Portland Musicians Lean on Community Organizations to Make Ends Meet

On a typical weekday morning, Portland musician Lisa Molinaro is off to one of the several school districts in the Portland metro area at which she substitute teaches. When she gets home from teaching, “the real work” begins as she sits down to continue working on her debut record.

Molinaro has been in the music industry for nearly three decades, playing with some of the biggest indie-rock names in the industry—Modest Mouse and The Decemberists, to name a few—and gaining a cult following with her former band, Talkdemonic.

Molinaro is used to having a variety of “side gigs” to pay the bills, but with rising living costs and a husband and stepkid to care for now, she says it’s getting more and more difficult to make ends meet.

“I am applying for another job at a local pizza joint, if that says anything,” she adds.

Between Spotify paying artists roughly $0.003 to $0.005 per stream, the rising costs of touring, and rent hikes in Portland, Meara McLaughlin, executive director of the nonprofit MusicPortland and MusicOregon, says, “Musicians have never needed more assistance.”

In 2021, MusicOregon set out to address the financial struggles musicians in Portland face by creating the Echo Fund, a program that allows individual musicians to apply for grants that go directly to them. The grant can be up to $5,000 and has to be used for a specific project the musician is working on.

Molinaro is one of many musicians who have been awarded a grant through the Echo Fund. She is currently using her grant to record her debut album, set to release next fall.

“You can’t know how meaningful it is to receive a grant like that,” she says.

The fund has given away $225,000 in direct project support to artists in Portland to date.

“Our city and our state supports traditional arts and culture, but popular music was never meant to rely on benefactors,” McLaughlin says. “That has changed.”

For years, touring and merchandise were the primary sources of income for musicians, but for many artists, touring can now be a financial gamble.

Local folk artist Kendall Lujan, one of last year’s Best New Bands, is wrapping up her third European tour for her latest album, Lucky Penny. She says she hopes to make money from this tour but points out that past tours have left her breaking even or, worse, losing money.

“As a musician you can’t really live normally,” she says. “You have to pick your battles and make sacrifices.”

Lujan opts to share a small studio apartment with her partner instead of a larger place so she can afford to go on international tours. She says she is lucky because her apartment is also owned by a landlord with a deep appreciation for music who gives her and her partner cheaper rent to aid their struggles as working musicians. Subsidized housing and assistance with medical bills through the Jeremy Wilson Project have “changed my life,” she says.

Jeremy Wilson, musician and founder of the nonprofit, says he created the organization in 2010 after seeing an outpouring of love and support from the music community when a medical condition debilitated him, leaving him to navigate a recovery that would stretch three years.

“Musicians are the very first people everybody calls upon when there’s an emergency, hurricanes, AIDS—musicians are going to bring everybody together,” he says. “Why is there not an organization of musicians supporting each other so that the wheel doesn’t have to be reinvented every time?”

Wilson says the foundation provides roughly $500,000 worth of services a year with a budget of about $150,000, thanks to donors covering the difference.

George Gall, local DJ and founder of Werm Hole, a semiregular event collective hosting DJs from all over the world, says electronic musicians face a unique set of challenges compared with rock musicians due to the stigma and location of raves. Werm Hole hosts nearly all of its events in underground warehouses. He says the fire bureau has been cracking down on underground venues lately for not being compliant with building and fire codes.

“It’s easy to point fingers and be like, oh, just get your venue up to code, but a lot of times, they make it impossible without spending millions of dollars to seismically retrofit these historic venues or these warehouses,” Gall says.

Longtime Portland rapper Mic Crenshaw says Black-owned clubs that primarily host hip-hop artists still get shut down disproportionately to places that play rock music. In 2016, Willamette Week reported on the $22 million federal lawsuit against the city of Portland alleging discrimination against Black nightclub owner Donna Thames. The lawsuit argued that the city had targeted her club, Exotica International Club for Men, closed in 2015, as part a pattern of shutting down Black-owned bars in Portland.

“People see reflections of themselves in white rock musicians, and so they don’t see anything potentially threatening or challenging or harmful because they see people that remind them of themselves,” Crenshaw says.

The rapper, who just released a new single, “We Are Tigers,” adds that in his 30 years as a musician in Portland, he has witnessed and been a part of the fight for hip-hop artists to establish themselves as respected musicians.

“Indie rock and alternative rock, they’ve had to share their platform with [hip-hop artists] as local musicians,” Crenshaw says, “and because of that, they’ve grown to respect us because they see how committed to our craft we are.”

Crenshaw notes he has been able to obtain several grants from a variety of organizations in recent years. In 2021, he was a Oregon Community Foundation Fields Fellow and received $100,000 in grant funding through that program.

As of 2023, Oregon is ranked 38th in the nation in state funding for arts and culture. But there’s some hope: Last year, the city of Portland created an Office of Arts & Culture to generate support for the arts. Since its inception, the office has put out $60,000 in grant money to support MusicOregon’s Echo Fund.

Office director Chariti Montez acknowledges that more “traditional” forms of art were prioritized for grant funding in the past, but she says the city is seeking to change that with a cultural plan called “Creative Future.” According to Montez, the plan seeks to address ways in which Portland can support arts industries that don’t fit in the “nonprofit art and culture world,” but there’s no clarity on the plan itself yet.

In the meantime, Montez, a local musician herself, says the office wants to continue supporting independent artists by financing MusicPortland’s City Sessions, an annual free summer concert series in which local musicians play in outdoor venues across town. The series is on hiatus for this summer, but expected to resume in 2026.

While McLaughlin says it’s been nice to see the city’s support for MusicOregon and MusicPortland, she wants to see more funding coming from all directions.

“Nashville and Austin and Seattle have made themselves incredibly successful cities largely based on their music,” McLaughlin says. “Portland could do that, but it takes will, and it takes a collective effort from the public, the government and the private sector.”