A musicians union could go on strike, too, but it probably wouldn't help artists and songwriters.
You can join a musicians union, but practical and historical factors make it difficult for artists and songwriters to organize and strike like actors and screenwriters have.
Awareness is one of many obstacles for musicians unions.
With 160,000 actors and 11,500 screenwriters in the midst of a strike, friends inside and outside of the music industry have started asking me why artists and songwriters don’t join a union, organize, and go on strike as well. The answer is complicated, but I’ll start with the admission that joining a union wasn’t something that even entered my mind when I was a touring artist. I wasn’t aware that musicians unions even existed, let alone that I could join one.
In 2019, my friend Elias wrote a great Rolling Stone article about musicians unions, which speaks to the negative feedback loop between that lack of awareness and “unions’ inability to connect with the day-to-day needs of so many working musicians.”
….the two major unions for musicians cater primarily to major-label vocalists—effectively the top 1% of artists—and the instrumentalists who work mostly with orchestras or in opera or musical theater. A large chunk of artists falls through the gap between those two constituencies—no one on an indie label, for example, or the multitudes of unsigned artists striving to make it big.
—Elias Leight in Rolling Stone
While the awareness problem doesn’t seem to have changed much for musicians unions in the four years since Elias’ article came out, the scope of this most recent Hollywood strike—plus a June 2023 National Labor Relations Board ruling—could get the ball rolling. But even with greater awareness, there are plenty more practical and historical obstacles musicians unions would have to overcome to get artists and songwriters to join.
US union membership is at an all-time low of 10.1 percent.
Whether you’re pro- or anti-union, in theory, the purpose of a union is to advocate for employees’ rights. Unions do this primarily through collective bargaining, which is when a group of employees organizes to negotiate terms for better wages, benefits, and working conditions with their employer.
Employees who unionize can vote on membership fees, negotiation terms, and whether or not the union will go on strike, i.e., stop working until certain terms are met by their employer. Under US federal law, independent contractors—i.e., freelancers and gig workers—are typically considered self-employed. So, while any employee can unionize under federal law, the same has not been true of independent contractors. And a lot of artists are independent contractors.
Even for employees, however, union membership has declined significantly in the past four decades. In the ‘80s, about a fifth—or 20 percent—of employees belonged to unions in the US. Today, only a tenth—or 10 percent—of employees belong to unions, meaning the share of unionized employees has fallen by half in the last 40 years.
The economic factors behind the precipitous decline in union membership are too complicated to get into here, but outsourcing, offshoring, tech disruption, the gig economy, legal changes, and corporate consolidation probably all play a part. The germane takeaway for this piece is that unionization has arguably become a less significant part of society overall, compounding the awareness problem for musicians unions.
The music industry isn’t Hollywood, and most artists and songwriters can’t legally organize.
There are really two musicians unions in the US1: The Screen Actors Guild: American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the actors’ union that is striking right now, and the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), which is composed of around 80,000 (mostly instrumental) musicians.
SAG-AFTRA represents major label artists, meaning artists whose label contracts with Universal, Sony, or Warner are covered by a SAG-AFTRA collective bargaining agreement, according to Elias’ reporting. It’s really up to this top 1 percent of artists to join and make use of their SAG-AFTRA membership. As for the AFM union, any musician can join, but its primary stakeholders are instrumentalists working in orchestras.
As Elias’ article points out, the results of SAG-AFTRA negotiations may trickle down to everyday artists’ bottomline eventually, and the AFM is making an effort to engage different artist populations, but the reality is the majority of artists and songwriters are neither under major label contracts nor gigging at union-covered venues. In effect, there really is no union catering to what we conceive of as artists and songwriters today.
To complicate things further, because most artists and songwriters are “self-employed” independent contractors, they also can’t legally organize under US federal law. In June 2023, a National Labor Relations Board ruling narrowed the definition of “independent contractor” to provide more workers with employee protections, but it’s likely that artists and songwriters still fall outside the scope of this ruling.
In other words, contemporary American artists and songwriters can’t create their own union. Even if they tried to organize, who would be their legal employer? Spotify? DistroKid? The reality is the music industry isn’t Hollywood, and there are a number of factors that make organizing and collective bargaining a lot harder for artists and songwriters than for actors and screenwriters:
Localization: Unionized actors and screenwriters are largely localized to Hollywood, and artists and songwriters are distributed globally.
Population: The actor and screenwriter population is a lot smaller than the population of artists and songwriters releasing music online.
Disintermediation: It’s a lot easier to be a DIY musician than it is to be a DIY actor or screenwriter.
Cost: Union dues are unaffordable for most artists and songwriters.
Stratification: Unionized actors and screenwriters include huge stars and unknown extras, while union organization for artists and songwriters is either stratified or non-existent.
A lot of the compensation and AI concerns to which actors and screenwriters are trying to bring attention with strikes are also affecting artists and songwriters. Unfortunately, unless SAG-AFTRA opens up membership to smaller artists, the AFM starts catering to contemporary concerns, or there is some major change in labor law, most artists and songwriters are just going to have to adapt.
For anyone who does want to join AFM, you can do so here.
Information is abundant, and time is not—but that doesn’t mean we should only see the trees. The proliferation of information should help us see the forest.
There are a couple of organizations that appear to be viable union options at first glance, but their names are misleading. The Songwriters Guild of America, for instance, is not a union. The “al” in The American Guild of Musical Artists, meanwhile, is doing a lot of work, because this union appears to be for performers in musicals.