Catching Up With Murray Foster…

I am so sorry I didn’t see this brilliant interview with Murray Foster from Great Big Sea and other artistic Canadians in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail about the challenges that artists and musicians face in trying to make a sustainable living pursuing their creative passions.

Despite many artists and musicians efforts, talents and creativity in their chosen field they don’t make a lot of money. As a consequence they have been forced to diversify their occupation in order to make a living. The article highlights the realities for many and provides some advice and resources to those pursuing careers.

While the emphasis on this article is on those in creative endeavours to provide for their financial future, the comments also bring home to me the need for consumers, and in particular music and books to listen to and buy legal content from authorised sources where the profits go to the creators if we want to continue to have those products available to us in the future.

I have copied some of the highlights of the comments Murray made here only (due to copyright) and circulated the full article on my Google plus page.

“Artists leverage rock-star creativity to pay for retirement” by Josh O’Kane, published in The Globe and Mail on the 2 March 2016 (no copyright infringement intended). 

When Great Big Sea went on hiatus a couple of years back, Murray Foster was faced, he says, with “putting together another jigsaw puzzle of income.” After a dozen years with the band, he began looking for ways to put his talents to work. But he was resourceful.

The Moxy Früvous co-founder and Great Big Sea bassist began teaching music, most recently at Seneca College; he wrote, directed and produced the film The Cocksure Lads; and he has begun working both with a not-for-profit and his own startup.

Amid all those gigs, what is his retirement plan? His house, half of which he already rents to tenants.

“I think my retirement plan is going to be me moving out of Toronto and renting both units in this house,” says Mr. Foster, 48.

Artists are used to sacrifice, and making do in a big city is rarely an easy game in the world of precarious income. But they’re also inherently creative – and can leverage that skill for financial stability, both now and for retirement…

Mr. Foster didn’t even expect music to be his career. He was ready to give up on the dream in the early nineties when Moxy Früvous took off. They played for a decade, touring and making records, earning enough money to survive. Then, as they closed up shop, they recorded an ad for an American airline that changed their lives, at least a little: It gave the members each enough money to make a down payment on a house.

“Without that one ad, it wouldn’t have been possible, I don’t think,” Mr. Foster says. “Those were the kinds of margins we were dealing with.”

Joining Great Big Sea soon after gave him another 12 years of putting off a “real grown-up job,” he says. As that came to a close, he decided to make a movie about the Cocksure Lads, a parody British Invasion band he invented with Früvous bandmate Mike Ford.

Making the film was a four-year endurance race, he says. (And it presented unexpected stumbling blocks, too: When sexual assault allegations were levelled against his former Früvous bandmate Jian Ghomeshi in 2014, he found himself unable to work as he processed the news.)

“I went into it for artistic reasons, but I came out of it with an amazing entrepreneurial skillset, in terms of leading a team, doing financials, business plans, and how to approach investors,” he says….

Keeping his income diverse is now second nature for Mr. Foster. “As traditional careers disintegrate, and people can’t rely on one job for life, more and more people are finding that, at mid-life, they’re suddenly without work, without an idea of what to do next,” he says.

“The advantage that I think artists have is that we don’t freak out in that situation, because we’ve always been in that situation. … Every musician is a hustler, and every musician is an entrepreneur now.”