We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Peter Stoltzman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Peter below.
Peter, appreciate you joining us today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?
I make a full-time living from music, but that includes a LOT of jobs. Currently I teach at both Colorado State University and University of Denver, teach privately, run a nonprofit (Colorado Music Bridge), play gigs, and teach at summer workshops. I’ve been through many iterations of a music career, from moving to NYC and touring all over the world and making Hip Hop tracks for Warner Bros. in my twenties, to doing a doctoral degree and full-time college teaching in my thirties, to now in my forties starting a nonprofit organization and continuing to perform, record, and teach.
The thing that I, along with many musicians like me, struggle with most is creating financial sustainability–thriving rather than surviving. Bottom line, of course, is simply a cost-of-living versus income game…but the pathway to that is fraught with many pitfalls and hurdles. What I see as the emergent paradigm is the savvy integration of modern online marketing with artist development, audience engagement, and product sales. This is the way some musicians are thriving now…but it takes a major investment of resources (expertise, time, and money) to make it happen effectively. And most of us are already filling our daily schedules to the brim in order to survive, so it becomes very difficult to both access and deploy those resources in order to market musical products and services. I know it is possible, and it is my aspiration right now to figure it out so that more and more musicians, including myself, can thrive.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I was born into a musical family, and grew up loving Jazz, R&B, and basically anything with a great melody, harmony, and rhythm. I made a million connections at Berklee College of Music, and moved to NYC in my early twenties with a band called Kudu. While I was working with a diverse array of musicians and bands, I was also recording my own original music–that is a dynamic that persists to this day. Original music is really what lights my fire, and I have always valued being an independent musician. I’ve done a ton of cool things, including play with some of my idols, tour around the world many times, run programs and teach thousands of students…but if you ask me what am I most proud of, the answer is my family. I have worked just as hard to maintain a great relationship with my family and to be a supportive and active husband and father, as I have at being a great musician or teacher. My brand is “Inspired, Joyful, Piano, Music.” I’m striving in everything I do to offer something meaningful to my audience and students, and to enthusiastically and authentically convey the joy of music. You can engage with me on Facebook, Instagram, and my website: www.peterjohnstoltzman.com. I am also likely going to start a Patreon community this summer, in order to engage more directly with my supporters, and to have a centralized way of building financial sustainability by sharing my products, teaching, and collaborative projects.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
In my view, capitalism is not an optimal economic system for creative ecosystems. At the core, music and all the arts are not here to have winners and losers, or to have a “working class” that is utilized (i.e. exploited) by a ruling class. However, in spite of the democratizing force of the internet, capitalism basically ensures that in every field there are haves and have nots. And while that may catalyze a fair amount of inspiring angsty creativity, it also makes it extremely difficult for most working musicians to thrive long term. With all that said, I believe that society can support the arts in many ways–obviously, go to shows, buy products, listen to music, engage with artists to acknowledge and boost them. But also, if you have great marketing skills, or videography skills, or perhaps if you own a nice property or have significant disposable income–consider how you can offer your resources to the artists you value! I think public and private organizations could help facilitate cross-disciplinary networking and incentivize collaboration with funding opportunities on a year-round basis. And venue owners and booking agents could work with savvy 21st century online marketing pros to help take the burden off performers to be filling seats. That is a two-way street of course–and again, it all comes back to integrating excellent marketing with the arts–we need click funnels, seo help, targeted ads, and content creation help. There is so much money to be made from musical products and performances and more…we just need to share resources of expertise and money, and share the revenue along with the risk. If venues and agents worked more cooperatively with artists rather than using them as commodities (again, capitalism…), there is so much more thriving that could be happening!
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
I think there are two common misconceptions about musicians/artists that it helps to shift: 1) “That’s so cool, you’re making it as a musician!” does not mean that a musician has a solid safety net of savings or property ownership or retirement or medical benefits. Just recently, multiple jazz legends have resorted to GoFundMe campaigns to pay medical expenses or to avoid losing homes in their old age. If you’ve ever gone to a club and paid a cover charge for music, the club is likely taking a significant cut of that, while also taking in food and beverage revenue. All the musician has at the end of the night is that cut of ticket sales or a paltry guarantee–so tip musicians, and buy their music and merch!
2) “If it’s so hard to be a musician, why don’t you just get a real job?” might seem like an obvious and perfectly respectful question, but it’s not that simple. Music gets in your cells, in your brain and in your heart, and for many of us it is not something we can just make a dry economic calculation about to determine whether it’s worth it. That said, your co-worker at Natural Grocers, or Starbucks, or Home Depot, or Amazon, or Google, or Bank of America, might just be a musician who is holding down a “real job”. If that is the case, just understand that if we didn’t have the brutal, dehumanizing, deregulated version of capitalism that we do, that co-worker would probably be an incredible musician and a happier human.
Perhaps some form of UBI will help creatives thrive more in the future…but for now, it’s important to be aware that most musicians are middle to working class, and have almost no wiggle room for financial disaster. So again, go to shows, tip, and buy music and merch!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.peterjohnstoltzman.com
- Instagram: @_peterjohnstoltzmanmusic_
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peterjohnstoltzman
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterjohnstoltzman/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/peterjohnstoltzman