As much as we might hate to admit it, we all know that the darkside of the way streaming has revolutionized our listening habits is the difficult position in which it has put the artists we love. In no uncertain terms, from a business perspective, musicians are worse off than ever. Streaming has squeezed their revenue streams at every turn, further stratifying the gulf between the realities of the industry’s biggest earners and smaller, independent artists, in a massive way
Enter the Living Wages for Musician Act. Introduced earlier this year by Congress member’s Rashida Tlaib and Jamal Bowman, the bill is likely the most significant attempt yet to regulate and reform the streaming industry on behalf of artists. Through a series of new fees and taxes on providers, it seeks to establish a new fund which would be distributed towards musicians in the hopes of compensating them more fairly for their work.
All this was developed in partnership with the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, (aka UMAW). Damon Krukowski, a founding member of the organization, is somewhat uniquely situated at the intersection of scholarship and practice. He sees our current time as “this moment, you can see it in so many parts of our lives, where the tech business world has moved way faster than government can move.” As a prolific author and poet who has previously taught at Harvard, he has written at length about the socio-political ramifications of how we listen to music, both on his Substack and in multiple books including The New Analog. When he isn’t busy with all that, you may know him as the former drummer of seminal dream-pop outfit Galaxie 500 and presently, as a member of the duo Damon and Naomi.
How We Got Here:
It’s easy to see streaming as a modern problem, but it’s important to understand how we got to this point if we hope to ever get out of it.
In many ways streaming has left artists more isolated from one another than ever. To take a phrase from Krukowski, it’s “very atomizing.” It’s become more attainable than ever to work in a truly ‘DIY’ mode, wherein even the existence of a larger label is no longer a give-in. Big streaming companies have become accustomed to this kind of direct access. However, this has the potential to leave musicians in a more powerful collective bargaining position “because the industry is not too used to, well, not at all used to musicians organizing, and us asserting any kind of collective power. And that’s really what UMAW is about. And I think that’s where we’re groundbreaking. Musicians have traditionally not had any format or form, to be able to act collectively, and we’re trying to forge that.”
First coming to prominence in the mid to late 80’s with Galaxie 500, Krukowski’s career itself is “older than most everyone in UMAW.” From his point of view, things are not looking good for artists. But that’s not to say it’s always been rosy. Back in the late 80’s, “We didn’t literally have the same employer. And now we’re all working for a handful of huge corporations. That’s where our income comes from. Whether you’re putting a record out yourself, or you’re on an independent label, or you’re signing to a major, or wherever, you are still dependent on Spotify, Apple, Google and Amazon… So it is a classic kind of organizing opportunity. We are on the same shop floor, and such.” Streaming has pushed artists further apart than ever before, but in many ways, these companies are not prepared for the collective force they could face when they come back together.
Spotify in particular has tried, time and time again, to rehabilitate their image, positioning themselves as a win for artists, and a powerful tool that enables them to take the reins of their own career. Big corporations have been selling this ‘bootstraps’ story of enterprising self-empowerment to the little guy for as long as America has existed. Krukowski argues that “that’s part of the narrative they sell. They use this phrase over and over again, that they have “removed the gatekeepers.” It’s so outrageous, because what they’ve done is they’ve centralized gatekeepers to their own power.”
Confusing, hollow business jargon and puzzling statistics are often released by Spotify, such as the claim that of “the artists who generated at least $1M from Spotify royalties in 2023, 80% of them did not have a “hit.” Krukowski purports that that sort of data is intended to sell artists and the public on the idea that their platform is wide-open; A place where anybody, big and small, can make money. Upon closer inspection, it seems to suggest more so that a hefty chunk of Spotify’s payouts are being directed towards unexpected places. In fact, it would make logical sense if the biggest artists on the platform were receiving the largest chunk of the total earnings. Nobody is arguing against that! The fact they aren’t is not indicative of some sort of democratizing payment system. Rather, it’s pretty suspicious.
Spotify has tackled the issue of pushing their ridiculously lopsided royal model onto artists from a number of angles. As of late, “their official phrase for it is ‘two sided marketplace.’ You’ll find it all over their financial planning and financial statements. What that means is they will charge back for access to the algorithm and to reach the platform. That’s the game. Sure, you got rid of everybody else’s access to the gatekeeping. And now you are the gatekeeper. And then you charge for it. And that’s their direction for increasing their revenue.” Every once in a while, Spotify finds a new way to passively increase their profit without actually improving their product, and the two-sided marketplace is merely the latest iteration of that quest to tighten their grip on artists and listeners.
Although it is more digestible to dilute the issue of streaming royalties down to a game of smaller artists versus everyone else, in reality, it’s not so simple. In the streaming era, even major labels and superstars have been put at the mercy of streamers. At the end of the day, they’re losing money too. Thus, it’s not so surprising that even some big industry players who Krukowski and UMAW have met with haven’t hesitated to back the bill. “We’ve had pushback on various issues, but we also have incorporated those criticisms into the bill… And at this point, we feel like we have really gotten a lot of, certainly behind the scenes encouragement, from various stakeholders in the industry, and some outright cheering. Some very cautious like “‘Do you guys realize what you’re doing?’ kind of things!”
Across the board, people at all rungs of the industry ladder have gradually ceded ground to the streamers. Not to say that artists, labels, and listeners have ever been ‘buddy buddy’, so to speak, but the sort of power vacuum that has presently been filled by streamers widened exponentially when the record companies decided that they no longer needed to even feign a respect towards their customers.
Krukowski sees it more so as a “longer story arc that really has to do with digital. To some degree, it started when CDs entered the market, which were already digital, and were profitable. My career spans that. You know, my first record was analog only, vinyl only, and cassette. And then, when CDs came in, everything shifted right away. And then we have the dissolution of CDs, with Napaster or the iTunes Store downloads, and then we have streaming. So it’s been kind of like a continual kind of destabilization of the old analog industry.”
Initially, the digitization of the industry left labels completely flummoxed. For the first time, they found themselves outmaneuvered. “In that the first battle was Apple and the labels, which happened in the early 2000’s. When Apple launched the iTunes Store, they set the price for the product no matter what the track was. And they sort of blew up the album because they separated the tracks on the album, which means they diminished the labels uptake and power. And the labels just ran into it. They did not know what else to do. And they handed that over to Apple.” UMAW views this as an opportunity for them to once again bring labels over to their side. “They (labels) would like to pull back a better role for themselves. And that’s why we’ve had very good meetings with very big independent labels, who are also very frustrated with this situation. They don’t have any power either! And we’re offering a way to shake this up.”
Streaming has now held on longer than almost any other format, perhaps because where do you really go from here? It’s all become completely decentralized. There’s no real tangible ownership at all. “I mean, my own view is that that’s been the fact from the beginning. And streaming is the latest way to kind of game that. CDs were already a kind of a game like that, because they were copyable. And you can go back and look at the ad campaigns or articles that were replaced by the industry back in the 90s about CDs. It’s really amazing to see what they claimed. They said, all these things like, that the copies are just copies, and they couldn’t really be the same as the master and blah, “blah, blah, blah.” All these sorts of lies about even the technology to try and mask the fact that what they were doing was giving away the masters with every purchase. But they did that; They gave away the masters”
Labels immediately overcorrected their mistake, reacting to their loss of control by pointing the finger at the consumer. Krukowski recalls that “they had these huge ad campaigns in the 90s about ‘don’t steal music!’ And what it meant was: don’t copy your CD for a friend. Which was just the most bizarre message. The major labels spent a lot of effort to kind of plant this idea that it was an ethical choice, because when they came out, it did not feel like it was an ethical choice. It did not occur to any of us, of course. That was just a joke for all of us.” First, they gave away the keys to the store, so to speak. Then they tried to tell listeners that they were robbing it.
Krukowski sees that period as a crucial tipping point where labels made themselves the enemy of everyday people. It seems to me that it was then that they really cracked open the opportunity for a more all-encompassing level of control that has now been abused by streamers. “Personally, sharing music is a beautiful thing. It’s a part of what you do as a musician. It just makes no sense to me. It never made any sense to criminalize copying music.I think you could probably trace that line from trying to make it seem like an ethical issue, to ending up with this completely unethical system where musicians aren’t rewarded at all.”
At this point, we are probably used to the debate surrounding so-called ‘ethical listening’. Some say we shouldn’t use streamers at all. Others argue we should all only buy physical (but with vinyl prices having ballooned to an obscene point, this feels out of reach for many consumers). The fact of the matter is that it’s probably all but too late to convince people to dump streamers. Krukowski, who has written about this ethical dilemma for Pitchfork, says “Personally, I never feel like the burden should be put on the consumer in that way. I think, with the gaming that has happened with the platforms, it is to get between us and our fans. That’s the whole thing where they start to sell us back access to our listeners. That’s the two sides. So they’ve inserted themselves in between what is a very, very, basic, fundamental human relationship between making music and having it heard.”
Intriguingly, Krukowski feels that it’s more important to focus on building a direct relationship, a sense of community, between artist and listener. As streaming has atomized artists, it’s also isolated listeners. He singles out instances like Facebook charging for access to their own fans, or Spotify keeping the details of an artist’s mailing list internal, as examples of the ways that big tech and streamers have sought to further their role as a barrier to that vital, direct communication.
Rather than focusing on an individual’s listening habits and whether or not they’re ‘ethical,’ Krukowski argues “It’s not about the consumer, per se, versus the producer of music. It’s more about just making sure that we are attending to the communities that we built together and, usually, depend on. I think you can find a lot of that kind of talk in a lot of political action right now. The idea that you are looking to the community that you’re a part of, and making sure that you’re taking care of each other, and not allowing your employer, or some other platform, to dictate the terms that you are going to use to organize yourselves between each other. That’s because those are usually, as you started out this conversation (by saying), atomizing. They don’t want you to talk to each other; They don’t want you to communicate.”
As informed and opinionated as he is, he seems largely uninterested in the myopic debate over the increasingly mythical ‘ethical listener.’ All in all, his advice for artists and consumers alike is simple: “Remember, what are the communities that you really want to be a part of? And how do you nurture them? And how do you keep those times going? So that’s really what I got. That’s the more sort of ethical thing that I’d urge.”
The Living Wages for Musicians Act
Krukowski has long been one of the most vocal and knowledgeable advocates for musicians rights around, but his work with UMAW began in “lockdown during the pandemic, in 2020. It was pretty spontaneous. It was just coming together. Because we were all off the road, with no work. We were unemployed, when all the venues shut down. And we just started meeting and talking about what to do, and UMAW started, we broke into different groups, looking at different issues in the industry. And a group of us started looking at the streaming from the beginning.”
The Living Wages Act is an effort to move their fight into the wider arena of grassroots organizing–One that is much harder for big streamers to simply ignore.
As Krukowski puts it, “Government has real power,” and UMAW feels that a congressional action in support of their demands would be much more consequential than their past demands (despite their impassioned support) have been. To him, things have come to a kind of breaking point in the industry. “There will be regulation, there will be antitrust, there will be a balancing, I think, to come for all of these platforms. And we’re trying to make sure that the streaming is included in that.”
America is, of course, no stranger to grassroots politics. However, musicians organizing in this way is somewhat unprecedented. UMAW isn’t quite a unionization effort, but it’s pretty darn close. Krukowski clarified that “Under current labor laws in the US, we cannot really form a union. So we are an advocacy group, as of now. So we cannot be like SAG-AFTRA, or the writers union that had that spectacular victory in Hollywood last year. But we can get a lot of advice from them.”
At the end of the day, barring a total legislative restructuring of the way music royalties work in this country (which is, needless to say, a longshot), UMAW is also going to need to get some big players in the industry onboard. Big artists, major labels, and ultimately, the streamers themselves, are going to need to come to agreement on the path ahead. When I asked Krukowski how the streamers had responded thus far, he made it clear that UMAW had tried to craft the Living Wages Act in the spirit of this necessary compromise. “We’ve structured the bill very carefully to leave all contracts in place. So the bill doesn’t touch anybody’s existing deal. It doesn’t interrupt the flow of money that already is there from streaming. So, in one important respect, it doesn’t touch the platform’s or the labels. It just creates more money and puts it into the system that’s not there now, and it earmarks that money directly for recording sessions.” Ultimately, UMAW is “not trying to make people richer. We’re trying to get more people to be able to pay their bills, so it is geared toward that.”
Although the response thus far from industry players whose support may ultimately become key to UMAW’s success has been cautiously positive, there is one clause in the bill that seems destined to provoke eyebrow raises: the royalty cap.
Conceptually, the royalty cap clause intends to establish a limit on the number of streams on any given track, after which all subsequent revenue will go to a shared fund to be redistributed amongst all musicians on the platform. It struck me as the most radical reimagining in the text of the bill, and Krukowski seemed inclined to agree. “It’s a redistribution of income. Now, it didn’t used to be a radical idea to have redistributed income in the US. We have a progressive nominally progressive tax structure that used to be a lot more progressive. And we are supposed to be redistributing income from the wealthiest to support society. But as you know, that has been weakened over time, to the point where people are shocked at the concept. But that is the concept. It certainly does not exist in music royalties right now, and so we think it’s extremely innovative. We also think it’s crucial to making this bill achieve the goals that we wanted to achieve, which is to provide more working musicians with a sustainable, livable income.”
But are the (relative) mega-earners of the streaming age such as the largest major labels and biggest artists ever going to go for a proposal that would theoretically actually reduce their total payout?
“Again, we’ve had a lot of encouragement on this from surprising places. For example, managers of very big artists. One label that we’ve spoken to, who has artists that go over that cap, welcomed it too. And that’s because the way that the music business is structured right now is so extremely toward the top that everybody sees their income being sucked up by the platforms. So anything to redistribute that down is actually being welcomed by everybody we’ve spoken to so far.”
UMAW’s Political Future
Starting in late March, UMAW held a series of concerts across the country in support of the bill. I attended the New York show at Elsewhere, which featured Yo La Tengo, Slaughter, Beach Dog, The Ophelias, and Christelle Bofale. The bill was also set to include Heems, but puzzlingly, both to me and to the UMAW volunteers who I observed scrambling around, he didn’t show up until minutes before the venue’s curfew.
The show, much like UMAW itself, featured artists of a variety of genres and ages. The Ophelias delivered a tight, high energy set, relying heavily on a strong array of unreleased songs which were noticeably more ambitious and energetic than their still satisfying, more indie pop-oriented material. Long running outfit Slaughter, Beach Dog tore through 45 minutes heavy on twang-twinged tracks drawn from their latest album, Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling. The highlight was guitarist Jake Ewald’s extended solos, which were received by the crowd almost as enthusiastically as their now obligatory mega-viral Tik-tok hit “Acolyte.”
Headliner Yo La Tengo appeared, ever casually, in a stripped down configuration. With James McNew on Bass, Ira Kaplan solely on acoustic guitar, and Georgia Hubley appearing behind a miniscule stand-up drum set, they tore through a set heavy on b-sides and unexpected covers, including Neil Young’s “For the Turnstiles” (purportedly in celebration of the start of baseball season), John Cale’s “Andalucia,” and Black Flag’s “Nervous Breakdown.” The band also fielded audience requests, somewhat haphazardly performing “Moby Octopad” (ironically one of their few guitarless songs). Yo La Tengo seemed to thrive in the more casual environment of the concert, relishing the chance to play so loosely and improvisationally (despite mild onstage protestations from some band members about Ira’s spur of the moment setlist callouts!).
There is one thing that set the event apart from your typical concert. Outside the venue were representatives from New York City based political organizations tabling about their respective causes. A few of them spoke interstitially between sets at the concert, including one from a Palestinian advocacy group in favor of a Gaza ceasefire, and another form the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Personally, I found their words meaningful and even brave to be delivered in front of a crowd not necessarily primed for staunch politics. However, it got me thinking about whether or not their endorsement by UMAW amounted to a tacit affiliation with the bill itself. I wondered if Krukowski felt that the inclusion of speakers who endorsed causes that are, unfortunately, highly controversial in this Congress right now, such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation, or a Gaza ceasefire, might have any effect on the success of the bill?
“It’s an excellent question. I guess the way I should approach it is in what UMAW’s role is. We are advocates, from our perspective. So, we represent our constituents. We are this group of musicians. And we’re gonna push for the rights for our constituency, as hard as we can.” To him, UMAW is not, and is not interested in being, an apolitical organization. “We’re also a group of musicians that came together around a set of shared political views that put us very much in the progressive left wing of things. So that’s written into our sort of articles of foundation. So, it’s natural for UMAW to be aligning itself with like minded political groups in that way. Of course, our sponsor, by no coincidence, is Rashia Tlaib. The only Palestinian American in Congress. So this is tied together in progressive politics, from UMAW’s point of view.”
However, this doesn’t mean they aren’t conscious of the realities of getting a bill through congress today. Krukowski acknowledged that “it has to cross the party line, and it has to make sense to people from multiple political points of view. Fortunately, there is an amazingly strange, kind of wonderful history of music law in the Congress being bipartisan… We have specific precedent that we based it on that Congress has passed in the past. Those laws were all passed unanimously. The principle one, done in the 1990s, was called the PPRA, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. These were huge, sweeping laws that affected a lot of digital copyrights. And they were passed in the 90s, actually, unanimously, as the Congress was impeaching Clinton.”
As corny as it sounds, music unites people of all backgrounds and political creeds, and likewise, historically, music legislation seems to overcome times of, shall we say, staunch division. “Partly, it is because the Congress has a general attitude that ‘music is not political’. And that’s not UMAW’s view, but we’re fine with that. I think the other side of that is that music means a lot to a lot of different people. I mean, it is such a basic, universal pleasure that we all share.”
At the moment, UMAW is, above all, pushing for the change they seek via politics, and thus, they’ve already considered what it might take to cross the aisle. “We’ve had meetings with Republican Congress people, with their staff, and they’ve gone well. This was pre-Gaza. But, they knew that Rashida was our sponsor. They understood that we were coming from a progressive place. But they also understood, immediately, that they have musicians in their districts that need some kind of help.”
Krukowski and UMAW seem to anticipate that partisan politics will be easier to overcome than one might expect. “We are very, very hopeful that we will have no problem finding constituents in every district in the country. We already have them. We sorted our initial thing I was telling you about, Justice at Spotify. Almost 40,000 musicians, right, and we sorted that list by congressional district. We are not missing a single district in the country.” It goes without saying that in legislative terms, this broad national support is, to put it mildly, highly unusual. That being said, it lends some gravity to Krukowski’s claims that the Living Wages Act has something for those of all political persuasions.
Near the end of our conversation, he gave me some insight into his own theory behind how that unifying principle really plays out. “Before we launched this, we started reaching out to regional music groups, all over the place. A lot of them tend to be in very red districts. Because a lot of regional music is happening in more rural places. It’s not the pop music world. So you know, what the bill is about is about all music making. This gets back also to who’s actually streaming on Spotify. It’s not just the top of the charts. Everything is up there on streaming. And so that means that, you know, Cajun and Zydeco and trad jazz from New Orleans is there. That means that electric blues from West Tennessee is there. It means a ton of music from West Texas is there. It means that polka music from the Upper Midwest is there. It means that church music from red districts all over the country are there. They’re all recording music like they always did, and they’re all distributing it, and none of them are happy with platforms. So I’m personally very optimistic that we have a lot to offer to every representative in the house. And so far, it’s been a very, very warm reception. I mean, no one would stick up their neck for us. Except Rashida. And that is very telling about this moment. About who we are, and about who Rashida is, and about what you experienced at the show. So yes, it’s coming from there. But that doesn’t mean it can’t communicate, and can’t work for everybody.”
In essence, many of us can agree that something about the way we listen today is broken. The question is whether or not streaming is too far gone to fix it. Is it nothing more than a pipe-dream to imagine a world where artists of all sizes can reasonably hope to make a liveable wage off of their work? According to Krukowski (the self-professed “Mr. Optimism”), according to UMAW, and according to Representatives Tlaib and Bowman, it’s well within reach. Clearly, this is a complex issue, and there’s a lot to be said about the bill, but to Krukowski, it boils down to this: “‘This streaming thing is not working!’ It’s not working for anybody, hardly! I mean, you see even huge artists complain about it, you know? So it’s like, okay, something’s really wrong here! We’ve got to do something about it. But the industry is not doing enough, and they’re not doing it fast enough. So that’s why we have this opening. We’re taking it, because we just feel like no one else is saying this.”