“It’s important for songwriters to understand that they already have the power to strike,” David Israelite, president/CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), said at the organization’s annual meeting on June 11.
Speaking to a room of some of the most powerful music executives and songwriters in the business, Israelite’s annual speech is seen as a state of the union address for music publishing — and it also often includes a rousing call to action. This year, as new royalty opportunities and negotiations with AI companies and other tech platforms lay on the horizon, Israelite focused much of his remarks on how the music business can begin to work together to ensure better payments for songwriters in the future.
But in an industry as fractured as music, is that really possible?
As Israelite himself pointed out, songwriters are not able to unionize — the National Labor Relations Board ruled them independent contractors, and thus not eligible for union status, in 1984. But his point about songwriters’ ability to band together to stand up for better treatment is still correct. In their own way, songwriters could “strike” because they have “the power to say no” and walk away when Big Tech wants to license music at subpar rates.
Israelite explained later in his remarks, though, that often when music companies representing songwriters push back on Big Tech for better rates, “songwriters don’t stick together” with their representatives fighting for the better pay. Israelite also called upon “artists and their teams” to stand with songwriters in their plight, noting that “without a healthy songwriter economy, the entire system suffers.”
Often, the music business looks longingly to Hollywood, which is built on a deep respect for unions and solidarity with their fellow workers, an underpinning that music largely doesn’t have. Last year, when the Screenwriters Guild of America decided to strike in pursuit of better working conditions, their colleagues in other movie trades stood by them, even though it meant halting thousands of jobs and projects for the largely working-class people of the industry. Eventually, actors also joined in with their own strike. The result was improved protections around AI, minimum writers room sizes and bonuses for actors due to the success of made-for-streaming titles.
Why is it that the music industry is always divided and stuck in a race to the bottom while it seems those in the film/TV business are holding hands in solidarity? One important reason is that film and music are two very different art forms, and thus, very different businesses. The comparisons only go so far.
Every film that gets made is the result of at least a few million dollars, a number of corporate sign offs, endless permits, years of development and the artisanal labor of dozens-to-hundreds of people. The resulting artwork may be marketed by pointing out its biggest star, but it’s easy to see that these works are team efforts, and even the biggest egos in the room know they couldn’t do it on their own. Viewers know it, too — when a movie-goer sees Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, they know it was not just the result of the genius of Scorsese, but also Leonardo DiCaprio’s acting, perfect costuming, expert set design and the bestselling book from which it was adapted.
To put it simply, everyone sees film as a team sport — but music is seen as an individual one, and many artists these days want the bragging rights of having done all the creative work themselves. Of course, the reality is that today’s average Hot 100 hit has two-to-five songwriters, at least one producer and a recording artist, not to mention session musicians or other contributors. But the sheer fact that one could technically do it alone remains imprinted in the minds of musicians and their fans.
This individualistic mindset is furthered when one considers that a song, even if it was written with 20 other people, is marketed and sold as the extension of the recording artist alone — and as if it is a peek into their soul. Listeners don’t want to think that one artist’s new breakup anthem was really based on one of her producers’ relationships, not hers, or that another’s new hit was pitched to her by a group of songwriters she’s never met. Artists are the sole public salespeople and face of the songs, and if the song succeeds, its triumph is almost always publicly attributed to the artist.
But if the song fails, it’s also seen as all their fault — even if it was actually their A&R who pushed them to choose that single. It’s an enormous amount of pressure that often forces recording artists to think like cutthroat entrepreneurs fighting it out in a wildly competitive space, not members of a collective artistic class that can achieve better results if they stick together. (Meanwhile, Dakota Johnson has a good argument that the box office bomb that was Madame Web wasn’t entirely her fault).
With that in mind, it’s no surprise that during the latest chance musicians had to stand together with a company for better pay, it didn’t go smoothly. Last year, Universal Music Group decided to pull its catalog off TikTok, to fight for the “fair value” of music. The company also expressed concerns about AI and artist safety on the platform.
Yet some of its top talent did not stand in solidarity with them: artists like Ariana Grande, Olivia Rodrigo, Beyoncé (who worked with a UMPG songwriter on “Texas Hold Em”) and Taylor Swift found savvy ways to get back on the platform so they could continue to market the songs and albums they had slated for that period. Non-UMG artists asked their UMPG songwriters to not submit their metadata to streaming and social media services until the ban lifted — effectively foregoing all payment indefinitely — so that their songs could continue to stay on TikTok. All of that undercut artists’ and writers’ own financial interests in the long term in the hope of TikTok virality in the short term.
For artists, the pressure and risk of losing the audience for their art or ruining the momentum of a campaign was too high to stand with UMG, which didn’t give them a heads up that this was going to happen. The same thing went for the writers who supported them. Apparently, some top UMG signees were given a few days of warning about the TikTok boycott, but it still wasn’t enough time to halt album campaigns that were already in motion.
UMG had good intentions — getting a higher royalty from TikTok — but it put its artists in a tough spot: One album flop and an artist can leave the zeitgeist forever. One album flop and the tour the artist already booked doesn’t sell. One album flop and they never sell their vinyl inventory. One album flop… and UMG could drop them!
If the music industry tries to pursue a voluntary strike or boycott for fairer rates again, it also must contend with the added challenge that the three major music companies are publicly traded, and may not have a long-term appetite for financial suffering. Forget about the artists’ and songwriters’ issues for a second — are the music companies ready to stand up with creatives in a strike that lasts for more than one financial quarter?
The trick to getting a non-unionized push for better remuneration to happen, and to achieve industry-wide solidarity with that push, is rooted in greater communication. When I think of a successful, widespread coalition in music, I think of the passage of the Music Modernization Act (MMA) in 2018, which brought together multiple groups in the music business to support the much-needed bill.
Not everyone got exactly what they wanted from the MMA, but practically everyone agrees that life after the MMA is better than life before it. It wasn’t a strike, but this coalition building, spearheaded in part by the NMPA itself, could help inform a voluntary strike in the future.
The main difference was that without the MMA, millions of dollars were left on the table due to passive attribution and credit information, and it took the industry negotiating with itself to solve it; any collective action against a Big Tech company, on the other hand, would require active collaboration by the majority against an entity that may be paying some royalties to some participants, even if others feel like it is not enough.
It’s going to be a hard road to get the music industry to treat each other like comrades and not competitors. As Israelite notes, “this is not an easy conversation” to have. Music is not film, and it never will be, but it doesn’t mean headway is impossible.
