Make Streaming Pay
Sign on to Support the
Living Wage for Musicians Act!
United Musicians and Allied Workers celebrates the introduction of the Living Wage for Musicians Act – led by Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman – to Congress. By creating a new streaming royalty, the bill would help ensure that artists and musicians can build sustainable careers in the digital age.
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Enough is enough!
Music workers create the enormous wealth that streaming platforms accumulate for their CEOs and investors year after year. But artists continue to be underpaid, misled, and otherwise exploited by streaming platforms. While artists experience declining wages and increasingly precarious employment, the music industry as a whole has reaped unprecedented profits, and CEOs of tech companies have become billionaires.
The Living Wage for Musicians Act is built to pay artists a minimum penny per stream, an amount calculated specifically to provide a working class artist a living wage from streaming.
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The Living Wage for Musicians Act would create a new royalty from streaming music that would bypass existing contracts, and go directly from platforms to artists.
The mechanism behind the Living Wage for Musicians Act is simple. The royalty would be funded through an additional subscription fee and a 10% levy on non-subscription revenue. This money would be paid into an Artist Compensation Royalty Fund, which will then be distributed directly to both featured and non-featured artists by a non-profit administrator. Congress set this precedent by unanimously passing laws in the 1990s that established a similar fund for money collected from manufacturers of recordable digital media, and a similar direct payment system to artists from Satellite Radio and Internet Broadcast platforms. As a result, the administrative system for collecting funds and distributing them directly to musicians already exists. The Living Wage for Musicians Act makes use of these same mechanisms for new digital audio technologies and applies them to streaming for the first time.
The Artist Compensation Royalty Fund will be distributed directly to recording musicians by a non-profit organization—just as SoundExchange does now for satellite radio and internet broadcast. Payouts from the fund are proportional to streams by track, same as they are calculated now—but with the crucial difference that this new money will go directly to artists, and not pass through labels.
Finally, the Living Wage for Musicians act includes a maximum payout per track, per month, in order to generate a more sustainable income for a broader and more diverse set of artists. Money exceeding this cap (as it stands, 1,000,000 streams for a track in a month) will be used to increase the payout per stream for all recording musicians. This will help us achieve our goals of helping musicians in every genre, across the US, have a more sustainable career.
The Living Wage for Musicians Act:
Adds new money to the music ecosystem
Creates a direct payment stream for musicians
Disrupts the industry from the bottom up
Encourages diversity in music and music makers
Empowers music fans
Drives economic growth
Revalues, dignifies, and empowers artists in society
How it Does This
1. Adds new money to the music ecosystem
Many of the so-called “fixes” to the music economy look at different ways of splitting up the money that already exists in the system. The streaming companies love this because they know the more we fight amongst ourselves, the less we look to them to correct the injustice they created. This bill says enough of that - instead of trying to split the pie they've given us, let’s just add another slice to the pie!
We seek to increase the amount of money that is injected into the music industry, and move that money directly from streaming subscribers to the artists and musicians. We know that they plan to increase the cost of a subscription and we will be out in front of it.
2. Creates an additional, direct payment stream for musicians
At every level of the music industry there are middlemen who take a cut of the money artists are generating. Paying artists directly gives them much needed mobility and agency in an often predatory landscape, where artists are often treated as least worthy of compensation.
As it stands, recording artists are not paid directly from streaming. When digital radio was created, the US Congress realized this was an error and created a way for artists and musicians to be paid directly in addition to rights holders. However, using their huge lobbying power, streaming companies have successfully bypassed the mandate to pay artists directly in the way that digital radio does. This bill corrects that wrong and creates the crucial path for money to flow directly to artists and musicians.
3. Disrupts the industry from the bottom up
The major labels (Sony, UMG, and Warner Music) have rigged the system to only support those at the top, making billions of dollars each year from streaming.
This bill corrects this massive injustice by creating an avenue for artists to be paid directly. This means more money in the hands of artists who are left out of the current system, and less control in the hands of the major label CEOs. The major labels have been reaping profits under the current system, but now it’s time for artists and musicians to finally get their fair share.
4. Encourages diversity in music and music makers
More and more musicians are forced to sustain themselves with second jobs and “side hustles.” Some are being pushed out of making music entirely because of the deeply unjust way money is distributed in the industry.
A more transparent, fair and equitable system of payments from streaming would extend the benefits of this new technology to genres that have been largely shut out from this new wealth including jazz, worship music, and the many regional musics that animate life in every corner of the nation.
We know that being a musician costs money and time. Historically, those who already have access to money and financial freedom are the ones who have time to focus on making music professionally. Because of this, people of color, people from lower economic brackets, and others who society and the music industry leaves behind are often underrepresented when we look at who can make a living from music.
Streaming companies have falsely lauded themselves as the saviors of the industry, creating the ability for more diverse artists to find financial success. This bill realizes that potential by giving more people money for the work they make, and allowing different people and different music to find financial success in streaming.
5. Empowers music fans
No music fan wants to give their money to tech CEOs. People pay for a streaming service because they love the bands, composers, or artists they listen to. Streaming services must remember everyone has different tastes, and that music outside of Top 40 pop is just as valuable to creating a vibrant music industry. This bill ensures both that consumers know their money is going to the artists they love, and that they will continue to have a vast and diverse catalog of music to listen to, discover, and enjoy.
6. Drives economic growth
Artists and musicians, for better or for worse, are small businesses. That means that we invest in our growth by paying other musicians, engineers, and producers. We go on tours that strengthen local communities across the nation. This bill understands that funding artists and musicians is a direct injection of money into the larger economy and will have reverberations throughout (and beyond) the music industry.
7. Revalues, dignifies, and empowers artists in society
We can imagine a day where the art we make is free from the restrictions of commerce, where artists' lives and work are valued inherently rather than always reduced to a dollar value. Until that day though, we will continue to fight to improve our material realities.
This bill is not a singular fix to solve all of the issues musicians and artists face, but rather a step forward towards revaluing and dignifying the arts in our society.
