Reply-all is swallowing me whole: a call to arms for the gigging musician

Help! I’m being swallowed by an avalanche of needless reply-alls! A cascading torrent of “sound’s good’s and “right on”s have squeezed the air out of me. Endless streams of emojis and GIFs berate me from day into night into day again. Needless questions directed at anybody on the thread but me… the “gig economy” (aka freelancing) has taken the form of an out-of-control social media thread.

As a freelance musician in New York City, I often have up to 20 or more bosses within a single month: band leaders, venue “teams,” event producers, managers, clients. Most of them involve some variation of group texts, group emails, or sometimes even the dreaded group Facebook message or WhatsApp thread. All of these forms of communication were supposed to revolutionize the efficiency of our profession. Now I find myself sorting through dozens of emails and/or texts, just to find the address of a gig.

It’s hard enough to scrounge together a functioning career as a musician, but the torrent of needless info is putting me over the edge.

It’s costing me, and everybody else in my profession, money. Let me explain: Let’s say I get booked for a gig. It offers to pay X amount. That includes, let’s say, one rehearsal, as well as whatever outside preparation needed to learn the tunes. Then there are the emails. They come, sometimes, at a dizzying pace, at all hours of the day and night, interrupting my schedule for weeks before the actual gig. On top of it, 75 percent aren’t actual pertinent or relevant information to me.

I have proposed a solution of mine to numerous bandleaders. They’ve all laughed at me, yet in private admitted the problem does need a solution. My system would work something like this.

Once I’m confirmed for a particular gig, there is a certain Communication Quota, let’s say 10 emails/what-have-you’s. Most band leaders can get all this info out within 10 emails! No problem! But when everybody starts replying-all, I’m now stuck with email threads that are 20 or 30 (or more!) emails deep, making it hard (sometimes impossible) to find the band leaders’ initial set of pertinent info.

If the band leader goes over this quota, they start incurring added expense, let’s say, $1 per additional email. Nothing crazy, but just enough to give the leader impetus to be succinct and clear, and enough that if I start getting 30 emails before 9 am, I’ll have made an extra $30. Win for me.

We live in an age where ease of communication has made us incredibly lazy. Economy of words seems all but dead. I get that. But Dear Lord, we can solve this so easily. As professionals, let’s all be more courteous and respectful of our inboxes, and our free time, which we could be dedicating to learning the tunes! It really isn’t too much to ask for!