Illustration by Luc Melanson
It’s easier than ever to listen to practically the entirety of recorded music. But for musicians, it’s harder than ever to make money. On Episode 31 of
The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk about the economics of the music industry with the English musician Tom Gray, who founded the #BrokenRecord campaign, and David Turner, who writes the newsletter Penny Fractions. Did streaming save music, or is it killing it? Should we blame Spotify or the record labels for the industry’s problems? And what should be done to make the music business more equitable?
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It doesn’t take a Leonardo-level intellect to figure out that the pandemic has been devastating for the arts economy. Live events were the first things to stop, and they will be the last to return. That means musicians, actors, and dancers, plus all the people who enable them to take the stage playwrights and choreographers, directors and conductors, lighting designers and makeup artists, roadies, ushers, ticket takers, theater managers have no way to make a living from their work, and haven’t for more than a year.
Still, I don’t think most of us appreciate just how bad things are. The crisis goes well beyond the performing arts. Surveys published last summer found that 90 percent of independent music venues were in danger of closing for good, but so were a third of museums. In a survey by the Music Workers Alliance, 71 percent of musicians and DJs reported a loss of income of at least 75 percent, and in another, by the Authors Guild, 60
Samantha Cabrera Friend Each Saturday outside a squat Logan Square bungalow, people in the community know they can come by for items like milk, eggs, fruit, and clothing. Some neighbors come prepared with carts to take home a whole box. This weekly food distribution began last spring as the small house transitioned from a hostel, garden, and interdisciplinary arts space for local artists to a sanctuary for LGBTQ asylum seekers released from immigration detention, calling it Casa Al-Fatiha. Here they could find a place to rest their heads and a community to rely on. The house, formerly known as Earphoria, once kept a schedule abundant with open mics, potlucks, and weekly shows. When in-person gatherings became impossible, two musicians decided to transform the space s art and music legacy into a new one.
The music industry, at just about every level below the C-suite, has had enough.
The recording business is still haunted by its 2000s slump, which resulted from a rapid decrease in physical and digital unit sales as well as the fallout from multiple economic recessions. Yet it’s largely recovered from those lows: The industry has been consistently profitable as a whole since 2014, thanks primarily to streaming and, in part, still-growing vinyl sales. But both artists and label staffers have time and again made clear that the industry’s newfound wealth is not trickling down to most of them; unjust label deals and the complicated mechanics of streaming finances have excluded them from this economic turnaround. And, after experiencing decades of career precarity while falling back on a fragile safety net, receiving little to no government support, and facing relentless deprivation due to the pandemic-induced economic crash, musicians and music workers in all sectors of the industry
This week, asking which advances qualify as genuine progress…
Last Friday, Ben Sisario of the
New York Times laid out some noteworthy developments in the international effort to make the music-streaming economy more equitable to artists. The state of play there underscores how ossified the systems for distributing and compensating visual art remain in 2021. But the comparison also invites a very serious question about whether visual artists are actually worse off as a result as well as whether that question misses the point entirely.
Sisario’s piece largely centers on the U.K., where the British Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee began investigating the business of streaming in October 2020. He writes that the group’s “aggressive questioning of tech and record executives” has “riveted the industry” throughout the proceedings, which will end with a formal report likely to be issued “in the coming weeks.”