Musicians' Unions outside North America
And beyond the capitalist world
In Q&As around my recent book Band People, a common refrain was the eternally appealing (to a particular kind of person) question of whether certain workplace frustrations could be addressed by collective action—in this case, should bands and band people organize, even unionize?
Of course, musicians in the Anglophone world do have unions—the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) in North America, and the British Musicians’ Union (BMU) in the UK. But the widely-held perception of them as unequipped to address the needs of (particularly) pop and pop-adjacent musicians in the 21st century has sidelined them in the debates around the technological challenges of the day.
So I wrote for The Baffler about some of the similar challenges the AFM faced, some theories about their slide into relative irrelevance, some organizations attempting to fill the void, and, in general, why it’s so hard to organize musicians.
That article, for reasons of space and relevance, focused on the AFM. For those interested, here’s some supplementary material on the BMU (whose close relationship with the BBC shaped its response to rock); in Cuba and the Soviet Union, and Sweden.
A morbid fascination with the “decline of the working musician” is part of a larger post-pandemic consciousness of cultural labor. Media freelancers and other cultural workers have drawn on their experiences with remote work, and trying to explain to government assistance programs just what is it they do for a living—is it a living?—to focus on their status as laborers more than as artists. What kind of workers are musicians? Why is it so hard to get them to organize in their own best interests? And have the historical effects of actually-existing musicians’ unions—the AFM in North America, the British Musicians’ Union (BMU), not to mention the Soviet Composers’ Union and Cuba’s Union de Escritores y Artistas Cubanas—been in line with idealists’ values?
The beginning of the decline for both the BMU and the AFM was their inability to assimilate proto-rock (R&B, skiffle, and “hillbilly music”)—since unions are fundamentally protective groups, they’ve had historical difficulty in situations when market popularity introduced a new “kind” of musician, whether jazz, rock, hip-hop, or electronic. The BMU had built its power on a symbiotic relationship with the BBC, which by the mid-20th century was arguably the biggest single employer of musicians in history. (I’m drawing here on John Williamson and Martin Cloonan’s Players’ Work Time: A History of the British Musicians’ Union, 1893–2013.) But that relationship was built on the BBC’s employment of live musicians. From the standpoint of musicians’ unions, recording technology and commercial records were as existential a threat as generative AI is today: mid-century union bosses had grown up in a time when the introduction of sound to movie houses had put thousands of theater orchestra musicians out of work virtually overnight, and they assumed the same would happen to live music on the radio. But the new music was premised on recordings; and the popular American bands were largely prohibited from touring by the union’s protections (a story for a different time), the only way people could hear American music was DJed “record hops.” While this was nominally prevented by the union—again, to protect the jobs of the bands—in practice, the popularity of the records and public pressure made this hard to enforce: dance floors filled for the records between band breaks, and emptied when the bands re-appeared (one promoter, the later-infamous Jimmy Savile, “simply paid the [live] bands not to appear”). The result was the legendary Radio Caroline and other offshore “pirate radio” stations broadcasting pop music, which undercut the BBC monopoly both in forcing the introduction of commercial radio in the UK in competition with the new BBC pop station Radio 1, then still kneecapped by “needle time” restrictions (complainers against the union restrictions included indie hero John Peel). Meanwhile, competing union quotas for touring musicians kept popular American swing bands out of England; then, later, British invasion bands from the U.S.: from the unions’ point of view, Louis Armstrong was taking a job from a British trumpeter, and any decent American group could play as well as the Beatles. From the fans’ point of view, the unions were establishment dinosaurs missing the point.
The models from the outside the capitalist world are uninspiring, trading financial security for government oversight and intervention: The Union of Soviet Composers (one of four “creative unions,” alongside writers, architects, and visual artists) wasn’t a trade union, but a professional organization based on “expertise, authority, and agency”—more like the old guilds which set standards and controlled membership; in this case, composers, musicologists, and pop songwriters, but not performers. (This distinction, wrote Kiril Tomoff in his Creative Union, was premised on “a distinction between intellectual and technical labor;” performers were considered full-time workers in trade unions associated with a particular factory-analogous workplace like a theater.) After failed attempts to first suppress Western pop music, then, Tomoff writes, “explain to young audiences why they should not be attracted to it,” Soviet authorities tried to assimilate rock under the auspices of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol), which opened official Rock Clubs in various Soviet cities. The Rock Clubs, as Maria Sonevytsky describes in her book Tantsi, were an attempt at solving a problem familiar from the other union histories: integrating popular “amateurs” into the existing professional unions. “[B]eginning in the mid-1970s,” Sonevytsky writes, underground singer-songwriters, then bands, were offered a deal: “in exchange for some degree of Komsomol oversight, these musicians could finally get access to some of the equipment (microphones, amplifiers, etc.) and venues that they had been denied;” as well as royalties and official promotion. To play at Kyiv Rock Club, “a band had to first fill out an application and answer questions posed by a committee”—for example, “What do you intend to say with your artistry?”
But first, the Komsomol had to solve another age-old question: how to separate the amateurs from the professionals. The procedure of tarifikatsia was adapted from a tiered level of classification of farm laborers: the band would play an audition concert in front of a board of experts, who would assign them to one of four levels, each guaranteeing a different level of wage and access to more or less prestigious venues. Meanwhile, approved bands also had to submit their lyrics to a process of censorship called litovannia: “the printed text of all song lyrics had to be submitted to a panel … a day before the public concert, the Komsomol would set up a stage, and the band would perform in front of a committee…six people sitting at a long table with a red tablecloth, dutifully following along with the printed-out lyrics…Finally, if all went according to plan, the committee would stamp the lyrics…as proof of their right to perform.”
The post-revolutionary Cubans followed the Soviet model of classification and accreditation (including the judgment of the obligatory panel of experts from the conservatory), which they called the plantilla system, administered by the National Association of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). (I’m drawing here from Robin D. Moore’s Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba.) Like the Soviets, the Cubans starting in the 1960s assigned musicians according to a three-tiered system, to each of which was assigned a monthly salary for a set number of performances (usually 6 to 16). Anyone wanting to be a professional musician had to be a conservatory graduate (and undergo periods of military service and manual labor); those rejected (like folk musicians who didn’t read music) had to find a different official job; then take ad hoc (officially) unpaid gigs until they could prove they were playing at least twenty a month, at which point they could reapply. Official youth organizations, and an initiative called the Amateur’s Movement, supported the formation of rock bands (and “occasional informal courses on rapping”). Unlike the Soviets, who retained systems of copyright and royalties, the Cubans went farther, abolishing copyright in 1967, and giving a government agency the power to act as, essentially, manager and booking agent for every professional musician on the island, setting work schedules, locations, even colleagues (i.e., other band members). While copyright was re-established and the plantilla system began to wither in the 1990s into a regime of taxation more than management, UNEAC remains a tool for both accrediting and promoting musicians, but also maintaining political control over and conformity among them.
Sweden, which has identified pop music as a core national export and invested government resources accordingly, has had since 1959 a version of this accreditation as a form of music education: the Studie Framjandet offers rehearsal and recording space, mentorship, even a small stipend to teenage bands who registered as “study circles.” (Adult musicians, meanwhile, can access what would seem to Americans an astonishing variety of government support.) One can even envision—theorists like Bernard Miège have—a world in which the prevailing rentier model (in which musicians are compensated by royalties derived from their copyrights) is replaced by one more like that of scientists on the payrolls of pharmaceutical companies: in which in exchange for regular paychecks, pensions, and benefits, the company owns the exploitable patents for any discoveries made by the individual scientists. Would band people, in exchange for a middle-class salary and benefits for some portion of their working life, sign over the rights to any songs and recordings made while under that employment? Would they take the gamble of forgoing unexpected millions from a hit song to protect yourself from the far greater chance of failure? Would they exchange control of the use of their work—in advertising, political campaigns, reissues and repackaging—for security? Can both sides of musicians—the fiercely independent artist, and the vulnerable artisan—be reconciled? Or is a sacrifice—on the one hand, security; on the other, control—inescapable?