On unionizing band people

One of the questions that keeps coming up in Band People Q&As is about 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 unionize? 

Like most band people, I’m reflexively sympathetic to the romance of the union song, from Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger down through to Chumbawamba. As I write in the book, “the musician can sound very much like social theorist Götz Brief’s definition of the efficiently alienated worker: ‘From the standpoint of efficient management, the ideal production material is described as follows: It is obtained at the lowest possible cost but is nevertheless 100 percent effective; it is highly adaptable, is economical to use, and is readily moveable from place to place; it is a calculable quantity, can be used without unwelcome side effects, and can be replaced at a moment’s notice.’” 

But the binary that defines the essentially Marxist worldview of classic unionizing—bosses and proletarian workers, in a corporate industrial framework—is an uncomfortable fit with the the ad hoc hierarchies and business relationships of the rock and pop world. Are the bosses, in one possible interpretation, bandleaders? Anecdotally, attempts to coordinate support musicians to collectively approach a bandleader with frustrations often end with the spokesperson left holding the bag as other members clam up in the moment. If the band is explicitly hired, there’s no barrier to simply replacing them. Are the bosses record labels? These relationships are explicitly time-constrained work-for-hire, which offers little legal leverage; and, given the competition for such relationships, little practical leverage. (I do think it’s more than a little surprising that more bands don’t ask to be added to the label’s health insurance plan, though.)

From the book again: “For all musicians’ stereotypically leftist sympathies, ‘the rock profession is based on a highly individualistic, competitive approach to music, an approach rooted in ambition and free enterprise,’ wrote critic Simon Frith. ‘The ideology of rock, in its uneasy combination of professionalism and nonconformity, remains essentially petit bourgeois’ in its values, especially those quintessentially American values like striving and bootstrapping. Because there’s so much pressure in pop music from people willing to work for basically nothing, an oversupply of amateur or semi-pro wannabes much greater than the ranks of career professionals—what [ethnomusicologist Tim] Taylor refers to as ‘the reserve army of labor for the capitalist music industry’—a hypothetical union to control, say, fees at a rock club paying five bands a night, is hardly imaginable.” Strikes by American musicians’ unions historically (the AFM recording ban of 1942–44; the 1941 ASCAP radio boycott) have tended to encourage opportunistic end-runs around union power (the decline of unionized big bands and the creation of BMI, respectively). Imagine the conflicted position of a DIY club, committed to accessibility and low ticket prices and with presumably leftist political sympathies, picketed by a musicians’ union for staging unaffiliated teenage punk bands and not paying them a mandated minimum living wage-based per-set fee (which would raise ticket prices). Maria Sonevytsky’s 33 1/3 book Tantsi—which tells the story of the in late-Soviet Ukrainian punk band Vopli Vidopliassova —includes comical scenes of punk bands auditioning for approval from the local licensing board by playing their set in front of a folding table of bureaucrats (including members of the Komsomol, ministry of culture, and the Union of Composers) who would judge whether they were worthy of a stipend and access to stage time. 

(Free book idea: a history of musicians’ unions and these contradictory pressures—not just the closed shops of Hollywood and Nashville, but the state-sponsored guilds of the Union of Soviet Composers and Cuba’s National Union of Writers and Artists.)

It’s this need for a closed shop which made the traditional music union in the US, the American Federation of Musicians (especially in Nashville, NYC, and LA)—which made middle-class life available to professional session musicians for decades—come to seem an obsolete dinosaur in the rock era, ill-equipped to address the concerns of musicians who valorize(d) open access and semi-amateurism. Any touring musician will have encountered punk bars (I’m thinking of the Milestone in Charlotte, but there are plenty) who bristle at paying the annual dues required by the songwriter organizations ASCAP and BMI, and assume you agree that they’re a shakedown even as you, the songwriter, depend on their quarterly checks. 

Additionally, I worry that the bosses-and-drones model of thinking about unionizing artists—that individual musicians are exploited cogs in a corporate superstructure of Live Nation, Ticketmaster, Spotify, etc.—inadvertently plays into the preferred framing of the tech industry: the inexorable logic of industrialization and automation requires the idea that workers can be replaced by technology, and if we insist that musicians are piecemeal artisans, we admit ourselves into that logic which leads to our replacement by generative AI. 

So color me skeptical, while respecting the organizing and advocacy work being done by groups like the United Musicians and Allied Workers, Songwriters of North America, and the Future of Music Coalition (which are better understood as political strategizing and lobbying groups than unions in the traditional sense). One can imagine—theorists like Bernard Miège have—a world in which the 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. I would be interested to hear responses from band people reading this: would you, in exchange for a middle-class salary and benefits for some portion of your working life, sign over the rights to any songs and recordings made while under that employment? Would you take the gamble of forgoing unexpected millions from a hit song to protect yourself from the far greater chance of failure? Would you exchange control of the use of your work—in advertising, political campaigns, reissues and repackaging—for security? 

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The Band People book tour rolls on apace, including an upcoming weekend in the upper Midwest. On my “day off” October 19, I’ll be playing a solo show in Chicago, my first since 2013.

October 3 THE HOLD STEADY @ The Earl, Atlanta GA

October 4 FRANZ NICOLAY (book event) @ Criminal Records, hosted by A Cappella Books, Atlanta GA, 5:30pm; in convo w/ Jay Gonzalez

October 4–5 THE HOLD STEADY @ Variety Playhouse, Atlanta GA

October 8 FRANZ NICOLAY (Zoom book event) @ Popular Music Books in Progress (w/ Steven Hyden)—email franz@franznicolay.com for link

October 11 FRANZ NICOLAY (book event) @ Riffraff, Providence RI; in convo w/ Josh Kantor

October 17 FRANZ NICOLAY (book event) @ Subtext, St. Paul MN; in convo w/ Michelangelo Matos

October 18 FRANZ NICOLAY (book event) @ Seminary Co-op, Chicago IL, in convo w/ Kelly Hogan

October 19 FRANZ NICOLAY (solo show) @ Burlington Bar, Chicago IL (early show, 6pm doors, with Micah Schnabel & Vanessa Jean Speckman)

October 20 FRANZ NICOLAY (book event) @ Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee WI (2pm)

October 25 JUST THE BEST PARTY plays “Never Mind The Ballots” @ Main Drag Music, Brooklyn NY