For the past five years, Pete Bernhard has been touring with his punk-influenced string band The Devil Makes Three, and has learned many of these lessons the hard way. He spoke with Is Greater Than about what he wished he had known before heading out on the road the very first time.

What were some of your misconceptions about what touring would be like?  How does it differ from what you envisioned?

Touring turned out to be way more work than I anticipated and I had to learn to take care of myself in order to finish a tour and not feel like a walking corpse. I think movies like “Almost Famous” and other band movies have led people to believe that between partying in the limo and doing tons of coke you can always somehow find time to get laid by some a beautiful stranger and that’s what playing music is all about “man”. That has not been my experience but then again I may just be in the wrong band. If you’re going to be in a DIY situation you might as well put those kinds of things out of your mind for a while. I never thought touring would be easy but it is hard in ways I never thought it would be.

You can’t expect people to do everything for you. For example, the promotion ball often gets dropped. To be a touring musician with no backing you need to be a lot of things: a booking agent, a business person, promoter and a mediator all while performing and writing songs.

What tricks have you found to ensure band harmony while on the road?

The biggest and most important lesson lest we all end up like Metallica and get a group therapist (I’ll die first) is to communicate with your bandmates. If you can’t talk to them and you secretly hate them, trust me–its no secret in a cargo van. There are no secrets in such close quarters and the more you can be honest with everyone the longer you will last and the more fun you will have.

What are four things you wish somebody had told you before you went out on tour? What did you have to learn the hard way?

The first thing I wish I had known is that you don’t need to play clubs when no one knows who you are yet. Play house shows and have fun. Empty clubs kill band morale and just generally slowly suck the life from your soul. Even a bad house show is still just a party.

I wish someone had told me to listen to criticism and ask for some help along the way. Trying to do everything your self is a form of torture and sadly I didn’t know everything it turns out. Come to think of it I did hear this advice along the way and I didn’t listen, so there you have it.

I also could have used some advice about being honest concerning what you want out of the band or project. People usually have goals or limitations and the sooner you know this the easier it is for everyone. If the drummer wants to be a rock star but the lead singer wants to work at the comic book shop and live in his moms basement then maybe its not going to work out?

Last but not least, it is worth spending money to keep yourself sane. Always cutting corners and sleeping on the ground will catch up with you quick and end your tours before you finish the all the dates.

Truth be told, all of this was learned “the hard way”. We did everything wrong before learning to do it right and the main ingredient to making it work is not giving up.

What are the most useful/important things a band heading out on the road would need?

Money! Prepare to not make any and you will be happy if you do. On your first tour you will be lucky to make gas money and eat dry ramen noodles. Everyone in the DIY community seems to hate the mention of money but it really can be quite useful in a pinch.

Your van breaks down in bumfuck nowhere. How should you have planned  for this possibility and what’s the first thing you do?

This is where you can get out of the car and start screaming, crying and throwing around instruments and kicking inanimate objects to really show the world how hard your life is! I have tried this method and  seen others use it the outcome is always the same. It won’t change anything, everyone in attendance thinks you’re an asshole and you’re still stuck on the side of the road. God is not torturing you–god doesn’t care about you that much. Breaking down is just part of touring and having a reliable vehicle and a road side assistance plan (get AAA) to fall back on is all you can really hope for. Again skimping on your van is like moving into a cardboard box because it’s cheaper than your apartment. You have to live in the thing sometimes, so why not save up a bit more cash?

Any other bits of hard-earned wisdom?

The only other thing I can think to say to aspiring musicians is: don’t be a dick and people will like you more. It sounds so simple and yet some people never figure it out. If you show up when you are supposed to and treat the people putting on the show and doing the sound with respect they will want you back. People in the business are used to being treated like shit and will bark at you because the last bunch who came through may have made them sort through all the M&Ms so they could have only the green ones. If you don’t act that way. it’s better for everyone.

All the cliches and misconceptions of online articles about the new music business model are in evidence in this piece—there’s no business model! He’s just like us (meaning, a former coder with what is most likely a healthy savings account, unlike most musicians, who eke out a living working minimum-wage customer service jobs in-between tours.) Label inherently means major label! Labels are dead! Don’t pay attention to those old systems that have worked for decades—touring, um, working night and day to support your passion—the future of music is in, um, sidebar widgets! A badly managed segment of an outdated business model (that’s the major label music business) is going under, so therefore it’s all bullshit! Right! Right?

This is coming from the same people, time and again, who think there is a viable business in making useless apps that zombie-bite your Facebook friends. I wouldn’t put these people in a management position at the local 7-11, much less expect them to plot the next stage of the faltering music business. Still, these arguments are pervasive, because they are inherently optimistic and appeal to the dimwitted libertarianism that drives the Web 2.0 economy and discourse—meaning, the have no basis in reality.

Why Internet-driven success is an unsustainable business model for musicians:

1. Novelty

The Internet lives and breathes novelty. “Internet Famous” is as much a term of derision as respect, referring to what Gawker has come to describe has “fameballs”—here today, gone later today. It’s a dodgy proposition for anyone trying to create a sustainable career to court the Internet hype cycle. Musicians should offer themselves to the capricious god of Internet fame hesitantly, lest they become the next Tay Zonday or Ok-Go—and they will, because everything thrown into the meme-grinder are merely fads. You’re not building a career, you’re turning out Pet Rocks 2.0.

2. The Web 2.0 Community (and Economy) Has No Respect for Musicians, Artists, or Skilled Laborers

The craft of music has no inherent value in the Web 2.0 community, just as the craft of writing, reporting, recording, or any other creative skill that lies outside of the realm of wrangling PHP/SQL tables is dismissed as irrelevant. Any discussion of the music industry on tech-centric blogs like TechCrunch or Metafilter quickly expose the seedy underbelly of the “all content should be free” argument: the bloggerati have absolutely no respect for content creators, see any non-code or design-related content creation business as being an over-glorified, overpaid hobby, and have no appreciation of the time or labor that go into creation of said “content”. Ironically, if one suggests that web coders or video game designers or Second Life developers similarly donate their content to the greater good, the same circles will lose their shit.

3. There is No Art, No Skill, Only “Content”

The reduction of artistic production and highly skilled professional creative production to the bloodless term “content”, an empty banner whose marketing-language vapidity encompasses everything from music and literature to advertising copy, only underscores this absolute lack of respect for creative production.

4. It’s an Impossibly Small Sample Group

The simple fact of the matter is that the people so often fueling debate constitute an impossibly small sample group of modern culture. If your favorite massive blog—Techcrunch, Gawker, BoingBoing—was a network TV show, it would be cancelled in a week. Your garden variety music lover, who attends shows and loves new music, is still getting turned on to music the same way they always have—from friends. They’re hearing music at parties, at work, on their friends’ Myspace and iLike profiles. Some are getting it from mp3 blogs—recommended to them, no doubt, by their one tech-savvy friend.

Most of these people have never heard of Brooklyn Vegan or Techcrunch or Metafilter or Last.fm, and could care less about the debates on the Internets about these issues. Mostly, they just like free music, which most people have been getting for decades primarily from friends in some shape or form—mix tapes, dubbed tapes, burned CD’s, mp3 trading parties. These folks still are the majority—they might have an iLike app on their Facebook profile, tried Pandora a few times, but the people holding forth in the Internet echo chamber are largely tech industry professionals and would-be tech professionals—engineering school students, laid-off journalists boning up on the new media, wannabe pro bloggers, and the like. Not only does this create an incredibly small pool of perspectives, but the aggregate musical taste of this pool borders on atrocious. Witness the Digg community’s inexplicable obsession with the music and actions of Trent Reznor, a washed-up rock star 18 years past his creative prime. I mean, was anyone looking to Roger Waters in 1986 for new ideas about music distribution? Are we really going to let a bunch of aging goths dominate the debate of where music is going?

5.Novelty 2.0

What is successful once online is old hat the second. Auctioning custom songs on Ebay is clever the first time, played the second. When Radiohead told its fans to pay what they want, there was a lot of noise. When Saul Williams did the same a few months later, no one gave a shit. It doesn’t bode well for the sustainability of this brave new world of musical progress when the person who has succeeded the most has done so selling songs about Flickr and coding to geeks.

6. The Infrastructure

In the Ars-Technica article, Coulton says “There are all sorts of services that do services like a label. CDBaby warehouses my CDs and they send it out when people order it, and they keep $4 a disc.” This is ridiculous. I use CDBaby for the release by my old band Mule Train, and they provide a great service. They do three things that are hard for unsigned musicians to do, and do it well: they make selling online via credit card easy, they fulfill orders, and they use their leverage to get unsigned bands on mp3 services like iTunes and Rhapsody.

Here’s a list of things that they don’t do: they don’t offer tour support, they don’t write or send out press releases, they don’t pitch coverage to newspapers, magazines, and blogs. They don’t get your music in brick and mortar stores. They don’t get your music on radio, they don’t redundantly post your promotional content on the 1,001 music-related social networking sites out there. They don’t print posters and send them out to venues, they don’t call promoters and booking agents to make sure that the clubs your band is playing at is actively promoting the show—flyering around town, running advertisements, etc. They don’t submit your band to summer festival bookers for consideration. They don’t loan bands $500 to get a new transmission when the van breaks down in the snow in Waukegan.

Sure, there are freelance services that offer these services—but rare is the band that can afford to fund this sort of infrastructure.

The thing is, the infrastructure as it exists is a necessary reality for 99% of the artists out there. Playing geek-friendly venues in SF and corporate events doesn’t mean shit to the established nationwide network that has developed through hard work over decades. Playing a Wired meet-‘n’-greet in the Sunset doesn’t mean a damn thing to the booking agent at the Exit/In in Nashville or the Black Cat in DC. The people who want to tear down the infrastructure don’t understand the first thing about the infrastructure. They’re the music equivalents of vein-bulging late-night pundits who rail on big government without any attention to the fact that government is big and complex, because governing 305 million people is a big and complex job. Of course, this is the same community that exalted phantasmagorical gnome and pretend-politian Ron Paul to national attention.

An infrastructure already exists—true, an unwieldy infrastructure that will change by necessity in years to come. This infrastructure is decades in the making, however, and for every inefficient, dated element that weighs it down, there are five systems that still work because they’re proven to work.

7. Albini’s Essay is 15 Years Old

Many of the things Steve Albini says in his seminal essay “Some of Your Friends May Already Be This Fucked” are still relevant. Indeed, the contract most major label bands are signed into consign them to mountains of debt even if they sell millions. The thing is, this essay is 15 years old, and even though it is constantly cited by the “content should be free” crowd, it is outdated and doesn’t really address the economic concerns of 90% of non-major-label artists working in 2008. It appears in the Ars Technica piece, as it does about every six months when some blogger who doesn’t have the slightest idea of who Albini is stumbles across it on StumbleUpon and parades it online as if it was new information. “Some of Your Friends…” is the “United Airlines Declares Bankruptcy” of the music business, apparently.

When Albini wrote the essay, independent labels that split profits 50/50 with artists were an aberration that sold albums in the thousands, not tens or hundreds of thousands. Indie labels weren’t a viable career choice, as they have come to be with their emergence in recent years. The success of an Arcade Fire or Shins or Neko Case—selling in the tens or hundreds of thousands — on indies like Merge, Sub Pop or Anti/Epitaph was unthinkable. The essay was written before the Internet—before unsigned artists could tour the nation and make a decent living selling self-pressed CD’s out of their van. It was also written long before gas was $4.50 a gallon. The essay is an interesting historical document, worth forwarding to a friend if they’re one of the rare .5% out there considering signing to a major. But other than that, it’s merely a well-argued historical document.

If this piece gets picked up on one of the news aggregators, I expect a line of fulminating commenters to arrive, and I can guarantee they’ll all be talking out of their ass. The guy who claims to have once been in a “successful touring indie band” (read: went on a five-city tour once or twice) will show up and drop his sage knowledge. Someone will point to the sputtering ad-supported RCRD LBL (I don’t know a single person who uses it—why would you when there’s the far more intuitive, simple, and Flash-free Hype Machine) or now the DOA Myspace Music (Imeem was already there, and no one cares.) Someone else might pull out Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes’ bullshit essay about how awesome it is for musicians to subsidize themselves by turning their songs into ad jingles, and how people who believe music should be something more than a way to sell cell phones are relics. I’ll be attacked as a pro RIAA reactionary who is fearful of the Internet or living in the past, which couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Whatever. If a single person with any real experience in the music business shows up to defend the Ars Technica piece—or this general line of thought—I will be absolutely shocked.

Instead, this is a realist perspective, from someone with admittedly limited, but actual, experience around this stuff. I know actual established musicians and bands and labels, who make a (paltry) living doing what they do. Sure, these musicians have come to enjoy a much larger audience through the democratizing blah blah blah of the Internet, but that doesn’t mean a goddamn thing when gas keeps on going up every year, all while they sell less and less CD’s at shows to increasingly larger crowds for decreasing ticket prices (since the concert venue market is in an economy-driven slump.)

I don’t know how the hell the Web 2.0-erati expect to make money with Facebook widgets, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out, right? Let’s make a deal Web 2.0-ers: stop telling musicians how to make a living, and we won’t tell you that your business model is patently absurd and doomed to fail when we’re working among you during the midnight shift at 7-11. No one has any real answers about what is going to happen to the music business or musicians, least of all you.