Should musicians be making the most noise about the recession?

As the credit crunch bites, rock stars are complaining the loudest about losses on album sales. But when the same artists earn a fortune from touring I start to lose sympathy
Macca's down to his last £440m. Elton's out of pocket to the tune of a cool £60m. Poor Robbie's going to have to scrape by on a paltry eighty big ones from now on. Last week's Sunday Times Rich List might have had me weeping into my gruel for the sorry lots of credit crunch-hit rock stars, were it not for the fact that I would hardly notice there was a recession except for their whining about it.Over the past few months I've gritted my teeth as Robert Smith complained about the detrimental effects of downloading and the economic downturn on his income, and Kaiser Chiefs have bemoaned the reduced cost of the average album on iTunes. But while the rest of us have had to grin and bear our redundancies, wage freezes, tighter budgets and reduced job security, major rock stars have made the most noise about protecting their profits.As soon as they feel the pinch, rock's aristocracy is applauding prison sentences and multimillion pound fines for the Pirate Bay founders, with Macca concluding that the £2.4m fine was "fair", probably assuming that, like him, they could dig that sort of change out of the back of the sofa. Robbie, Radiohead, Richard Ashcroft and 150 other musicians have rushed to sign up with the Featured Artist Coalition in the hope of rescuing their income (and, to be even-handed, that of future bands too) by wrestling back the copyright to their albums. And artists have suddenly become open as to how small a fraction from music sales they actually receive; the transcript of Courtney Love's speech in 2000 to Digital Hollywood is an precursor to current widespread cap-wringing, even if her conclusion that "the system's set up so that almost nobody gets paid" smacks as hypocritical since we now know she had $350m stashed away for pilfering.
To a degree, you can sympathise with these artists; the perfect storm of illegal downloading, streaming sites and the credit crunch has hit musicians hard (although the same can be said for freelance music journalists). But I find such pity-us bickering shallow when a) it seems to be the musicians with big bank balances doing the moaning and b) these same artists are keeping schtum about how much they make from gigs.Having spent some time booking bands, I found it staggering how much they would ask for an hour's work. As a general rule, a band who've had a sniff of a top 40 hit and a bit of media hype will happily charge anything up to £10,000 for a show – a new band with their debut album in the top 20 will cost you around £20,000, double that if they're top 10. And once they've got a couple of albums and a Brit nomination under their belt you'll be lucky to get them for less than the price of a three-bed semi in Carshalton. One venue asked me to try to book a festival-headliner band for a small one-off event claiming "money is no object". When I came back to them with a quote of £1.1m, money suddenly became a very big object indeed.Even factoring in bands' costs for an average of £3,000 per show, it's clear that a couple of UK jaunts by a group with a modicum of success could provide them with more than an average annual salary. Many bigger bands can make more money in one European festival season than you or I could make in a decade of finger-blistering overtime. In the 90s record labels had to come to terms with the obliteration of any profit from singles; the format merely became a loss-making promotional tool for the band's album instead. Perhaps the time has come for whining musicians to see albums in the same way – as infinitely sharable plugs for their hugely profitable tours.