Independent Musicians and the Antimonopoly Movement (Episode 76)

That accessibility piece is important, because our organization has roots in the DIY ethos of the modern independent music movement, and specifically, the punk communities here in DC. Among the early important folks working at the organization were Kristin Thomson and Jenny Toomey who played in a band called Tsunami, ran an independent record label called Simple Machines, and put out a famous zine called The Mechanic’s Guide To Putting Out Records that broke down the logistics of how a record is released: “Here’s how to contact the pressing plant, and here’s how mastering works, and here’s how distribution works here. Here’s how you can get your release physically into independent record shops around the country,” those kinds of practical things.

Probably hundreds of little independent labels put out their first seven-inch record because of that zine, and then later CDs. So we try and apply the same idea to policy, that you can learn as you go. It’s this iterative learning process, that you can share what you learn, and then you also can just sort of step up and claim your space in these policy conversations. Your voice already matters and you don’t need permission from anybody in a position of authority. You don’t need anyone’s approval to claim your voice.

So, after that, I ran an all-ages venue and art space in a small town, while working a music retail job and got to understand more of the mechanics and logistics of what was happening in the industry. Got to do some organizing work, trying to make it easier to start and run those kinds of spaces and make sure that more local communities had access to live music, especially for young people. And from there, got into the policy aspects of it because… starting at the local level. To make a space like that work, you kind of have to make friends with the local fire department, and take the mayor out to lunch. And then recognizing that people are facing the same kinds of policy dynamics in different local communities, that there can be shared strategies and resources, that we’re stronger working together.

And then ultimately I was invited to come out and speak at the Future of Music Coalition Conference and met a bunch of people out here, and not long after, joined up with the team. That was like 2012.

Historically, the industry has been exclusionary to different kinds of voices and different kinds of genres, and based on what the predominant market actors want to elevate. And I think similarly there’s this thread that’s about… that connects diversity of expression to diversity of business models. So there isn’t one business model for how you make a living as a musician. There’s always been lots of different business models, and today there are more than ever. And what’s important in the face of that is to have a range of choices to let communities and individual creators decide what kinds of business models work for them, rather than having one-size-fits-all models imposed from the top.

My first encounter with ILSR’s work was when I was living in a small town. And after I’d moved away from that small town, there was a controversy about big box stores coming in and wanting to drop a big, I’m not sure if it was a Walmart or what, in the town that I was living in. And we were thinking about, “Well, what possibilities does that preclude for independent retail, for the indie record store that I used to work at, and the impacts on the communities? And how could markets instead be structured? How could policy choices instead be structured to keep things community-centered?”

When that conversation shifts to music, we have observed consolidation in almost every part of the music industry, and in adjacent industries, and in almost every example that we can think of, that’s had negative implications for musicians themselves, both in terms of their ability to reach audiences on their own terms. And it’s had negative implications for musicians’ ability to earn fair and sustainable levels of compensation, for the working conditions that they’re operating under. And that’s in addition to other kinds of public interest harms and problems that consumers and music listeners, music fans, are facing.

The anti-monopoly piece and the idea that you want to structure markets in ways that maximize real choice and real diversity, it’s always been a thread that’s run through all of our historical work, like looking at digital economies, looking at policies like net neutrality, looking at the ticketing marketplace back when the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger was under consideration. It’s always been a thread. But I think at this political moment where we have this growing, collective, all-hands-on-deck, national anti-monopoly moment, I think that there’s something really important that the music community can contribute, just because we’ve got so much direct experience with the impacts of ownership consolidation and monopolies in our own industries.

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So moving from the more broad summary level, thought we could spend some time talking about different sectors of the music industry, and to break it down and make it more real for our listeners. In terms of the label sector, how has that space undergone concentration, and what has that meant for musicians?

You’d run into some distribution bottlenecks, and you’d run into challenges getting your record on the shelf in stores, but if their business model that, for example, that was based on moving lots and lots of units and paying out a smaller royalty rate to artists, but if it worked out for that particular artist, if they could make it up in volume, then it’s okay that the royalty rate is smaller. So independent labels in that era were able to say, “Well, we’re going to just spend less on overhead and do a 50-50 profits split. And that way, we’re not required to operate at such a massive scale.” That worked especially well, because they were often offering music that was not targeting mass audiences. Instead of just doing pop hits that had the chance to sell millions or hundreds of thousands of copies of records, you could put out records that would sell 10,000 copies, 20,000 copies, and that would one of many meaningful income sources for the artist if it was happening on a 50-50 profit split.

The word that we use in the industry is “recoup,” so you’d be able to recoup on your investment and make sure that the artists would actually earning royalties earlier. When you have a handful of companies controlling the marketplace and it’s shifting more and more towards centralized digital platforms, the market gets constructed in ways that work well for the biggest stakeholders but might not work as well for the little guys, the smaller entrants in the marketplace. And so we’re stuck with a sort of a one-size business model, at a time when these technological innovations should be diversifying the kinds of business models that are available to artists.

And so they get to set the terms of engagement for the marketplace. And so they’re able to move things more and more the direction of more invasive data practices about audiences. They’re able to use their reach across all of the different markets to create these consolidated datasets. So they are able to know how artists are going to do in different markets, then leverage that data against the few remaining small independent promoters in other markets. And so they have a kind of competitive power that only comes with operating at that big scale.

So even if the little guys are able to start collecting more data, and try and use their data about attendance to calibrate how they put on a show, and what kind of offers they make bands, and how they do the ticket price, because they’re not able to have access to what’s happening in all other markets, they don’t have the advantages of operating at scale.

I don’t want to only single out Ticketmaster here. We think in a lot of cities. We’re lucky in DC that we still have some strong independent promoters, but in a lot of cities, we have an effective duopoly between Ticketmaster/Live Nation and AEG, both in owning the venues themselves, but also on the festival circuit. The festival circuit more and more is an important, important source of revenue for artists, for the kinds of artists who can get those gigs and are playing them, to the extent that it’s fewer and fewer companies owning more and more festivals. There’s less space for risk-taking. There’s less space for actually staying in touch with what’s happening in a local or regional scene, and wanting to elevate those kinds of voices. And so the negative incentives kind of accelerate each other. You get kind of a negative feedback loop.

And that’s just because musicians are a great example of a population that doesn’t have a traditional employment relationship. There are exceptions, like a symphony orchestra player is employed by the symphony, and so they can have a traditional insurance plan or have a union-negotiated insurance plan, or… Recording artists for major labels can have access to a union health plan, which is negotiated by the union as part of those deals. That’s great. But many, many musicians don’t have access to those kinds of things and don’t have access to employer-provided care. So a single-payer approach, a Medicare-For-All approach, would just be infinitely easier and more humane.

Even the process of shopping for a plan, for people who are on the road so much of the year, can just be super-challenging. Finding a plan that covers out-of-network care. If you’re on the road and you have an injury on tour, it’s a big question whether you’re going to be able to find a provider that’s covered when you’re in Cleveland or whatever. Those are unique considerations that this population deals with. I think it’s common for other kinds of gig workers as well, but there’s things that are unique to music and that’s what’s driving us more and more towards the single-payer conversation.

Thank you all for tuning into this episode of Building Local Power from the Institute For Local Self-Reliance. You can find all the links to what we discussed today at ILSR.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s, again, I-L-S-R dot O-R-G. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. Finally, you can help us out with a gift that helps produce this very podcast, gets us great guests like Kevin, and produce original research on the way monopolies are infecting our economy. Once again, please help us out by rating this podcast and sharing it with your friends on iTunes, or wherever you find podcasts. This show is produced by Lisa Gonzales and me, Zach Freed. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I am Zach Freed, and I hope you join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.