Artists on the frontlines: How strikes are redefining the US labor motion 

Labor Day celebrations within the U.S. usually deal with the long-suffering manufacturing sector on this nation, on the labor unions that signify these staff, and on the hard-won positive aspects achieved by the labor motion via the twentieth century. However after final summer season’s SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, and with video game artists on strike now, artists are all of a sudden the vanguard of the U.S. labor motion, marching in parades alongside Teamsters, United Auto Staff and United Steelworkers members.  

These strikes additionally function a uncommon and pressing reminder that artwork, like auto and metal manufacturing, is figure.  

Arts union strikes have been uncommon. The final time TV and movie actors and writers walked off the job was in 1960, below the management of then-SAG president Ronald Reagan. And the longest job motion within the arts sector was the final main musician’s strike, the so-called “recording ban” enacted from 1942-1944 by the president of the American Federation of Musicians.  

The American Federation of Musicians sought to guard dwell musical broadcasts on radio — a observe that was an enormous, regular and comparatively secure employment for a lot of musicians — from the rising tendency of radio stations to chop prices by enjoying business recordings on the air as a substitute. They finally succeeded in establishing a system of royalty payments, making certain that musicians can be compensated for the ways in which their recordings have been used to generate income for radio (and later for tv) broadcasting firms.   

The principal objective of the 1942 strike was to guard what was then a thriving musical center class. Certainly, the royalty system supplied some measure of earnings stability not only for the large stars of the day, like Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller, but in addition for much less heralded — however no much less essential — profession musicians. These musicians have been capable of preserve comparatively snug lives as major breadwinners. They may buy houses, elevate households and ship their children to school, largely on the quantity of their wages, royalties and residuals earned via their work within the movie, radio and tv recording industries.   

As we speak, that has all modified. It is simple (and fairly frequent) to take a look at the seismic technological improvements within the late twentieth and twenty first century which have squeezed musicians’ incomes as pure and essential elements of life in a free market financial system: if musicians are making much less cash, the argument goes, it’s as a result of they’ve didn’t adapt to a brand new world order.

The rise of digital musical instruments, reminiscent of synthesizers and MIDI, because the Nineteen Eighties has meant that, as a substitute of hiring dozens of musicians to play on a tv soundtrack or an promoting jingle, a producer can rent a person or a small workforce of artists to do the composition and programming.

On-line streaming has been catastrophic for musicians’ incomes potential, with firms reminiscent of Spotify intervening within the once-stable compensation system of royalties and residuals by negotiating new preparations with report labels that pay out a tiny fraction of what radio and tv used to.  

Nonetheless, work in music has at all times required adapting to new business applied sciences, going again to the advent of printed sheet music within the sixteenth century. Musicians have at all times managed it with relative success. Neither is the modern monetary squeeze attributable to a shrinking client market. In 2021 alone, Spotify’s annual income skyrocketed by 27 percent and it has climbed steadily ever since, leaving Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek with an estimated personal net worth of $4.9 billion.  

Individuals all over the place have repeatedly confirmed how a lot they need and wish music. So what’s completely different this time?

The issue is that musicians’ capability to collectively set up to guard their pursuits — and ours — has been hamstrung by generations of anti-labor rhetoric and coverage enacted by the U.S. authorities, particularly because the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose union-busting political career was satirically launched by his SAG presidency. With the AFM’s dwindling affect, musicians more and more function as atomized neoliberal free brokers, competing with each other for relative scraps whereas Ek and different business tycoons feast on the fruits of musicians’ labor.  

The implications are dire and manifold.

With fewer financial prospects, artists from socioeconomically marginalized backgrounds are much less more likely to make a profession out of music. The individuals who can nonetheless afford to take part within the business are more and more those that have entry to generational wealth — statistically white and higher class. What’s extra, with a rising variety of musicians seeking to crowdfunding and different pay-what-you-can instruments to generate earnings for themselves, paying for music feels much less like compensating somebody for his or her labor and extra like a philanthropic alternate. Philanthropy feels non-compulsory in a approach that an bill doesn’t, and yields precarious earnings that differs starkly from secure wage work.  

Fortunately, a number of musical staff and their allies are placing within the time to determine actual and sustainable options to those points. The American Federation of Musicians, regardless of its constraints, remains to be vibrantly energetic in cities throughout North America. It just lately performed a key role in lobbying for entry to federal employment insurance coverage advantages, particularly via the pandemic. Organizations just like the New York-based Music Workers Alliance have labored with the union on many points, together with lobbying for urgently wanted revisions to the Copyright Act to account for the monetary sinkhole that’s music streaming.

A systemic drawback just like the recuperation of the musical center class requires each a systemic response and networked collective motion. That collective is vast and deep, together with all musical staff, from the lead singer to the roadie and all listeners in between — in brief, anybody who cares about music.  

We all know that we will’t dwell with out music, so let’s do what we will to make sure that we get to proceed to dwell with it, and that aspiring artists from all walks of life can proceed to make a dwelling from it.  

Mark Laver is an affiliate professor of music at Grinnell Faculty.