Worker’s Song | Franz Nicolay

For most of recorded history, there were two ways of making a living as a musician. You could work for a patron—the court, the church, an individual aristocrat—or you could sing for your supper, sometimes literally, as an itinerant minstrel. Then, by the turn of the twentieth century, a third option opened, that of recording artist, in which little... See more

Though their advocates and spokespeople have a tendency to use the word union loosely, they’re better understood as advocacy and lobbying groups than labor unions in the traditional or legal sense. Despite UMAW’s robust social media presence, their numbers and structural leverage are fractions of those of the AFM.

The story, Kelley writes, is “the tale of what happens when working-class consumption of popular culture overrides the interests or concerns of popular culture workers . . . a story about the limits of solidarity . . . [set by] consumers whose own self-interest may actually clash with the demands of laboring artists.”

New technologies may be disruptive to the existing population of working musicians, but even more irresistible to the general public than new technology are new forms of music, which may introduce new classes of musicians who don’t fit neatly into the existing professional categories. Take the rise of rock and roll.

You can’t convince the general public that technological progress is actually bad if they like it.

The most prominent recent victory for organized musicians was 2018’s Music Modernization Act, which, among other things, established mechanical royalties for streaming, based on a “grand bargain” offering streaming services indemnity from infringement lawsuits in exchange for royalties. The MMA was sponsored by conservative Republicans Bob Goodlatt... See more

In 1926, the year before The Jazz Singer popularized pre-recorded sound to cinema, theater pits employed 22,000 musicians in the United States; by 1934, there were only 4,100. Fewer musicians’ salaries meant lower ticket prices and more daily showings, and attendance almost doubled. New York City’s Local 802 organized picket lines outside theaters ... See more

And “indie,” in the current day, doesn’t necessarily mean “small”: the big-tent Beggars Group (4AD, Matador, Rough Trade, XL, and Young Turks) is inarguably a major business. North Carolina’s Merge Records has had multiple Billboard top tens, and is distributed by a NASDAQ-listed public company that counts among other clients Walmart, Target, GameS... See more