Among musicians, disquiet is building – will they go on strike?

As actors and writers across the pond down tools in protest of unfair compensation and the threat posed by artificial intelligence, Will Pritchard asks why musicians facing similar challenges aren’t striking alongside them

Big names, like Swift and Sheeran, must stand in solidarity with less-powerful individuals (AFP/Getty/Invision/AP)

For almost as long as she has been writing songs, Helienne Lindvall has been fighting for the rights of songwriters. But it wasn’t until 2007 – when scriptwriters in the United States brought Hollywood to a juddering halt, buckled Daniel Craig’s stint as James Bond, and forced hours of repeats onto the air – that she realised the possibilities of taking that fight to a bigger stage.

As actors and writers in the US once again down tools over work conditions – joining train drivers, takeaway couriers, driving instructors, and university lecturers doing the same – Lindvall is feeling the momentum build. “This time,” she says, “I think the groundswell is even stronger among musicians.” She would know. As the current president of the European Composer & Songwriter Alliance, Lindvall finds herself among a number of organisations banding together for better rights for musicians and songwriters – but the list of challenges they face is not short.

In November last year, the charity Help Musicians found that as many as 80 per cent of professional musicians in the UK are struggling to meet basic living costs, and that a similar fraction is concerned they will be forced to leave the industry as a result. At the same time, the remuneration packets of their paymasters continue to bloat. So far, so familiar. The music industry has been built on the practice of players being stiffed by suits, but for some it feels like the divide has become starker in recent years. “We’re so deep into streaming, and seeing how it’s completely unsustainable for songwriters,” says Lindvall. “People are getting really fed up.” Another writer puts it more bluntly: “The dream of the independent music industry was that you just need 5,000 fans that will pay you £20 a year, they can be anywhere in the world. Now you can have hundreds of thousands of fans and you get f*** all.”

The plight of the UK’s working musicians has been further compounded by a drawn-out cost of living crisis and the creeping threat of new technologies; AI prime among them. One of the more alarming stories to emerge from the Hollywood SAG-AFTRA strikes is of extras and stand-in actors being ushered into on-set booths, having their bodies scanned, and the resulting images retooled to wander the backgrounds of movies forever more – creating an endless, eternal bank of actors for the small fee of a few hundred dollars each. This squeeze is something musicians can relate to. Streaming services are already flooded with bots and AI-generated tracks (trained on existing songs) that have been steadily eating away at their piece of the pie for years. In April, a fake collaboration between Drake and the Weeknd went viral after fans mistook the song for a leaked track. The person responsible for the upload claimed to be a ghostwriter tired of being ripped off by major labels.

The balance of power is stacked against those on whose talents and output the industry turns. Organising efforts to push back against these conditions, however, is far from straightforward. Broadly speaking, there are a couple of overarching reasons as to why musicians and songwriters in the UK aren’t forming pickets like their Hollywood counterparts.

Firstly, the vast majority are self-employed, meaning they don’t have access to the same employment rights as full-time employees – and, furthermore, are blocked from collective bargaining by UK competition law. (Though this situation is changing in Europe, thanks in part to the efforts of Lindvall and others.) Those musicians who are classed as employees are able to strike; players in the Royal Opera House orchestra voted last week in favour of potential action.

Secondly, the music industry is highly atomised. For any one writing session, studio recording, or live performance, each person in the room might have a different paymaster and discrepancies in the way they’re making their crumb. Composers writing for TV and film often work solo under distinct contracts, then there are music teachers, buskers, and more to consider. All are feeling the pinch in different ways and to different extents. This makes organising and coalescing under a single protest banner – even when there are obvious shared concerns – hugely difficult. Those who write music for film, for instance, are battling over so-called buyout contracts, meanwhile session artists want guaranteed royalties for the songs they play on, not just fees for their time (conversely, songwriters typically get royalties, but not fees for their time).

Some would argue all of this is by design. Lindvall says that these atomised conditions are bolstered by practices that have become standard in the industry; she’s heard from writers and producers who’ve been forbidden by labels from discussing their rates with other workers, under threat of losing future work. As has historically been the case, technology – currently streaming, with its corrosive effect on the value of music – has accelerated all of these grievances, in some cases into the realm of the existential. With so many working musicians struggling to make ends meet, the future of the sector as a whole comes grimly into question.

Members of The Writers Guild of America picket outside Fox Studios on 2 May 2023 in Los Angeles (AP)

There is also the not insignificant question of what form a strike, if one were possible, might take. “Because we’re all gig workers and often working with international clients, it’s hard to know if striking just in the UK would have much of an effect,” one composer for TV and film tells me. This is one way in which the challenges faced by musicians are not comparable to those making movies and TV. Screenwriters and actors withdrawing their labour can have an immediate effect: new releases are what bring in the big bucks. Music streaming, on the other hand, has shifted value onto existing releases (known in the industry as “catalogue”), which can be exploited in new ways by rights holders. Pulling out of live shows might work, but that course of action would likely hit artists a lot harder than it would the promoters putting on those shows – and, without unions providing hardship funds, it would likely be unsustainable in the long run.

So what routes to improved conditions are available to embattled music-makers? Tom Gray, a songwriter and campaigner whose indie band Gomez won the Mercury Music Prize in 1998, takes a long view of things. “I spent quite a lot of my young life going on marches and things, and nothing much came of them. A lot of my approach is informed by that,” he says. “People have different views on this, but I’d rather use the available machinery to try and bring about change than to stand around with a placard getting angry.” (Though speak to Gray for any amount of time and you’ll soon realise the lack of a placard doesn’t mean he isn’t angry.)

Most recently, he spearheaded the #BrokenRecord campaign, which successfully pushed for a government review into the economics of streaming and continues to needle at the industry’s chummy status quo. “We’ve got the industry in a headlock, right? They can’t get away from it. They’re having to talk with the government all the time about their business practices, which is not something that they like to do,” he says. Gray is the new chair of The Ivors Academy, the trade body for UK composers and songwriters, meaning his mouthpiece is now louder. Progress, however, is slow. “It’s a longer and more boring road,” he says, “but everything is a negotiation. Even a strike is really just the start of a negotiation.”

Festivalgoers walk at the Unfair Ground during last year’s Glastonbury festival (AFP/Getty)

Lindvall suggests that high-profile musicians have a bigger role to play. “We’re looking at SAG and thinking, ‘Wow, I wish we had people like George Clooney and Matt Damon that would act for us in that way,’” she says, pointing out that major labels plan entire financial years around a small handful of flagship releases. To see Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift standing in solidarity with their teams of lesser-known – and lesser-paid – writers, producers, session players, and live performers, Lindvall says, would, at the very least, force the conversation into board rooms. There are some willing to speak up, of course: US rapper Snoop Dogg recently broke from the script during a panel session discussing 50 years of hip-hop at the Milken Institute’s 2023 Global Conference, posing one simple question to streaming services: “Where the f*** is the money?”

Another sector that some musicians are looking to for inspiration is the gig economy. “The gig economy was named after us,” says Lindvall. “If people who drive Uber are able to unionise and protect their rights, then I think we should as well.” Indeed, many working musicians will feel they have more in common with taxi drivers operating at the whims of faceless paymasters than the Swifts and Sheerans of the world.

A lot of the time it was like, ‘I get paid like s*** but I love it, so I’ll just live poorly’ but now it’s more like, ‘I can’t actually physically do it, because I can’t eat’

Jake Thomas, organiser at Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain

Jake Thomas, an organiser at the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB), says the group tries to communicate to workers that they’re “not just fighting for your own work at the moment, you’re fighting for a sector that we all want to stay in and that we’d all like to be sustainable”. It’s an argument, he adds, that applies just as much to musicians as it does the delivery drivers, cleaners, foster carers and others represented by the IWGB who take pride in their work.

Musicians are expected to be grateful for the chance to make any money at all while pursuing something creative, just as app-based workers are told to appreciate the flexibility their lack of worker status (and rights) gives them – even when the result is declining pay rates and terrible working conditions. “A lot of the time it was like, ‘I get paid like s*** but I love it, so I’ll just live poorly,’” says Thomas. “But now it’s more like, ‘I can’t actually physically do it, because I can’t eat.’ So it’s basically a struggle to protect the profession in itself.” While labels, streaming services, TV commissioners, and concert promoters may not have adopted the algorithms that Uber et al use to calculate the minimum fees people will work for, the trajectory is the same. “It’s a race to the bottom,” says Gray.

Thomas says the negotiating and political work that established mass-membership organisations like The Ivors Academy and Musicians’ Union do is still important. But rapid developments in the music industry – technological and otherwise – require a new, more agile response. The IWGB doesn’t currently have a dedicated branch for self-employed musicians (though its remit goes well beyond couriers and drivers, and includes yoga teachers, nannies, and game developers), but its organising instincts are reflected in nascent organisations in the US, such as the Union of Musicians & Allied Workers, who are taking on the fight for musicians’ rights. It all starts with organising and, in some cases, figuring out how to do that. “There are things that have been rejected by mainstream unions as impossible or, you know, too much capacity or not worth the political effort. But we’re demonstrating that things can be done here,” says Thomas. He points to the outsourced cleaning staff at UCL, LSE, and the University of London who have consistently been standing up for better rights. “They were told it’s not possible,” he says. “But they keep winning.”

What’s clear is that no one involved in these fights is under any illusion as to the scale of the challenge they face. Building solidarity and forcing change has never been easy. But the groundswell Lindvall feels is real. The chorus of voices demanding a better way is getting louder – and spreads far beyond Hollywood. Soon enough, the sound of the summer of discontent will be impossible to ignore.