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The Death of the Middle-Class Musician
It’s easier than ever to make music, and harder than ever to make a living from it
These profits trickle down to a small number of Canadian artists who fit the major-label mould—young, stylish upstarts like Calgary pop songstress Tate McRae, BC-bred Punjabi rapper Karan Aujla, and Saskatchewan country singer Colter Wall. “The carrot that’s being dangled in front of an artist is their dream,” says Kurt Dahl, a Saskatoon-based entertainment lawyer who cut his teeth drumming in One Bad Son, a rock-and-roll road band that opened for the Rolling Stones and Judas Priest in the late 2010s. One well-known indie rocker told me that his band has taken money from more unusual sources: a tech mogul flew them to play his daughter’s birthday party at a climbing gym, and a cigarette company paid them to perform at a tobacco industry event.
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