The Instagram Musician’s Union: Here’s Hoping It Works!
Some of you who follow the music scene closely might have noticed a recent influx of new musician’s organizations calling themselves unions, showing up on Instagram and elsewhere. United Musicians and Allied Workers (@umaw) and Secretly Group Union (@secretlyunion) are two examples of this new development.
This is great! Musicians, especially those who are in the popular music scene, have historically not been very interested in organizing and working together to improve labor practices, and seeing change in this area from a new generation is very encouraging. Well done!
A brief history of music industry labor practices
The lack of labor organization in the music industry is a big reason why major labels (in the latter part of the 20th century), and now large tech firms like Spotify and YouTube (currently), have been able to get away with paying artists so poorly for their creative work. It hasn’t always been this way: here’s the story of when musicians went on strike and won.
In fairness to Spotify, and the major labels, artists could be doing a lot more to educate themselves on the deals they sign, before they complain about their royalty payments. But, we’re not talking about major labels and big artists in this space, we’re talking about smaller indies and the DIY side, and the treatment is just as poor in these cases too. And, smaller artists have even fewer options when it comes to defending themselves.
In further fairness, there is a very strong argument to be made that streaming music allows the artist to continue to make money without having to put in additional time, like they would on tour or in the studio. The time-scaling positive effects of music streaming are not to be underestimated.
Is Spotify the problem?
It is not necessarily Spotify’s fault that consumers don’t want to pay for music anymore. All of these changes that artists want to see start with the artists themselves no longer being willing to sign away their rights, and/or give away their music or time for free.
There are actually a lot of great things that Spotify has done for the music industry. The question is really, do the positives outweigh the negatives? If you’re interested in getting into more details on this, here’s a great podcast episode that explores the many sides of this issue in explicit detail, by the podcast Bandhive:
https://bandhive.rocks/why-spotify-is-not-the-problem/
Why current labor abuses continue
Now, Spotify didn’t invent this problem, but they sure are fine with exploiting it.
I’m of the opinion that a business model that depends on poor treatment of labor to be viable is not a legitimate business model that should be allowed to continue. When I hear complaints that Spotify might go away if they had to pay artists fairly, my response is, that’s fine! There will always be music, and there will always be fans willing to put in the work to find music they love. So, I don’t view Spotify’s current large market share as some well-meaning democratization of music distribution. It’s just the new boss, same as the old boss. If you’re coming at this with a purely business-first-at-all-costs perspective, we might disagree, and that’s ok!
An entire industry of certain venues, labels, managers, and tech firms have been allowed to develop business models that depend on an endless supply of 18-35 year olds who are willing to work for free, forever.
Once one set of artists burns out or quits in frustration when they want to do something like own a house or have children, there’s always the next crop of young kids coming up who don’t know any better and are ready to be exploited on the promise of “paying dues”, “exposure”, or “you don’t draw enough people to be paid…yet”. I think it’s a pretty shameful way to run a business, personally, and it’s about time it stopped.
How to develop music industry labor practices that are more equitable for everyone
The only way to make it stop is to continue doing what we’re seeing: work towards coordinated labor organization among as many different groups of musicians as possible, and then use that combined negotiating power to insist upon fairer treatment.
It’s worth noting that not every venue, manager, promoter, or tech platform is some evil conglomerate out to get you. Let’s not be paranoid.
There are plenty of genuine, honest people working in these industries who are actively trying to do the right thing by artists. Operating a music venue, in particular, is extremely difficult and competitive, and involves risking a significant amount of up-front money by the venue owner, so we as artists really do need to respect what venues do for us.
But, for every genuine and honest partner, there’s at least an equal number of dishonest and exploitative partners out there. Industry vets have known this for years, and you’ve probably experienced it yourself if you’ve been creating and performing music for any length of time.
[Quick note: despite the color palette similarities between our two websites, this website is not affiliated with United Musicians and Allied Workers, though we absolutely support them!-ED]
Let’s not reinvent the wheel
All of this new energy going in the direction of labor organization is super encouraging! But, I’d like to emphasize that what we’re seeing here is not new, even though it may be new to you. All of the steps to fairer treatment of labor have been walked before, over the last 50 years of labor organization by existing musicians unions such as the American Federation of Musicians (among many others). Historically, the AFM has had the most impact in classical music: if you play with the New York Philharmonic or other such group, you are likely a member of your local AFM chapter. The AFM is a big reason why musician salaries in these famous groups often range well into the 6 figures, with health insurance and additional benefits. There’s probably an AFM chapter in your town right now.
A lot of these legacy unions are run by older people, which wouldn’t be a problem necessarily, except that they’ve done such a poor job of getting the organization message out to the younger generation. They’ve done such a bad job that many younger musicians think that new groups like UMAW and SGU are brand new ideas. They’re not, you just haven’t heard of the existing unions.
The reason I bring all this up is not because I think newer musicians unions should act like legacy organizations like the AFM. It is because there is existing labor infrastructure that has been developed over a long period of time by the legacy unions, that could be very valuable to all of these newer organizations. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here, we just have to open the table up to young and old, classical and popular musicians, and more.
Fragmentation is a legitimate concern: a large number of smaller unions is only marginally more powerful than an individual artist. A single unified group, or at least a unified cooperative of individual groups, is significantly more powerful.
I hope that all of the people who are so excited about founding unions on social media are equally excited about bringing everyone to the table, and taking advantage of the existing labor infrastructure that's already in place. It’s been encouraging to see Secretly Group Union operating in partnership with the legacy labor org OPEIU; here’s hoping partnerships like this continue and expand!
