So you want to be broke? - Your guide to living the indie musician life

I decided to start a new series as part of this blog, giving advice on surviving life as an ultra indie musician, based on my experiences with The Miss Bennets and based on my 10ish years (OMG) of obsessively following and supporting independent Canadian musicians. I hope someone out there finds this useful or at least entertaining. Lets Begin!

Chapter one: Finding sweet musician digs

Our lovely 100 and something year old apartment in Halifax

Finding the perfect pad is hard enough for a regular person, but if you're a musician its even more of an uphill battle. First of all, you have no money. This makes it difficult to put down first and last months rent on an apartment and generally being poor limits how nice a place you're going to find in any city.



When calculating how much rent you can afford, always round down your income. Housing should take up 20% of your annual income, so do the appropriate calculations or have your mathy friend do it for you. No matter what stick to your budget!!

When looking at apartments and meeting landlords DO NOT tell them you're a musician. You never know what kind of biases landlords might have, they obviously worry about noise, parties and your ability to pay rent on time. #starvingartiststigma

Noise- if you're going to be jamming and practicing at home, rather than a rented jam space, or a friend's garage etc. it's not a bad idea to look at basement apartments. Your band may sound stellar, but your neighbour downstairs will not appreciate a bass drum beating above their head at any time of the day or night. The last thing you want is complaints from neighbours interrupting an epic jam sesh. Alternatively, you can do what we did, which was rent a two-storey apartment in a house, we had the second and attic floor, so we set up our instruments in the attic and we never had a noise complaint the whole year (our downstairs neighbours were incredibly blazed all the time though, so I think it was partly a mutual, "you don't complain about our noise, we won't complain about your smell" unspoken agreement). If you have enough roommates to rent a whole house that is also a good option. Oh, and carpet will act as a sound barrier between floors, although carpet in rentals can be nasty so make sure you ask your potential new landlord if they are willing to have the carpets steam cleaned before you move in.

Location- I am terrified of sketchy areas/apartments. I really liked our aforementioned apartment in Halifax because it was just off of a busy street and because it was on the second floor, it was quite safe. The downside to cheap basement apartments is that they are targets for break-ins. Our friends once had thousands of dollars of uninsured musical equipment stolen from their house, so its an important thing to consider. If you live in Toronto here is a handy map illustrating crimes committed in the city http://spotcrime.com/on/toronto .

Now obviously most cities have areas that are considered artistic communities with cheaper rentals, lots of music and arts venues. It can be beneficial to live in the artistic hub and meet other musician- neighbours etc. But, while they might not complain about the noise you make, you'll likewise have to put up with their noise too.

Size- lets be honest, pretty soon you're going to have to start selling off your possessions to pay for food, so I wouldn't worry about finding spacious digs.

Landlord/lady- trust your gut. Does your potential landlord/lady give you the creeps? They're going to have a key to your home, so make sure they're not a creep! If I'm being completely honest here, half the reason we took the apartment we did in Halifax was because Landlord Rob was kind of hot and had a totally sexy reassuringly deep voice. Plus he was totally jacked (we later wrote him a song). Incidentally, things in our apartment only seemed to need fixing on the hottest days in the summer... *wink wink* but I digress...

OK the real reason why we wanted to live in Rob's apartment is because he seemed reasonable, he is a contractor so we knew he'd renovated the apartment well and could actually fix things (our landlord in Kingston was awful, we had a leaking roof for 3 years), and also he lived two doors down so we knew we could get him in case of an emergency.


Ghosts- I don't believe in ghosts per se... but our apartment in Halifax was kind of haunted by the ghost of a cat lady. She was cool though and kept to herself mostly, so it wasn't a big problem for us. If you are viewing an apartment though, and you get any sort of inexplicable bad vibe even if it's super nice, it may be haunted. Don't rent it. Also, if someone is offering an apartment for unusually cheap rent, someone was probably murdered there. Don't rent it.

Camp Hill Cemetery, near our apartment. Possibly where the body of our ghost was buried? Also the final resting place of Alexander Keith

Here is an important check list of things to ask your potential landlord:

1. Does noise travel in the building? - remember, don't tell that you're a musician, but find out if noise is an issue, cheap housing or older homes tend to not have great sound barriers between the floors.

2. How much are utilities usually? - its nice if you can get a place where utilities are included, because theres nothing worse than getting screwed by Nova Scotia power.

3. Can you contact the current tenants?- Getting in touch with the people currently living there is a great way to find out if the landlord is good, but also to possibly work out a deal on furniture/household stuff, sometimes if you just let them know that you need things for the apartment they will leave it behind. It might not always be the nicest stuff, but hey, beggars can't be choosers. Stay tuned for a later post about furnishing your artist digs, but I suggest you hang on to beer boxes and milk crates, they make great tables.

4. Is there a penalty for breaking the lease/ is there a month to month option/ do they allow subletters?- Hey you never know when you might get the opportunity to go on tour!

And my final tip is to do as much research as possible, see if you can find any info online about your landlord, research the neighbourhood and neighbourhood amenities. Make your decision half on your gut feeling and half on a thorough pro-con list. You will probably have to sacrifice something(s) to get a place you can afford. If you don't have a car, you really want to think about being walking distance to grocery and laundry and work. And seriously, trust your feelings on ghosts.