Worker’s Song

When Chappell Roan called for record labels to provide health insurance for their artists at the Grammys earlier this year, a number of commentators were quick to point out that some already do: artists signed to major labels, who are signatories to the contracts with the major performers’ unions, are eligible for SAG-AFTRA coverage. Their session-musician counterparts, meanwhile, can qualify for similar benefits through the once-powerful American Federation of Musicians (AFM). But as artists face new challenges specific to the twenty-first century—poverty-level streaming royalties, AI ghost artists, corporate consolidation of ticketing and touring—traditional unions have come to be seen as irrelevant, anachronistic. Most musicians will go their entire careers without ever signing a union card.

New and energetic but much smaller groups, rooted in pandemic-era organizing, have sprung up to fill the void: Liz Pelly, in her recent anti-Spotify blockbuster Mood Machine, focuses in particular on the media-savvy United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW). Though their advocates and spokespeople have a tendency to use the word union loosely, they’re better understood as advocacy and lobbying groups than labor unions in the traditional or legal sense. Despite UMAW’s robust social media presence, their numbers and structural leverage are fractions of those of the AFM.

And yet the current moment appears to offer what hasn’t been seen in generations: an opportunity to close the long-standing breach between the unions and independent musicians, harnessing the institutional power of the former to the newfound energy of the latter. Independent musicians want health insurance and the kind of security offered by pensions; the extant musicians’ union offers them. Why can’t they seem to get along? That is to say—what is “new,” or what could be new, about what Pelly calls the “new music labor movement?”

For most of recorded history, there were two ways of making a living as a musician. You could work for a patron—the court, the church, an individual aristocrat—or you could sing for your supper, sometimes literally, as an itinerant minstrel. Then, by the turn of the twentieth century, a third option opened, that of recording artist, in which little mass-produced widgets could go do the supper-singing for you and send the money back home. If, for the sake of argument, that third window closed at some point between the advent of Napster and Spotify, the two older models remain: patronage (grant funding, corporate licensing, academic sinecures) and live performance.

Musicians’ associations in the pre-recording era focused on exclusive credentialing and mutual assistance. The medieval guilds were replaced as the patronage model lost its primacy to the commercial. The “gentlemen” (elite performers working for private employers) were joined by the “players” (jobbing plebs) as the new associations adopted the cross-class trade-union model, with its new external focus on negotiation with individual employers. The unions that arose in the Anglophone world alongside the recording industry in the 1890s were more traditional labor unions, expanding and organizing on the level of industry and sector rather than individual, localized workplace, and confronting corporate adversaries (labels, broadcasters). The AFM and its overseas counterpart, the British Musicians’ Union, moved their focus from the mutual-aid guild model to that of an inclusive trade union focused on more jobs, higher pay, and better working conditions—in theaters, music halls, orchestras, night clubs, and then broadcast radio and television. They would now accept both skilled and unskilled, professional and amateur musicians, just as industrial unions combined both the skilled and unskilled trades: as long-time AFM leader James Petrillo famously said, “Since when is there any difference between Heifetz playing a fiddle and the fiddler in a tavern? They’re both musicians.” By 1903 the AFM claimed to represent 80 percent of the professional musicians in the United States—greater control over its field, writes Petrillo biographer Robert Leiter, than any other affiliated union in the American Federation of Labor. 

The story of the unions in the twentieth century was one of reaction to a series of new technological challenges to musicians’ jobs. A prime example, as detailed in Robin Kelley’s chapter in Three Strikes, was the AFM response to sound in movies. In 1926, the year before The Jazz Singer popularized pre-recorded sound to cinema, theater pits employed 22,000 musicians in the United States; by 1934, there were only 4,100. Fewer musicians’ salaries meant lower ticket prices and more daily showings, and attendance almost doubled. New York City’s Local 802 organized picket lines outside theaters beginning in fall 1936. But “the picket lines were easily ignored by a modern world anxious to check out the latest Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers flick,” Kelley writes. The union undertook an expensive PR campaign, with the slogan “Bring back flesh,” intended to convince moviegoers that they were suffering from a kind of false consciousness, and that they actually preferred live music to canned. But the campaign failed: “Movie attendance apparently did not waver, and musicians, for the most part, were not fulfilling their obligation to picket”—nor, Kelley documents, did other union members resist the urge to cross the picket lines to see new movies.

Solidarity between musicians’ unions and other trade unions was traditionally wobbly on the unresolved question of whether musicians were really workers, as opposed to more elite artists. Out of general discouragement, the pickets disintegrated; and the national AFM convention failed to support the New York local’s strike, which by summer 1937 was over. The story, Kelley writes, is “the tale of what happens when working-class consumption of popular culture overrides the interests or concerns of popular culture workers . . . a story about the limits of solidarity . . . [set by] consumers whose own self-interest may actually clash with the demands of laboring artists.”

The great “success” of union activity in the twentieth century is often considered to be the AFM recording strike of 1942–44. In keeping with its priority of live over recorded music, the union banned its members from recording. Labels initially covered the gap by releases from their catalog and vaults, then moved to highlighting vocalists (who were part of a different union and weren’t covered by the strike). Eventually, the labels caved, creating a royalty fund to reemploy some of the displaced musicians, which became the model for responding to home taping, satellite radio, and—at least in theory—streaming. But the strike didn’t keep records from replacing live music on the radio, and the record industry emerged unscathed. Within a decade, the union—under pressure from Hollywood studio musicians whose main business was recording—began to bargain away the royalty fund itself. New technology, it seems, can only be controlled and turned to musicians’ best advantage, not opposed.

In large part, this is because public opinion is almost always overwhelmingly in favor of the new, and attempts by musicians to convince them otherwise can come off as hectoring and out of touch. Young rock and rollers in the 1950s wanted to hear records played on the radio and at dance parties, no matter what the unions said. Music fans in the 1980s wanted to make cassette mixtapes and tape albums for their friends, no matter the “Home Taping Is Killing Music” inserts. Metallica’s 2000 lawsuit against Napster over illegal file-sharing didn’t stop students from sharing files, and the band’s PR loss—they were roundly mocked as cops and killjoys—far outweighed their legal victory. Meanwhile, a brief scroll through today’s Reddit and comment responses to critiques of Spotify reveals defensive reactions from music fans who love streaming’s “universal jukebox.”

New technologies may be disruptive to the existing population of working musicians, but even more irresistible to the general public than new technology are new forms of music, which may introduce new classes of musicians who don’t fit neatly into the existing professional categories. Take the rise of rock and roll. What could have been potential alliance between the AFM and the emergent genre foundered on mutual distrust and misunderstanding, as documented in Michael James Roberts’s book Tell Tchaikovsky the News.

While the AFM was no longer structured as a guild, which made a distinction between skilled members and unskilled amateurs—in some locals, prospective members had been obligated to pass a sight-reading test, which in itself would disqualify many rockers—the bias toward traditional training and skill remained. Meanwhile, the union’s retained its historical opposition to playing records on the radio (which eliminated jobs for live musicians) and importing foreign musicians (who, in theory, threatened domestic jobs). But records and DJs were crucial to the new musical culture, and kids wanted the British bands to tour the United States.

Even more, proto-rock’s association with the working class, both black and white, meant that it had a built-in critique of work itself, which the middle-class rockers of the 1960s integrated into their general countercultural worldview that working for “the man” made you a sucker. But despite the challenges from new technologies, the system had worked for the union musicians—it had made a middle-class lifestyle accessible, and their work respectable: the union contracts set minimum wages and working conditions, mandated contributions to pensions, and regularized their working lives. “Musicians who settled in Los Angeles,” writes music historian Marc Myers, “no longer had to scuffle to find work. In fact, just the opposite.” He quotes one saxophonist: “Musicians were living the dream.” In interviews for my book Band People, veteran Nashville musician Bruce Bouton refers wistfully to “being in the union all those golden years of Nashville recording, [when] it was, you sign the [union time] card, get paid, get your pension paid, get your health and welfare paid.”    

It’s not that rock musicians couldn’t join—the band MC5, for one, was active in the Detroit and Ann Arbor locals, trying to create a link between the young rockers and the old guard—but in general, the unions resisted organizing the new counterculture, and the young rockers were either oblivious or didn’t see the point. The AFM had won itself a seat at the establishment table, but to the longhairs, that was a problem by definition. The result was what Roberts elegantly frames as a “misalignment” in which the “structural left” (the unions) were allied with the “cultural right” (working-class and musical conservatism) against a “structural right”—in this case, the force of capital represented by the record labels—which had found it convenient to identify with the “cultural left” (the hippies). “Alienation of young people from the labor movement,” Roberts writes, “meant that rock musicians considered the musicians’ union irrelevant . . . a profound change from a few generations earlier, when jazz and classical music and the musicians’ union were part of the same culture.”

The effects of the mutual incomprehension were clear: AFM membership, which had peaked at 331,000 in 1976, was halved by 1995 and hovers around 70,000 today. Meanwhile, the major labels consolidated and took advantage of suspicion of the AFM to outsource production of records to independent record companies who weren’t signatories to the union recording agreements. As their power diminished, the unions returned to the more service-oriented approach to their remaining membership and took a less adversarial approach to corporate players and government regulators on issues like copyright extension and venue licensing. If the industrial, mechanical-reproduction era was a historical anomaly for musicians—as the “recording artist” emerged as a new way of making a living—perhaps so, too, were the aggressive, confrontational labor unions of the same period a temporary departure from the preindustrial guilds and associations focused on mutual aid and credentialing.

Many musicians are reflexively sympathetic to the romance of the union song, from Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger down through to Chumbawamba. But the binary that defines the essentially Marxist worldview of classic unionizing—bosses and proletarian workers, in a corporate industrial framework—is an uncomfortable fit with the ad hoc hierarchies and business relationships of the rock and pop world. Are the bosses, in one possible interpretation, bandleaders? Or are the bosses the record labels? These relationships are explicitly time-constrained work-for-hire, which offers little legal leverage; and, given the competition for such relationships, little practical leverage. From the point of view of labor law, band people are employed by their bandleader or band corporation, and can only legally strike against those entities. Their relationship with labels, distributors, and streaming companies, meanwhile, are purely voluntary—band people and bands are independent contractors, “gig workers” like Uber drivers.

Musician’s bargaining positions could be clarified and strengthened by North Carolina Representative Deborah Ross’s proposed Protect Working Musicians Act, which would allow “independent artists to band together and collectively negotiate with large streaming platforms and AI developers,” without relying on intermediaries like distributors. Currently, musicians are prevented by antitrust law from coordinating, say, a mass pulling of catalogs from Spotify, which would be considered the actions of an illegal cartel—the Ross bill would codify that right. And “musician” isn’t a simple category. Each role musicians play in their professional lives—songwriter, publisher, performer, master-owner—currently requires a different institutional representative: American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) or Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) for the songwriters, SoundExchange for master owners, and so on. The Ross bill would allow musicians to tell a cleaner, more complete story as, simply, musicians.

Crucial to legislative success seem to be two things: bipartisan sponsorship and a willing, or coercible, partner. The most prominent recent victory for organized musicians was 2018’s Music Modernization Act, which, among other things, established mechanical royalties for streaming, based on a “grand bargain” offering streaming services indemnity from infringement lawsuits in exchange for royalties. The MMA was sponsored by conservative Republicans Bob Goodlatte and Orrin Hatch (himself a published songwriter). Intellectual property legislation can be of bipartisan interest: Republican Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee because of her Nashville constituents, and Republican Darrell Issa of California because he made his money on royalties from a car alarm patent, have all been unexpected bedfellows in versions of the 2015 Fair Play Fair Pay and 2021 Music Fairness acts, which would provide royalties to performers for AM/FM radio play.

One of the lessons here would seem to be that demands on streaming companies—like the penny-a-stream invoked in the Living Wage for Musicians Act introduced in March 2024 by the Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib—are useful for driving conversation but will be stillborn without cross-ideological partners and committee sponsors. More importantly, they will fail if they don’t offer either a carrot or a stick to force streaming companies to a deal. Regulatory solutions, like potential FTC enforcement actions against Spotify for unfair and deceptive practices associated with their “ghost artist” and “Discovery Mode” programs, could provide such a point of leverage. But all of this seems unlikely under Trump 2.0.

There are, perhaps, softer targets closer to home. In 1999, Roberts, along with labor scholar Stanley Aronowitz, authored a study commissioned by New York City’s Local 802 called “The Irony of the Indies,” which concluded that independent record labels—as non-signatories to the AFM recording contracts—constituted the music industry’s version of the outsourcing taking place contemporaneously in other fields. While the canonical indie labels of the 1980s and 1990s were certainly not consciously undercutting musicians’ union power—rather, the attempt was to do an end run around mainstream gatekeepers and set up an entire alternate music-industry ecosystem—Aronowitz and Roberts make a convincing case that the effect was the same. As another group highlighted by Pelly, the more jazz-adjacent Music Workers Alliance (MWA), puts it,

Although many of us record for indie labels, we don’t believe that business arrangements in which artists are expected to fund some or all recording expenses out of pocket in exchange for larger back end payments are inherently “anti-corporate” or “progressive.” . . . No compelling case can be made that small businesses generally pay or treat music workers any better than large ones. Furthermore, the major labels remain the only unionized sector of the recording economy, where music workers are guaranteed good wages and benefits.

And “indie,” in the current day, doesn’t necessarily mean “small”: the big-tent Beggars Group (4AD, Matador, Rough Trade, XL, and Young Turks) is inarguably a major business. North Carolina’s Merge Records has had multiple Billboard top tens, and is distributed by a NASDAQ-listed public company that counts among other clients Walmart, Target, GameStop, and Costco.

It would seem that indie musicians, while supporting the long, slow, patient coalition-building that can produce transformative legislation, have at least the opening to have uncomfortable but potentially productive conversations with their own bands, local venues, established independent labels—and their union locals. Indie musicians could build alternative union-like structures, as some of the newer organizations seem to be moving toward, using freelancer’s guilds to replace some of the health care, pension, and administrative functions of the official unions. Or they could integrate with the existing AFM locals by exerting pressure on indie labels to become union signatories, or even setting up band LLCs and S-Corps as small union shops. This has the advantage of building on past union achievements—and reintegrating independent musicians under the union framework and getting access to union benefits.

It requires, of course, a willing and interested partner at the local, who understands the benefit of meeting the indie infrastructure halfway. The mostly New York-based MWA presents an interesting case in that they acknowledge the existence of the AFM and its limitations—but at the same time sees the AFM as a potential ally and partner. (In part, this is because many of its members are jazz musicians and educators whose careers have brought them into more contact with the union than their indie-rock counterparts; but also because several of them are union members for aspirational and ideological reasons.) Their membership also overlaps with the Indie Musicians Caucus (IMC) of New York’s Local 802, a “non-recognized caucus” of AFM members who envision an AFM capable of integrating musicians from indie rock, hip-hop, DJs, and the other traditionally non-union spheres that constitute the vast majority of working musicians today. (Besides institutional inertia, Local 802 currently has no dedicated organizing staff.) In the meantime, the MWA gestures toward a kind of parallel organizing which wouldn’t preclude a future assimilation into the local: their Fair Recording Guidelines contract, for instance, meant to establish baseline minimum pay for independent or home recording sessions, is purposefully written to not conflict with union contracts.

In an ideal world, these newer groups would be able to be integrate into the existing framework of the AFM. But while some representatives of Local 802—which focuses on orchestras, Broadway, and television—have expressed interest in the energy to organize independent musicians, members of the IMC were rejected as delegates to the AFM national convention in 2023, where they hoped to advocate for changes to the union bylaws to allow more local flexibility for organizing the independents.

Other locals, though, have been more innovative. Nashville’s Local 257 has been a leader in the attempt to create scales to keep home and remote recording under the union umbrella at affordable rates: as low as $100 a song (comparable to or less than what many of my peers, for example, charge for freelance sessions). Portland’s Local 1000 offers a similar gesture with their Fair Trade Music Venue certification (including $50–100 minimum rates for opening acts). One can imagine, for example, North Carolina’s Local 500—which represents the area that is home to Merge Records, long-running venues like Local 506, and Representative Ross’ district—as a potential home base and test case for organizing a local indie scene’s major players.

The onus, too, is on the musicians themselves: It’s relatively painless to rail against Spotify online, but can they have those uncomfortable conversations with bandmates and label partners? A labor-sympathetic label, meanwhile, may find themselves placed in an automatically adversarial stance by labor lawyers or union representatives used to conflict (though groups like Beyond Neutrality offer a more co-operative approach). But historically, labor activists must make a choice: Are you a musician first—if the pressures of activism threaten your precarious work relationships—or an organizer?

To return, then, to the question of what is “new” about the “new music labor movement,” to what has catalyzed a renewed awareness by indie musicians of their status as cultural laborers: the easy answer was the pandemic, which gave them free time, and presented the accounting and bureaucratic challenge of conceiving of themselves as workers—and enumerating the nature of their work—to qualify for government relief.

Even more, though, is a psychological move away from the vision of the musician as bootstrapping entrepreneur. The fading away of the pot of gold at the end of the rock-star rainbow as reward for all that striving has made room for musicians to think of themselves as cultural laborers rather than, to quote UMAW founding member Joey La Neve Defrancesco, “temporarily embarrassed pop stars,” which could trump solidarity. Imagine the conflicted position of a DIY club, committed to accessibility and low ticket prices and with presumably leftist political sympathies, picketed by a musicians’ union for staging unaffiliated punk bands and not paying them a mandated minimum fee. If Live Nation has presented too formidable a challenge for today’s musicians to take on, would they have the appetite for more regional powers like New York’s Bowery Presents or Chicago’s 16 on Center—or their local DIY space? Corporate consolidation of regional venues is, on the one hand, often seen as a threat to independent music, but it could be reconceived as an opportunity: a unified, corporate entity is a more legible counterpart for collective bargaining than motley independents.

Still, the organizing of independent venues was, in fact, done during the rise of the AFM in the 1930s, when the union’s mid-century leader James Petrillo got his start organizing the musicians of Chinese restaurants in Chicago: “His methods were not tactful but they were very effective,” writes his biographer; and those early years included kidnapping, shootings, bombings of the union office and Petrillo’s house, and dustups with the vice president and Mussolini. During this time, the union did organize dance clubs—the equivalent of today’s rock venues—if “only with great difficulty . . . Years of militant pressure, boycotting, picketing, and policing were necessary.”

There are groups who do something quite like this today: songwriters’ performance rights organizations (PROs) like ASCAP and BMI, who and have a staff of field representatives who make sometimes contentious visits to bars, restaurants, and other public places that play music but haven’t bought the required license. (Admittedly, intellectual property rights are arguably easier to enforce than terms of employment.) Any touring musician will have encountered venues who bristle at paying the fees and assume you agree that they’re a shakedown even as you, the songwriter, rely on the quarterly checks from the PRO fees fund.

Though new times always call for new tactics, today’s “new music labor movement” may have significant commonalities with the old music labor model. The traditional bosses-and-drones model of thinking about unionizing artists—that individual musicians are exploited cogs in a corporate superstructure of Live Nation, Ticketmaster, Spotify, etc.—rhymes with both the old union concept of infinite replaceability and the preferred framing of the tech industry: the inexorable logic of industrialization and automation requires the idea that workers can be replaced by technology. If we insist that musicians are piecemeal artisans, we admit ourselves into that logic which leads to our replacement by generative AI—but also into the cyclical battle of musicians’ unions against technological automation, and its corporate sponsors.

The lessons of musicians’ unions past appear to include: focus on the material, bread-and-butter needs of musicians (all of them, not just the “skilled” or “professional” ones). Don’t let culture war issues alienate you from potential allies. You can’t convince the general public that technological progress is actually bad if they like it. Look for small but potentially transformative opportunities for organization close to home. And, perhaps, that energetic emerging collectives have the potential to enliven entrenched unions, while benefiting from their institutional knowledge and structural power: the question is whether to reinvent or to repair the wheel.