LOS ANGELES — Every day, Joey DeFrancesco hears from fellow musicians who see actors and screenwriters on strike, and wish they were on a picket line too.
“A lot of musicians are really angry now. I get messages all the time asking ‘Why aren’t we on strike?’” said DeFrancesco, guitarist for the rock band Downtown Boys and co-founder of the activist nonprofit group United Musicians and Allied Workers. “Writers and actors are on strike demanding changes in how streaming platforms compensate labor. They’re fighting at the bargaining table. Most musicians don’t even have a seat at that table.”
All the fears and complaints that Hollywood actors and writers have about low streaming-service payouts and threats of digital replacement are an ever-present reality for musicians and songwriters, too. Yet the rockers, pop singers and hip-hop artists who create the vast majority of music we consume are not on strike to protest their paltry royalties or AI inroads. One big reason? They’re not unionized.
“We have to overcome some legal hurdles, but we could unionize musicians tomorrow,” DeFrancesco said. “SAG is like an alternate history for musicians. We’ve done all this before and won, just not within recent memory.”
Some musicians are in fact unionized. The American Federation of Musicians, with 80,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, collectively bargains for orchestra, film and live theater musicians. The L.A. Phil’s summer calendar is proceeding as normal under their contract through AFM.
But the vast majority of artists who dominate the streaming charts and fill nightclubs, arenas and stadiums have no such counterpart.
Under current law, without a National Labor Relations Board-recognized union that can collectively bargain for them, pop musicians and songwriters are treated as independent contractors licensing their work.
That wasn’t always the case in the U.S.
In 1942, the then-136,000 members of the AFM authorized a strike, fearing that radio stations and allied record labels would take advantage of the new technology of vinyl records to siphon away their performance earnings.
The musicians’ union won — hundreds of labels, and later movie and TV producers and advertisers, signed contracts paying a portion of sales into a fund that would hire live musicians to perform free concerts. After a second strike in 1948, for decades, the Music Performance Trust Fund was the single largest music buyer and employer of musicians in the country, and the AFM had 250,000 members at its peak in the 1950s.
Yet after the second world war, a conservative federal government passed a pair of laws — the Lea Act in 1946 and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 — that limited the AFM’s ability to negotiate for better pay and hiring practices.
In the ’50s, the AFM, owing in part to racist beliefs about Black music, didn’t organize then-emerging rock and R&B acts. Black musicians organized valiantly, but segregation limited their abilities to perform and benefit from the trust fund.
Union infighting split the group’s allegiances across class, and in the ’70s, courts ruled that gigging acts were actually independent contractors, with the singer or bandleader as the nominal employer, kneecapping unions’ ability to organize. Labels dramatically cut payments to the MPTF in the ’80s, and in 1984, the National Labor Relations Board declined to give the Society of Composers and Lyricists the ability to collectively bargain with film and TV producers, saying its members like Henry Mancini, John Williams and Quincy Jones were independent contractors.
Moreover, federal laws like the Sherman Anti-Trust Act limit artists’ and songwriters’ ability to collectively withdraw their music in protest of streaming platforms and other companies. Federal copyright law sets a standard royalty rate for songwriters, who have pushed to raise it over time, but songwriters cannot withdraw published songs in protest.
Performing rights organizations such as ASCAP, BMI and SESAC (which collect and distribute royalties when an artist’s work is performed in public) would be another place to look for collective organizing. But ASCAP and BMI operate under a federal consent decree that limits, among other things, their ability to bargain on behalf of members for better deals.
Other musicians fear retaliation or blacklisting from services like Spotify should they stick their necks out around organizing. In an industry where every act is its own small business, it’s confusing to know where to turn for solidarity.
Many of the industry’s most marginalized artists are also the most disconnected from established labor organizations.
So in this summer of labor unrest, where can artists and songwriters turn if they’ve caught strike fever?
“Thousands of musicians work under union contracts daily on film and TV scoring,” said Marc Sazer, the vice president of the AFM Local 47, based in Burbank. “But our inability to make a sustainable living in the streaming economy is in a similar place with the actors and session singers in SAG-AFTRA.”
The union welcomes pop musicians and other performers to join, if they want to see the impacts of labor organizing and find community, though for now its bargaining ability outside of film and TV, orchestras and theater is limited.
“Union membership is open to everyone,” Sazer said. “We’re not in the business of turning people away, and we want to make ourselves more and more relevant.”
A few in-progress bills would open up significant new paths for organizing and create pressure for better pay. A broad-based labor bill like the PRO Act would expand workers’ rights to organize in ways that would help musicians too.
Other industry-specific bills would make an immediate difference. Under a loophole in current law (one that the National Association of Broadcasters fought to keep), artists in the U.S. do not get paid when their music is played on AM/FM radio (only songwriters receive payments from terrestrial radio spins). The American Music Fairness Act would update that to better match the rest of the world’s practices and pay performers for broadcasting their work.
Even more significantly, the Protect Working Musicians Act would update federal antitrust law to allow an exemption for musicians to collectively bargain with streaming services and other companies.
Some new unions have emerged in the music industry, like recent drives at Bandcamp and indie label conglomerate Secretly Group. Organizations like the Future of Music Coalition and United Musicians and Allied Workers have successfully mounted pressure campaigns, like the Justice at Spotify picket campaign and another to raise performances fees for artists at South By Southwest, whose meager payouts were a bane of touring artists.
After generations of pain from piracy, low streaming service payouts, pandemic-era blows to touring income and now threats of inflation, AI and other worries, musicians don’t have much more to lose, DeFrancesco said.
“The very term ‘gig workers’ connotes musicians’ precarious workplace. They have few rights, they’re fairly unorganized with low pay at whims of their employers,” DeFrancesco said. “Actors are well organized, and the only way to get power is understanding that we’ve got to do this together.”
