JOURNAL EXCERPT: Roots Musicians Are Mobilizing With a New Wave of Unions

EDITOR’S NOTE: In honor of SAG-AFTRA reaching a tentative agreement last week and the TV/theatrical/streaming strike coming to a close, we’re sharing an excerpt of a story about the unionization efforts in the music industry from our Fall 2023 journal, available now. Order your copy or, better yet, subscribe today — and support nonprofit roots music journalism in print and online for a full year!

In the early days of 2020’s quarantine, Sadie Dupuis wrote poetry, cooked a lot of vegan breakfast sandwiches, and helped found a union, United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW). A singer-songwriter, guitarist, and founder of the indie rock band Speedy Ortiz, Dupuis was one of thousands of music workers who mobilized during the initial crisis, lobbying Congress for unemployment assistance for independent contractors, rent and mortgage relief, and other aid to help those struggling with lack of income from touring.

“We all were at home, we had time to get on Zoom calls, to get rightfully angry and share information, and there hadn’t previously been a good forum to get together with different musicians from different genres and discuss commonalities in music contracts, frustrations on tour, and other issues,” she explains of the surge in crisis-related activism.

The growing concerns of independent touring musicians — including inadequate residual compensation from streaming platforms, the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the creative process and future pay, and more — parallel those of their peers in the broader entertainment sector. At the time of publication, both the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and Writers Guild of America (WGA) were on strike — their first joint labor action since 1960.

Those groups represent more mainstream actors, writers, and recording artists in and outside of music, but several new grassroots music unions like UMAW have formed in recent years. Others include New York-based Music Workers Alliance (MWA) and Bandcamp United, which represents workers at the popular music distribution platform. While Bandcamp United requires dues like a more traditional workplace union, UMAW and MWA still operate on a donation basis. And although all of their locations, missions, and membership numbers vary, this next wave of grassroots organizations is united by a single cause: radically transforming pay and working conditions for music industry workers on stage and behind the scenes.

Unity and Independence

Music unions are not a new phenomenon. Founded in the late 19th century, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) represents more than 80,000 American and Canadian professional musicians, including tuba player, high school brass instructor, and Atlanta Hawks instrumental director Kadeem Chambers. While initially skeptical of unions, after a slew of high-profile work — including two Apple commercials, touring with theatrical production DRUMLine Live, and playing with Beyoncé during her 2018 headlining Coachella set — he decided to join the Atlanta Federation of Musicians, the local branch of AFM. He was persuaded by an AFM board member and friend’s father, who “played on a track with TLC years ago and is still getting residual checks to this day,” says Chambers.

“He told me unions fight for you to get the pay that you deserve,” he continues. And they did just that for Chambers, who secured residuals when that Beyoncé performance was optioned for a Netflix special and a live album — all because of his new union contract.

While his orchestral background and personal connections helped to connect Chambers to AFM, many young people are unaware of existing music unions and their benefits, says Dr. Austin McCoy, a labor and music historian and assistant professor at the University of West Virginia.

“Every few years, I read in the news about artists wanting or starting new unions, because SAG-AFTRA and these other older ones are basically focused on instrumentalists or orchestra members or musical theater performers,” he explains.

Historically, unions were organized around a single institution or location, “but today’s musicians are placeless for the most part,” says McCoy. “They are touring and constantly on the move, so they are more difficult to organize because they aren’t united by a central employer or workplace.”

Membership in legacy unions is open to those who play roots or other music genres. But according to jazz and rock guitarist Marc Ribot, one of the founders of the next-generation musicians-advocacy group MWA, “while AFM has successfully represented sectors of the industry that have been under contract since the mid-20th century, it has not successfully represented an important sector of the industry that has come to being since then — independent musicians.”

Most of those musicians are independent contractors, cobbling together a living from multiple revenue streams including streaming and album sales, touring, and merchandise.

“In the United States, our systems are not really built with those kinds of workers in mind,” says Kevin Erickson, director of the nonprofit advocacy group Future of Music Coalition. Not only do independent contractors — or non-exempt workers — lack access to employee benefits and protections like health care and paid leave, but “under current antitrust law, you can’t collectively work to set prices or make demands of somebody else in the marketplace unless you have a labor exemption,” he continues. So, if a musician is not a direct employee of a streaming service, music venue, or record company, options for collective bargaining are limited.

According to Atlanta-based entertainment attorney Steven Sidman, the majority of the employment, copyright, licensing, and other laws that apply to modern musicians predate both the modern music industry and the current gig economy, creating confusion that prevents formal organization.

Organizing is also unpaid labor, and “presumes a certain cohesiveness among constituents that is often lacking with independent and roots musicians,” he says.

Libby Rodenbough, a vocalist and fiddle player with the North Carolina folk quartet Mipso, says a scarcity mindset can also keep musicians from uniting to pursue common goals.

“Throughout labor history, the powers that be have effectively pitted one type of worker against another, and that definitely plays [out] in the music industry,” she explains. “People think if they don’t take a gig or thank Spotify for putting them on a playlist, somebody else will get that spot.”

Fair Pay SXSW rally moving to join the WGA picket in New York City, May 2023. Photo by Edwina Hay

Action From Home

While issues like fair pay and streaming royalties predate the pandemic, the abrupt break in live music in March 2020 gave musicians like Dupuis and Dr. Lydia Warren, a folk performer and ​​director of the Frank & Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center at Fairmont State University, plenty of downtime to pursue activism.

“Like everyone else, I was stuck at home scrolling social media and came across UMAW and attended a virtual new members meeting,” says Warren. She found the group “nice and welcoming,” and immediately joined a subcommittee dedicated to fairness in streaming revenue called “Justice at Spotify.”

For Dupuis, the pandemic created a sense of urgency for suddenly out-of-work musicians and “a growing awareness of exploitation in labor across different workplaces.”

As most musicians were sidelined from touring and performing, unions for hospitality and other essential workers were gaining traction and bringing attention to cross-sector causes like fair pay and safe working conditions.

“Any time there are reports of successful organizing of large corporations like Amazon or Starbucks, it raises awareness to workers in other sectors, like music,” says McCoy.

According to Ribot, this new wave of unions — predominately independent, grassroots, and worker-driven — offered musicians an alternative blueprint for forming new solidarity groups, including MWA.

Originally founded in 2019 as a working committee of the NYC Artists Coalition dedicated to public policy improvements like labor protections and strengthening the social safety net for local freelance musicians and DJs, MWA and its work took on new urgency during the pandemic.

In 2020, Ribot, Dupuis, and other members of UMAW and MWA successfully lobbied Congress to pass legislation that allowed states to extend unemployment benefits to independent contractors and other contingent workers as part of the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program.

“I feel lucky I have some other job training and was able to cobble together random kinds of work, but other musicians didn’t have those opportunities,” says Dupuis. “They often had to do essential work or food service, which also put them in harm’s way, and a lot of people who relied on music as their main source of income were in a rough Catch-22, so those unemployment payouts were critical.”

And in 2022, Ribot and MWA were instrumental in establishing a $200 million musicians relief fund for independent contractors in New York. The retroactive grants provided much-needed funds to performers like Ribot, who lost thousands of dollars due to pandemic-related concert and tour cancellations in 2021.

As venues opened again and musicians started touring regularly, UMAW committee members collaborated with the National Independent Venue Association to develop guidelines for “best practices for returning to music without hurting health or finances,” says Dupuis. The risk-mitigation procedures for house staff, patrons, and musicians included face coverings, air circulation minimums, temperature checks, and contactless guest experiences. In addition, Dupuis’ UMAW chapter in Philadelphia partnered with the Working Families Party and local harm reduction groups to get Narcan (an over-the-counter medication for emergency overdose reversal) and fentanyl test strips into venues.

“A lot of musicians don’t realize you can add those provisions to your touring rider, but things don’t change unless you ask,” she says.

Building Coalitions

That sentiment infuses the work of this new wave of music advocacy groups, as the pandemic only compounded the systemic issues facing working musicians, like fair pay and streaming compensation.

“Over the past 25 years, things have demonstratively gotten worse in almost every area of musical work,” explains Ribot, who released a new album, Connection, with his indie rock trio, Ceramic Dog, in July.

“In live gigs, ticketing corporations and fat administrative expenses eat up bigger portions of the receipts, and in recorded music, there was a 60% collapse in income following the introduction of file-sharing,” he says. “In response to these conditions, dozens of people are getting together in their towns and on their scenes to try to change things.”

Even those behind-the-scenes in the music industry are taking action. Workers at Secretly Group, a quartet of independent music labels that represent artists like Angel Olsen and Kevin Morby, won a contract with management last October, and employees at Bandcamp voted to unionize last March.

As Bandcamp United member and support specialist Ed Blair explains, “between streaming and COVID, it’s never been harder to be involved in the music industry.” He says unionizing is the “only rational response to the way both the tech and music industries are headed —every day there’s another layoff! Unions allow workers to have a say in their working conditions, and that’s never been more crucial.”

These new groups are changing the status quo with information-sharing, transparency, and collective action. UMAW recently launched a musician rate transparency initiative, inspired by the Freelance Solidarity Project, an organization of contract writers dedicated to raising industry compensation that’s a division of the National Writers Union.

“The ability to share rates is so important for musicians,” says Dupuis. “So many bands who are new and excited don’t know that $100 isn’t an appropriate payment for a support slot on a tour and don’t know that they can and should negotiate.”

In addition, UMAW offers free attorney consultations in partnership with Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic and encourages musicians to fight back against standard anti-musician practices with campaigns like #MyMerch, which calls for music venues and festivals to stop taking a cut of merchandise sales.

“Until that campaign, that was not something I recognized as predatory,” says Warren. “But I would roll up to a festival and they would take 20% of my merch sales, even when it was just my mom selling the CDs.”

UMAW is also pushing for transparency in streaming contracts and payments. While streaming accounts for more than 80% of the overall music economy and those platforms continue to bring in billions of dollars of revenue, the payout to working musicians remains negligible.

“After the label or publisher or manager takes their cut, you’re just splitting fractions of pennies of pennies of pennies among four to six people,” says Dupuis. She is one of nearly 30,000 musicians who signed UMAW’s Justice at Spotify petition demanding an artist-centric payment model, increased business practice transparency, and an end to lawsuits against artists. The group is also currently working with US Rep. Rashida Tlaib on national legislation that would pay artists direct streaming royalties, similar to the current satellite radio payment model.

“This bill would redefine the landscape of streaming and maybe bring us closer to living wages for musicians,” says Warren.

While fair streaming practices are essential for working musicians, they still rely heavily on live performances for most of their income. Both Dupuis and Rodenbough are touring this fall — Dupuis and Speedy Ortiz to support their fourth studio album, Rabbit, Rabbit, and Rodenbough and Mipso for the release of the band’s sixth LP, Book of Fools — and they are getting loud about fair compensation.

“The reality for touring artists is that you’re working 24 hours a day because you’re either traveling or loading in or performing or selling your things, and you make maybe $50, which is not sustainable,” says Dupuis.

She is one of the voices behind a UMAW campaign that is challenging compensation practices at one of the industry’s most high-profile festivals, South by Southwest (SXSW).

“Many artists have the dream or goal to play SXSW, but they pay artists who perform in a pretty draconian way,” says Dupuis. According to UMAW, SXSW collected $270,000 in artist application fees in 2022, but only paid a total of $32,000 to musicians to perform at that year’s event. As application fees have risen from $40 to $55 per act over the last 10 years, US-based solo artists are paid either a $100 appearance fee (bands receive $250) or an event wristband, while international acts receive only a wristband and zero payment.

“The pandemic made us stop and look at how outdated these payment modalities are and will continue to be unless there are collective actions,” Dupuis says.

Since the pandemic began, Ribot has joined members of MWA, UMAW, Bandcamp United, Secretly Group, and other activist organizations to picket the New York offices of Penske Media — the majority owner of SXSW (which also publishes music and entertainment magazines like Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety). He spoke at a fair pay rally at SXSW and joined local advocacy groups AFM Local 433 and Austin Texas Musicians to lobby the Austin City Council for fair pay.

These efforts seem to be working:  In June, the council’s Parks and Recreation Board unanimously passed a recommendation requiring SXSW to change artist compensation before the city waives fees at city-owned spaces — a step forward for the collective musicians’ movement. Shortly thereafter, the festival announced a new compensation structure for 2024: $350 for bands and $150 for solo artists, or about $100 more per performance.

And these coalitions have staying power. While Dupuis says the days of nonstop Zoom action meetings went away when people returned to work and life, “there’s certainly been great awareness of what organizing can accomplish, and it’s helping to change our ideas of what touring looks like and what compensation looks like.

“In the ideal world, we would be like other countries and have government funding for the arts, and that could fill in some of the gaps, but the commonality across all UMAW projects is the knowledge and confidence that you can ask for things that will make a difference in the live music space.”