Musician Unions

I have to highlight this Jacobin piece written by Joey DeFrancesco, who turned his final historiographical paper for my labor history seminar in the fall into a great public facing article on the history of musician unionism. This may in fact be the only time in history that a graduate level historiography actually became something useful for the public…….I didn’t even know he was doing this until he sent it to me, so no credit to me. Definitely check it out. A couple of excerpts:

This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the American Federation of Musicians’ 1942–44 strike against the recording industry. Demanding a bigger cut of the profits created by new recording technologies, the AFM’s roughly 136,000 members refused to produce any recordings for two full years. And they won.

Following the “recording ban,” as the strike is commonly known, the AFM secured contracts with over six hundred record labels that required each company to cough up a royalty fee for every record sold. The royalty fund was then used to pay musicians across the United States and Canada to perform free public concerts. For decades, the union-controlled fund was the largest employer of musicians in the country.

As musicians today contemplate how to demand more money from streaming services that pay just one-third of a cent per stream, the AFM’s successful strike offers key lessons about how to win a better deal for labor. After all, this radical change did not emerge from the actions of a few isolated celebrities, nor a disorganized consumer boycott, nor a tech utopian cure-all, but rather the flexing of strike power by an organized mass of music workers.

Then there’s the meat of the history. And then the conclusion:

Today the AFM remains an essential organization that protects the wages and benefits of some seventy thousand members performing in orchestras, movie studios, recording studios, and elsewhere. The union’s current legislative focus is the American Music Fairness Act, which — in the spirit of the MPTF — would benefit all musicians by finally requiring that performers be compensated for music played on terrestrial radio.

But the majority of musicians — particularly freelance musicians with many separate employers — remain unorganized, and a full-on confrontation with new music technologies has yet to happen. Streaming, for instance, now accounts for 83 percent of music industry revenues. Like the new recording technology of the 1930s, streaming creates a massive windfall for the major labels, plus a few tech giants like Spotify and YouTube, while working musicians see their wages and opportunities shrink every year.

The AFM did negotiate a contribution to the MPTF from the major labels’ streaming profits, and the American Music Fairness Act is a necessary step to raise the bar on all royalty payments. But streaming payouts remain miniscule for almost all artists. New organizations such as the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) have formed in recent years to join the fight and organize the vast numbers of unorganized musicians into the struggle for a fairer music industry. UMAW’s Justice at Spotify campaign has over thirty thousand music workers backing its demands and has held pickets in cities around the world, making it the largest-ever collective effort against a streaming service. UMAW joins various international efforts to redistribute streaming revenue back to musicians themselves, such as the #BrokenRecord campaign in the UK.

The AFM’s victorious strikes in the 1940s demonstrate that musicians can organize tens of thousands of musicians across hundreds of employers to win major victories for all music workers. Rather than retreating into an anti-technology stance, submitting to the logic that technology would inevitably destroy jobs, leaning on consumer activism, or demanding that record profits go solely to the small number of recording musicians, the AFM used the strike weapon to widely redistribute the surplus created by recording technology across its entire membership.

We must do the same today. A more just music industry will not be built by an unorganized shuffling between powerful tech platforms, the press releases of a few isolated millionaires, or a retreat into narrow guild unionism. Instead, music workers must again organize on a mass scale to demand more.