Alex Maiolo has worked with The Future of Music Coalition for almost nine years, primarily focusing on the health insurance crisis as it relates to the working musician. In addition, Alex plays in various bands, including the psych-pop outfit Violet Vector & The Lovely Lovelies and ambient/clo-core staple Hi Fi Sky. He is a partner with an insurance agency in the Carrboro/Chapel Hill area of North Carolina. Insurance as it relates to the artist, studio owner and musician is all part of a typical day’s tasks.

[Cross-posted at KnowtheMusicBiz.com]

You don’t have to be a news junkie to know that the health care debate has been heating up in recent months. With all of this back-and-forth, it’s easy to forget that this is about getting more people covered. And musicians are one portion of the American public that could definitely use some help.

My name is Alex Maiolo, and I’m the project manager for Future of Music Coalition’s Health Insurance Navigation Tool (or HINT, for short). I’m also a musician. Like everyone at FMC, I’ve seen too many of my peers have to deal with unforeseen health calamities without the benefit of insurance. read more

It’s hard to believe that its been eight years since FMC’s original survey on musicians and health insurance. That oft-cited study, published in 2002, showed that 44 percent of working musicians did not have insurance. One of the barriers, besides cost, was that the topic is difficult to wrap your mind around. To help demystify the issue, we created the Health Insurance Navigation Tool (HINT) — a free program that offers jargon-free information to musicians seeking to learn more about their health insurance options.

Fast-forward to 2010: health care is now a matter of serious debate across the country. FMC has advocated for reform, and we’re still very much committed to arming musicians with information so they can make smart choices.

But we also want to know if anything has changed since our initial report. Which is why we’ve just relaunched the survey. read more

The path to success in the music industry is difficult for anyone, and the late-singer songwriter Vic Chesnutt had a harder road than most.

Vic, who passed away in 2009 on Christmas Day, had written songs since childhood. At the age of eighteen, a car accident took away his ability to walk and gave him just “limited use” of his hands. A gifted guitar player, Vic could now play only simple chords. This is something that every musician out there who uses their hands to create has likely contemplated, if just for a moment, but for Vic, it was a day-to-day reality.

Now, Vic’s many friends and admirers are holding a pair of concerts in his memory at Athens, Georgia’s 40 Watt Club. read more

It’s not exactly news that the economic situation has been pretty grim lately — turn on the tube or crack a newspaper and you’re sure to be greeted with yet another story of fiscal woe. Yet most of these reports don’t talk about artists, many of whom were already struggling to make ends meet before the Great Recession.

This article in New York Times is different in that it puts creators front-and-center. The article includes data from a new survey showing that more than half of American artists experienced a drop in income from 2008 to 2009. The study was commissioned by non-profit artist-support organization Leveraging Investments in Creativity in collaboration with Princeton Survey Research Associates International and the Helicon Collaborative, a non-profit consulting firm. read more