San Diego's music scene is full of talent, but making a living off your art? That's a different story.
Shua, a Southeast San Diego artist with over a million Spotify streams, has lived both extremes: signing a record deal and later facing near homelessness. In this episode, he shares the highs and lows of his career, what it means to be an independent musician today and why fan support is more crucial than ever.
We also break down the brutal reality of the modern music industry, where the biggest stars are increasingly taking home the bulk of the earnings while local and indie artists fight to stay afloat. And we explore why local music matters, what we lose when artists can't afford to make their art.
" I think art, if you're willing, can cut through the noise and say to someone, 'See me. Hear me,'" Shua said.
Whether you're an artist, a music lover or just curious about how the industry really works, this episode offers a perspective you won't forget.
Guests:
- Shua, musician
- David Hesmondhalgh, Professor of Media, Music and Culture at the University of Leeds
Shua Track List:
Shua's 2024 Tiny Desk Contest entry:
Shua's musical influences:
- Fred Hammond
- The Winans
- Stevie Wonder
- Bill Withers
- "The Jungle Book" Original Soundtrack
- Beethoven
- Coldplay
Mentioned in this episode:
- Soda Bar | North Park dive for intimate sets, rising indie acts and vibrant local energy
- San Diego Zoo | World famous Balboa Park destination for animal lovers, families and curious minds
- Petco Park | Home to the Padres — and a downtown hub for major concerts and local shows
- Snapdragon Stadium | Mission Valley venue where Wave FC and San Diego FC play, and top music festivals take the stage
Sources:
- "Rock and Roll, Economics, and Rebuilding the Middle Class" (Alan B. Krueger, Chairman, Council of Economic Advisers, 2013)
- "Music Superstars Are the New One Percenters" (Neil Shah, Wall Street Journal, 2019)
- "Musicians and Singers" (Data USA, 2022)
- "Is music streaming bad for musicians? Problems of evidence and argument" [Full PDF] (David Hesmondhalgh, New Media and Society, 2021)
- "Data Shows 90 Percent of Streams Go to the Top 1 Percent of Artists" (Emily Blake, Rolling Stone, 2020)
- "What the Ek? Spotify founder is richer than any musical artist, ever" (Daniel Griffiths, MusicRadar, 2024)
- "How Many Streams Would an Artist Need to Earn as Much as Spotify CEO Daniel Ek? No One’s Close" (Wren Graves, Consequence of Sound, 2024)
- "Spotify most streamed artists of 2024" (Guillaume Vieira, Chartmasters, 2025)
- "Our Annual Music Economics Report" (Spotify, 2025)
- "Beethoven's capital" (Dr. Nicole Kämpken and Dr. Michael Ladenburger, Beethoven-Haus Bonn, 2005)
Shua performs "Lucid Girl" with The Sacred Souls on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!":
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Episode 2: Shua Transcript
Julia Dixon Evans: Just a heads up, this episode includes a mention of suicidal ideation. If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. You can call or text 988 for support. Please take care while listening.
Shua: Cool, am I good to go?
Anthony Wallace: Yeah, yeah. You’re rolling.
[Music: Shua’s “Broken”]
Evans: When you think of a professional musician, maybe you think of glamour, Taylor Swift and private jets. But the reality for most musicians is very far from that.
Shua: There are points at which I had no gas, no food, and I was like, well I'm stuck here, so I'm gonna have to take my instrument and go to a corner and just start playing.
Evans: Meet Southeast San Diego artist Shua, who first came on my radar through last year's NPR Tiny Desk Contest.
[Music: Shua’s “Broken”]
Evans: His voice is stunning.
[Music: Shua’s “Broken”]
Evans: And his music's hard to pin down genre-wise — a mix of Bon Iver, Stevie Wonder and Frank Ocean.
[Music: Shua’s “Broken”]
Evans: Shua's career has taken him from the euphoric high of signing a record deal as a teenager to being on the brink of homelessness just a few years later.
Now, approaching 30, things are looking brighter. He's got well over a million streams on Spotify. And he’s found support from his fans on Patreon to help fund his work as a musician — stuff like recording projects and music videos. Yet, despite this success, his original music doesn't pay all the bills — at least not yet. Now, he's a father, with two kids, and the stakes are even higher.
Shua: I have a family and we have to live and eat, and right now we're in a season where I'm the only one that's working, so it's working out, but it's also very much a time of mystery.
It takes a lot of hard work. Like, hey, 10.99 a month will get you access to every piece of art that's ever existed, every song. It kind of makes everything less valuable. And so you have to either be a viral pop star or — almost — you're nothing.
Evans: Shua’s right. That cheap Spotify subscription gives us everything we could ever want, but at what cost to the artist? The fact is, in recent years, the divide between the very top artists and everyone else has been getting a lot worse. The numbers are staggering: The top 1% of artists now take home more than 50% of all concert revenue, while most musicians earn less than $20,000 a year. The music industry is a microcosm of the wealth gap in our society. Economists have called it a “superstar economy,” where a small elite thrives while everyone else struggles.
We’ll examine how music streaming and market forces have reshaped the industry — for both music makers and listeners. And we'll ask why it matters. Why those of us who aren't professional musicians — like me and probably you — should care. We're all familiar with the starving artist trope, but you might not realize just how difficult our society makes it for people to survive as musicians.
Yes, this is a story about numbers and statistics. And the numbers are bad. Dire, even. But this is really a story about one person, one musician.
From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest, a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.
[Theme Music]
Evans: OK, I'm going to start with a big question and that is: Why is it essential for you to make music, to be a musician?
Shua: Oh, that is a big question. There's never been a point in history where humans have not made art. No matter the level of trouble or danger around the corner — war, famine, etc., etc. — people are always making art. So I think it's essential because it's reminding me that I'm human, personally. I'm like, OK, I'm human. I am here. I matter. My story matters. My background and my culture matter. Maybe my faith matters. Like all these things, you know.
Evans: When you were growing up, what was music like for you?
Shua: Well, I grew up in a very religious household, so it was a lot of gospel music. It wasn't kind of like the… There's a whole thing now that's like the sort of evangelical music that kind of copies U2. But when I was growing up, of course I'm not white, so I grew up in the Black gospel space. My father was listening to these artists called The Winans, Fred Hammond and a smattering of Stevie Wonder and Bill Withers and all that sort of stuff. And I just, I loved it all. And then music and movies as well. Disney movies, stuff like that.
Evans: That makes me think about one of your songs. It's called “Plaza Cuernavaca.”
Shua: Yeah, yeah. When I was little, I was very, I was terrified of the dark. Terrified of the dark. And so we had our little nightlight, but for some reason the nightlight wasn't enough, and so we had three different tapes that I would switch between: One was a gospel CD that I loved listening to, and another was Jungle Book, and the other one was Beethoven.
[Music: Shua’s “Plaza Cuernavaca”]
Shua: I'd go between the three, and so I would, for years of my life, I would fall asleep listening to those three things. And so I was like, I just want to write a song about my kind of love affair with music and where it began and where it's tortured me in other ways.
[Music: Shua’s “Plaza Cuernavaca”]
Shua: Some of the first times in my life I had experienced depression, the sort of dark places that my mind would go to — even just really young, 10, 11. Listening to Stevie Wonder or listening to a Coldplay song, and the sort of catharsis and emotional resonance of those things would legitimately chase away those sort of dark thoughts that told me that life wasn't worth living.
[Music]
Shua: And I guess I just keep on going cause I’d like more people to say like, hey, the work that you’re doing has really helped me. I try to imagine that it's a healthy balance of people just like the music and it's, oh yeah, this is nice to listen to. And also, there's some kid out there or adult out there that's saying, oh, this is life sustaining.
There was a period of my life, kind of when I started out on this journey, where I got a little baby record deal when I was 18. It started in 2013, I believe, and then in 2016 it ended. It was pretty soul crushing because I really believed in it. I really thought it was going to be the moment, and that would be my life from there on. But I'd given up essentially in 2016. I don't know what I thought I was going to do, but I think I was just coasting. Trying to figure it out. I had a lot of depression. I was dealing with a lot of suicidal ideation.
It was a period of about two years where I was couch surfing cause I would try to find a friend to stay with. I was definitely wandering around and sleeping in my car or sleeping on a couch and just trying to figure things out. I was like, OK, I'm getting in my car, and I'm gonna pretend like I'm gonna drive away right now, but I don't have any gas in here, and I don't have any plans of getting any money to get where I'm gonna get next.
There are points at which I had no gas, no food, and I was like, well I'm stuck here, so I'm gonna have to take my instrument and go to a corner and just start playing and hoping that somebody gives me enough money to go get a gas canister and then build that up and go to my car, which is like, let me, you know, and it's worked. I mean, it doesn't work. Mind you, it's not a sustainable way of life. But it was also like, what? I'm 19. Like, this is what you're supposed to do. It's not. And I didn't know that either. That's not what all 19 year olds do?
And so, it was really hard, but I had a couple friends that basically wouldn't let me give up. Like, yeah, you're not going to, you don't get to do this. Like, you don't get to quit.
And so, a couple years later, they're basically like, you're gonna record this song that you wrote. Cause I kept on writing songs, and I would do a house backyard show every once in a while. So they're like, you're gonna record this song. Then I was like, OK, OK, OK. And I got excited about it. I recorded a little song and I expected nothing to happen with it, but I put it online and I was like, maybe a thousand people will listen to this. That would be awesome.
[Music: Shua’s “You Can Only Go in Pieces”]
Shua: But then, it is what it is now. Over a million plays, or I'd like to think of it as a million people. “You Can Only Go in Pieces.” And it happened, the million plays happened after the record deal, after I’d given up.
[Music: Shua’s “You Can Only Go in Pieces”]
Evans: After that early hit, "You Can Only Go in Pieces," Shua decided to devote his life and career to music. But things from there were far from easy.
Shua: Right now, it is a battle to have the margin to actually create what I think needs to be seen and heard in the world. But I have a family and we have to live and eat, and right now we're in a season where I'm the only one that's working, so it's working out, but it's also very much a time of mystery.
Evans: Would you say, a couple years ago when you became a dad, of course it's pivotal, it's a big deal. But in terms of your approach to the music career and your idea of what financial stability might look like, how did that square away?
Shua: The level of responsibility that I felt. I started thinking about my life when I was a kid, and I was like, I want this guy to have an awesome life and, of course, kids don't really worry, they don't think about that stuff. If we ate the same thing every day and it was like I did: red beans and rice or whatever and like syrup sandwiches — that wasn't my whole life, but there are periods when I was a kid. I just wanted him to have a good life. And so I think it put a bit of fire under me to be like, OK, so let me take stock. What are my skills? Oh, just playing music? OK, great. That's it. I guess I'm going to have to really figure this out. There's no plan B.
I basically have three full time jobs, which is doing work as a patron for the church, being a music director, music minister. Doing gig work, which is not my favorite. It's like you sit in a corner of a restaurant and you get ignored for three hours, but it's nice cause you still get to do what you love, you get to play music — all the gigs are music related. And then doing my own things where I'm like, I'm going to put on a show. I'm going to sell my merchandise. I'm going to have my Patreon. I've sang on some other people's records this year, which I had a lot of fun doing, I sang on my friend's The Sacred Souls record that they put out this year, which was a lot of fun, sang some background vocals. I did “Kimmel” with them, sang background vocals on “Kimmel” with them a couple weeks ago.
[Sound clip: The Sacred Souls on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”]
Shua: Things like that pop up. You never know when it's gonna come, so it is a little bit testy. You don't know what's going to come, you don't know what's going to happen. So far, things have been good and a little bit scary, but you're just doing a lot of different things. You do a lot of different things until the one thing that you really want to do, you strike gold or whatever, that could be a billion different things. It could be you're posting online and something goes viral, or it could be the old way where somebody's like, hey kid, I want to give you a record deal, come to Hollywood. That sort of a thing, which I don't know if that, I mean, it kind of still happens or you're just doing a lot of shows and you build a legitimate fan base just from doing shows.
There's a lot of ways, but just financially, I am doing a lot right now. I'm pretty stretched thin. I like it because my family gets to eat and go to the zoo. That's not the vision. The vision is that I get to kind of work like a normal person. I'd love to do music as a 9 to 5, where I go in at 9 a.m., I write my songs, I'm touring every once in a while. That’d be nice. And I think that's the goal. And I think I'll get there. I think it's going to happen very soon, actually.
[Music]
Shua: But I have these conversations with people and they're like, well, how long are you going to do this? And I'm like, I don't understand the question. In any other vocation, no one has asked that question. Oh yeah, I went to school, I put my whole life into being an aerospace engineer. No one goes, well, how long are you going to do that? It doesn't make any sense.
This is what I am, this is my vocation, this is my profession, I poured the most time, energy, money into this, and so I'm going to utilize these skills that God has given me and that I've tried to steward as best as I can to put food on the table until maybe something drastic happens and I'm not able to do it anymore, or until I'm like, OK, that's enough of that. I'd really like to get into
Evans and Shua: Aerospace engineering…
Evans: It's safe to say that we love music, like on a societal level. So why is it then, when we see someone like Shua — someone clearly talented and dedicating their life to music — why do we ask them: When are you gonna give it up?
We talked to someone who's spent nearly 30 years thinking about these kinds of questions and how music is and isn't valued in our economy and culture.
David Hesmondhalgh: I'm David Hesmondhalgh, and I'm professor of media, music and culture at the University of Leeds in England.
Evans: David has written and spoken a lot about what he calls "cultural workers": people with jobs in any sort of artistic field, and why society often assumes they'll need to give it up at some point.
Hesmondhalgh: Maybe there's a certain amount of envy and wanting to make people conform to a certain model of how people should be in the world. I think what is more surprising is the way that you still sometimes hear from people who love art and culture, the sense that musicians, for example, as workers, is to destroy the mystery and beauty of the art. So it's drawing on the old romantic myths of artists as somehow transcending society. In my lifetime, there's been a shift amongst what you might call liberal-minded progressive people from being often uninterested in the rights of cultural workers to recognizing them much more.
Evans: And the reason for that is how dramatically and publically the music economy has changed. From 2000 to 2015 was the era of digitalization, when music became cheap or even free and widely available online. In the span of just a few years, the top 1% of musicians lost hundreds of millions in revenue: dropping from $2.7 to $2.1 billion dollars a year. Meanwhile, the bottom 99% saw their earnings fall even harder — plummeting from over a billion dollars to about half a million.
When it comes to CD sales, the top 1% of artists account for about half of sales. But on Spotify, the top 1% of artists get the overwhelming majority — 90% — of all streams. That leaves only 10% for everyone else, making it tough for up-and-coming artists to earn a fair share of the platform's revenue.
David believes there are significant injustices in the streaming model, which we're really only a decade into now. But he also points out that making a living in music has been very difficult for a very long time.
Hesmondhalgh: It seems that built into the music industry, there's a very strong tendency for people at the top to earn disproportionately much more than people lower down the ladder of success. And it was before this current era. I think it's always been the case that the number of musicians who could earn a sustainable living from music has been always relatively few. It goes back thousands of years, but it changes fundamentally with the rise of capitalism and with the rise of recording technologies.
Evans: It's always been a struggle to adequately reward musicians for the beauty and joy they bring us. But within the last century, as music has increasingly been recorded and distributed by big corporate entities, the struggle has only intensified. So much more of the music economy pie is taken by non-musicians. Spotify's CEO, Daniel Ek, is richer than any musician in the world. It would take 115 billion streams for an artist to earn as much as he did from Spotify last year alone. That's more than four times the number of streams that Taylor Swift got in the same period.
Hesmondhalgh: So these are the problems that musicians face and a difficult question for anyone thinking about a better society is what number of musicians might we think that it's possible for a decent, humane society to sustain. It might be a bit difficult to argue that everybody who wants to be a musician should be able to make a living from it. But I do think, personally, that it would be very good if more musicians could make a sustainable living from music than is currently the case.
Evans: But who cares? I mean, probably every artist in your Spotify Wrapped is in that top 1%. This isn't just Drake and Billie Eillish. This is almost any non-local artist that pops into your mind. Basically, anyone famous enough for an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. As long as you have those superstars to listen to, why does it matter if there are no professional musicians living and working in your community?
Hesmondhalgh: The way you might make a case to somebody who doesn't want to have a society with a great diversity of musicians is to try to convince them of the importance of music.
[Music]
Hesmondhalgh: I think it can strengthen connections between people by being the basis of shared memories. It can enrich a place, be it a city or a neighborhood. And if music is an important way in which individuals and communities and societies express themselves, then presumably we’d want all the different elements of a society to be able to join in with that set of expressions.
I think there's something interesting about music, where for all kinds of interesting historical reasons, it's often people from marginalized communities who have succeeded in the world of music. Jazz itself begins in New Orleans, and not in the wealthier quarters of New Orleans. The musical genres that have been most internationally successful in terms of styles have come out of African American and Afro Latin communities. It doesn't mean that it solves the problems of inequality, but it means that music has some sort of way to tap into a democratic ethos sometimes and I think that might be another reason to value it.
[Music]
Evans: So music makes places vibrant and desirable, and historically music has been a crucial way for underrepresented voices to express themselves. And on the flip side, a way for everyone else to hear them.
Shua released a song in 2020 called "Aren't You Tired?," and last year re-recorded a version to submit to the NPR Tiny Desk Contest.
Shua: Yeah, I was writing an EP in 2020. I needed an outlet for a lot of the overwhelming emotions I was experiencing with the news of the killings of several of my brothers and sisters: Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor. I was writing songs and, actually my wife, she texted a bunch of friends and said, hey — I didn't have any recording equipment — she was like, Shua really wants to record some music, and you all believe in him. So they just sent me a bunch of money to make music. And I was really overwhelmed by that.
And so I started making stuff in the garage, and I was up until 3 a.m. every night, kind of a mix between yelling at myself, being very frustrated, crying because of the pain of what I was trying to express. And then my wife came into the garage, and I literally just said the first lines of the song to her out loud: Aren't you tired of waking up to the news? Those Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday blues. I said it just like that.
[Music: Shua’s “Aren't You Tired?”]
Shua: I mean that was a pivotal point, I think in culture as well, where you know the thought that whatever bleeds leads. If you weren't hooked by that machine, then you certainly were in that time. And so I was just saying how I'm like, it's exhausting. You can know in a way that leads you to action, but I think most of that was just extremely paralyzing.
[Music: Shua’s “Aren't You Tired?”]
Shua: And that's why I was like, I must do something. I must, like, I'm going to write some songs. And it felt so insignificant. But my faith kind of gives me opportunities to be in spaces that I probably wouldn't decide to go to. And I'll say, I've been able to sing about police brutality in front of people wearing very stylish red hats.
Evans: Yeah.
Shua: And have those people come up to me, tears in their eyes, and say, I've never been affected by a story like this in this way. And I was like, well, it's probably because you're only hearing it through the lens of your algorithm that's telling you what to think about it instead of hearing it from someone that's experienced it. And that's, I think art, if you're willing, can cut through the noise and say to someone, like, see me, hear me. In a way that your phone can't.
[Music: Shua’s “Aren't You Tired?”]
Shua: Don't let the algorithm tell you what you like. Find things that you really enjoy. But it takes work. That's the hard part. You have to pay attention. You have to slow down. The systems that are out there, they kind of subject the artist to being a part of a system that doesn't play in their favor.
Of course, Spotify, the whole streaming thing. It's not, it's great for shareholders and CEOs. It's awesome. I wish I was one — that would be sick. Actually, I'm just kind of jealous is what I'm trying to say. Some people play the game and it works out for them. You kind of have to create at a level that can end up being a bit soul sucking.
What shook me was the idea of having a patron. Patrons, meaning a specific community of people that you actually know, that believe in what you're doing, and back you financially. I have that in micro, and it's great, and it helps.
I heard a story recently about — I always say his name wrong, Beethoven. Beethoven. Beethoven.
Evans: That works.
Shua: Ludwig. Of course he was a genius prodigy, etc., etc. But there's this point at which he was — I think it was Vienna. The big deal is like, we have this artist, look at what we have, look at what's come from our city, from our place, we're all gonna raise him up. And then another city came and was, I think, I don't remember what it was, but they were like, we'll pay you to come and live out here. And at that point, they hadn't been paying Ludwig yet, and so they said, we will pay you just to stay here. You don't even have to make anything. Which I think is hilarious. I'm like, San Diego, come on! But the idea of having a culture or a group of people that values art.
I started doing this gig where I go and I sell merchandise at these big concerts. So the ones that are at Petco Park or the ones that are at Snapdragon. I'll go and I'll sell the merchandise, and I'm like, whoa, these artists are coming through, and they have these whole, it's this whole industry. Thousands and thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars for this thing that really, I mean, it affects us in legitimate ways, but we're also completely detached from it.
And there are places where there's more of a locality to art and to expression where you know the artists that are in your city or when those artists are in your town, you're like, no, these are from my town. If you had found yourself at Soda Bar on a Tuesday evening at 9 p.m., I think you would be like, what? This is here? In my city? Around the corner from me? Cause I've done that many times. A lot of the time I'll just put my kids down to bed, put my wife down to bed — she likes to go to bed early — and then just stalk the night, and go out and listen to some music. If you want to be surprised, and if you want to have a bit of an adventure, and if you want to find some things that you really love that is really close to you, and you can actually claim a part of it.
And take ownership of it because it's from your place, your town, like Ludwig in Vienna. You are ours, and actually support it.
I would just like to leave my mark in this little place. I think things like that do matter — the Anthropocene, the sort of marks humans leave. I want to leave a good one. Not one of pain, because we're good at doing that. But if you live your life on purpose, you can leave a beautiful mark in a place.
Evans: When our interview wrapped, Shua picked up his guitar, and with hardly any warm-up, launched into one of his new songs, “Broken,” set to be released this year.
In that moment, our producer Anthony, our engineer Ben and I were floored and deeply grateful. Grateful that Shua persisted on this path as a musician. Grateful that he endured all of what he went through. And that he's still writing songs. And that he is ours, that we can claim him and know him as a fellow San Diegan.
[Music: Shua’s “Broken”]
Evans: A special thank you to Shua and David Hesmondhalgh for their help with this episode.
You can find a longer version of Shua's live in-studio performance at our website, KPBS dot org slash The Finest.
Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, subscribe, leave a rating and share it with your friends.
[Theme Music]
Next Thursday on The Finest: What does it mean to be a government artist in San Diego? We talk with San Diego's official outgoing and incoming Poets Laureate about their work to bring poetry to life across the region.
Paola Capó-García: Poetry has a way of winning anyone over if you are exposing them to anything beyond their misconception or stereotype of poetry.
Evans: The Finest is a production of KPBS Public Media. I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer is Anthony Wallace who also composed the score. Our audio engineer is Ben Redlawsk, and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.