusiasm”
In contrast, the band have blossomed in their own right the last two years, and swiftly crept up the lineup sheet, headlining a sold-out Aatma in Northern Quarter in December 2022, only three months into arriving in Manchester, an event they see as key in building their reputation on the Manchester scene. Almost two years later, they have headlined Fuel, Castle Hotel, Disorder and played at countless other Manchester venues. As Stan Rankin, drummer, puts it, “we now take it for granted that we’ll get messages”, a big contrast to the need to send many emails to promoters when starting out.
It serves as an encouragement to new bands struggling with booking gigs, but also a sobering warning – getting to this point has been almost seven years in the making. As Stan points out, they had the advantage of “five years’ worth of songs…although some were pretty bad…we also had two years working relationship as the four of us.” Jas Malig, bassist, admits that their newfound success “isn’t just a Manchester thing…it coincided with us improving as a band and becoming more comfortable live.” Jacob, Jas and Kit Thomas, guitarist, all started studying at BIMM Music Institute, to which Kit attributes part of their growth, as not only did it help them connect to other musicians, they found their current management because “he used to work at BIMM, and he was putting on a showcase event.”
But how sustainable is the band? Maintaining hours of practice each weekend has already triggered certain difficult decisions; Kit tells me “there was talk about me getting trains up to do practice every other weekend” before he decided to go to Manchester. Stan, too, remembers a moment during his gap year when he questioned how much longer he could financially sustain the band. The band pay by the hour for practice, recording fees, plus travel costs to the studio with all their equipment, and as well as the financial commitment, they spend nine hours weekly on practice including travel, with an added three or four hours on branding.
“I was working full-time at the pub, and I was gonna quit. I had it in my head that I wasn’t going to be able to…do all the other things I wanted to do.” The lack of financial stability when running a young band is a very real issue. I ask them how they fund themselves, and at first there is a moment of silence, revealing something about the unpredictability of self-funding each next step. Three rely on student loans and work when they can find it to fund both studying and the band, while Jas, working and not studying, says “I have to make the money I’m going to spend.”
I ask what would happen if they did run out of money. Jacob admits that “doing music is a luxury, it’s not a mandatory thing…but once you do something like this for long enough it becomes such a huge part of your life it doesn’t feel like a luxury. There’s always a way to find that £12 you need to go to practice.” Hungry have a band pot they all contribute to, into which they reinvest all the money they make from gigs, and on average, they break even. Kit also tells me they “have dealt with some people who are just money-motivated,” a culture that breeds profit for higher-ups at the expense of artists. Admittedly, while all four of the band are state-educated, and in Stan’s words are “at the lower end of financial security when it comes to being able to put money into music, [they] are all four still in a very good situation compared to a lot of people,” with parents and (even if limited) savings they could access if they really needed to, a useful advantage often taken for granted in creative fields.
This raises bigger questions about who can access the British music industry, a field historically celebrated for its working-class icons such as Adele, Oasis and the Beatles. This year, English Teacher, originally from Leeds, were the first band not from London to win the Mercury Prize in 10 years. Rent prices are higher than ever before, and real disposable income has been falling consistently since the late 2010s, making music side-hustles almost impossible without extreme hard work or familial aid and connections. Even for those who decide to pursue music alongside a full time job, a principal problem that arises is the incompatibility of hospitality work and the music industry, with the key workload of both sectors falling on weekends. In addition, the scheduling and commitment required by employers does not leave space for the spontaneity of valuable opportunities such as another band pulling out last minute.
Considering this, social media once more rears its head as a seemingly more accessible route to success. However, as Jacob points out, “with democratization of music, there’s people who just blow up from their bedrooms…but the internet is still based on capitalism.” It is easy to forget when scrolling that we do not have complete agency in what we are shown – rather, social media has a real estate system much like the physical world, where money buys engagement. I asked Hungry how they felt about it as a creative tool, in terms of the self-promotion required on social media, where people are desperate for authenticity. Jacob argues that “if you do pop music, it is about you as a person…if you do something that’s more technical…you probably don’t have to do as much indulgence in your own personality.”
It is a tightrope that Hungry seem to walk with their own online presence, striking a balance between their long Instagram captions written from the band as an entity and the videos they post from behind the scenes on TikTok. I point out that also, ultimately, social media can feel vulnerable and embarrassing, and Jacob says that this is the very reason they make sure they do everything they do on social media “in a silly way…we’re accepting the fact this is stupid.” He talks too about the difficulty of using social media while maintaining the band’s image as that, a band, resistant to falling into the common divergence of the band and its one key personality, such as a Matty Healy or a Liam Gallagher.
Despite the difficulties they face on social media and keeping the band bank account in the black, Hungry maintain that giving up was never really an option. As drummer Stan puts it, “it’s like what they say about gambling. Every gambler stops before their biggest win.” They are grateful too for the beacons of community support for new bands within the bleak landscape of grass roots music venues struggling to stay afloat, such as ‘The Fiver’ in Cambridge which gives new bands their first gig experiences, supported by Arts Council England, or smaller community venues such as Withington Public Hall Institute in Manchester.
Ultimately, the revival of band culture and grass roots music will not happen by itself. It will take an effort not only from enthusiastic artists like Hungry, wanting to persevere because they love it that much, but also continued funding from the government for arts opportunities, and arguably more education for people of all classes on how to access this kind of support.
Hungry are playing at Band on the Wall on 21st November and have an EP coming out in December called ‘Are you the best yet?’, available on Spotify.
https://botw.ticketline.co.uk/order/tickets/13374485/un-convention-manchester-2024-live-phoebe-green-hungry-and-olivesque-manchester-band-on-the-wall-2024-11-21-19-00-00
