18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY MAY 25-31, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com Turn Up the Volume Things in the music industry are bad, but workers in the industry are getting organized. By Jael Goldfine FORUM In 2017, America’s most exciting punk band was scraping by. Downtown Boys, a Rhode Island-based act, had a cult following, a Coachella performance under their belt, and glowing reviews in every major music outlet. Despite their accolades, “a band like us…could barely get by, busting our ass, touring half the year, and live off that,” says drummer Joey La Neve DeFrancesco. Then Covid-19 struck, and what had been a precarious but doable situation became impossible. Passive income for all but the biggest superstar acts had already disappeared thanks to the economic upheaval that accompanied streaming. Then, as lockdown restrictions set in, touring—which, in the Spotify era, is where bands actually make most of their money—shut down. The pain didn’t stop when live music returned; instead, artists found that the industry was even less profitable for them than before. DeFrancesco believes there’s no going back. “Even that would be impossible—that very meager existence,” he says. This turmoil has created hardship for musicians. But it has also generated something else: the will to fight back against the hyper-consolidated, increasingly tech-run industry that appears determined to rob musicians of a sustainable career. Since 2020, a small but powerful labor movement has emerged, uniting musicians, industry workers and organizers in an attempt to get back a slice of the pie. This movement is still in its nascent stages, but it has notched a significant number of victories. The record label Secretly unionized in October. After a strike, YouTube Music became the first officially recognized union of workers at Google in April. United Musicians and Allied Workers, a group of music workers founded in 2020, collaborated with U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib on legislation that would force streamers to pay royalties comparable to physical record sales. The latest win came on May 19, when staff at Bandcamp voted to form a union. The stakes of this election are higher than they seem. Since 2007, Bandcamp has been a beloved platform for indie artists and music fans to discover, buy, and sell music unavailable through traditional channels. Bandcamp is not a streaming site, but has become central to the economy of independent music. Many indie artists use Bandcamp as their main website. Artists make under a penny per stream on Spotify, but when a fan buys an album or T-shirt on Bandcamp, the artist gets 82 percent of the profits. Fans have to stream a song 5,000 times for the artist to net the same $20 they see from a T-shirt purchase on Bandcamp. Soon, Bandcamp workers will begin bargaining for a contract. When they get one, they’ll be in a position to help steer Bandcamp’s owner, Epic Games (maker of the game “Fornite”), as it ventures forth into the metaverse, taking musicians’ security with it. People in other parts of the music business will take note, and maybe some of them will organize too. Jael Goldfine is an intern at The Nation and a reporter based in Brooklyn. OPINION Artists make under a penny per stream on Spotify.
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