The Zone
sound and other waves
Strike Against Streaming: Why Musicians Should Stand in Solidarity with the Writers' Guild
May 3, 2023
The current WGA strike represents one of the first, and arguably the largest labor actions by artists and creative workers against streaming companies. We musicians should find this inspiring in our own struggles with Spotify and other platforms.
On May Day 2023, the Writers’ Guild of America voted unanimously to approve a strike, and the pickets began the next day. Quickly, the American film and television industry ground to a stand still, and there are rumblings that the DGA (the Directors’ guild) and SAG-AFTRA (the Screen Actors’ Guild) will follow suit.
It’s a response to “disruption,” a tech industry euphemism for rapidly shifting industry conditions to disempower labor. Titans like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and more started to take on a lion share of the new television and movie production in Hollywood to pump their streaming products with fresh content. In the process, they’ve worked to ruthlessly cut costs along every step of the production line, robbing screenwriters of the residual structure, pay guarantees, and staffing commitments that previously defined the industry.
Streaming companies are looking for ways to get content on their platforms as cheaply as possible, and studios have been quick to follow suit. It’s the people who actually make the stuff that get left in the dust.
This might sound really familiar if you’re a musician or run a small-to-medium-sized record label. You are very familiar with a streaming company looking for ways to get content on its platform as cheaply as possible, with major labels effectively joining as members of a cartel. And, you, the musician, have gotten left in the dust, even if you never knew the industry to work any other way.
The WGA strike should inspire hope in us musicians. This is the first major confrontation between organized creative labor and streaming companies, and it could set a template for how to confront those tech companies. That template could help in confrontations against the likes of Spotify, Epic Games, and likely imminent firms attempting to generate music with AI, trained on a corpus of existing recordings.
Obviously, a key part of that template would be withholding labor, and there are good, practical questions to be asked about how so disorganized and disenfranchised a creative class as musicians might do something like that. When there is a union, that union can go on strike. When there is no such union, and basically anyone can upload their music to a streaming platform, it’s hard to put a full stop on production like the WGA effectively has. It’s why we should do everything we can to help the burgeoning musicians’ union UMAW (United Musicians and Allied Workers) succeed.
In the short term, what would withholding musician labor look like on streaming? Would it be a coalition of independent labels removing their content from Spotify simultaneously? A movement to only upload tracks that have annoying beeps playing throughout them or are only short snippets of full songs? A social media campaign to convince everyone to change their album titles or artwork to something that would cause a PR nightmare for Spotify?
I digress. The really important thing that the WGA has the opportunity to do is demonstrate what it looks like to strike a new deal with the streaming industry. Likely the one that overlaps most with what musicians could reasonably demand is a significantly improved residuals structure. The way the screenwriting business has traditionally been structured, writers get an upfront fee and a cut of residuals, or a percentage of future revenues on the thing they wrote. Cable syndication is great for writers, since they get a cut of the syndication fee. A movie enjoying cult success on DVD was good for a writer since they’d get a cut of those sales.
Both that guaranteed up front rate and those residuals have been decimated in the streaming era. Per the WGA’s demands, what writers are effectively demanding is something commensurate with how they were compensated before all of this “disruption” happened. And by withholding their labor and demanding better terms, they’re working to ensure that if a streaming company makes money off of their work, they make money too. There is no reason Netflix should be juicing its profitability by denying writers their rightful share of revenue.
Very simply, the writers are asking for an actual viewership-based residual to “reward programs with greater viewership.” They are also demanding a significantly higher percentage for residual payout when their work is showing outside of the United States, which in theory not just improves the lot of American writers, but lays the groundwork for, say, better deals for writers in Latin American countries whose work is watched in Spanish-language households in the States.
This all hinges on “requir[ed] transparency regarding program views.” Right now, these streaming companies use an information asymmetry to keep writers in the dark about how much their work is actually being viewed and, in turn, what percentage of a given company’s total revenue they should have the right to.
Obviously such demands do not translate perfectly to music streaming. On Spotify, you can see exactly how many streams a given track has. Rights holders actually do get a fixed royalty for each stream, and this is relatively auditable. If you see that your track was streamed a thousand times last month, and you know you get a third of a cent per stream, then you know something is going wrong if you get anything less than $30 (lol).
The key here is that if streaming is ever going to be fair, rights holders will need a transparent picture of what share of Spotify’s revenue came from streaming their music, and likely that payout needs to be a percentage of revenue as opposed to the pathetic fixed rate of $0.003.
A good question is if this would actually result in better pay for musicians. There’s a decent chance it wouldn’t. The cost of a monthly subscription to Spotify is less than the average cost of a CD 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation. The cost of one CD spread out between all of the artists someone listens to in a given month still sounds like chump change. Weirdly, Spotify’s innovation was creating a new music economy where the industry is in likelihood insolvent by design.
As Damon Krukowski has astutely argued, the reason music streaming is even a viable venture is because it’s found a way to commit arbitrage on the music industry, effectively through a combination of cartel-like business dealings and a twisted hearts-and-minds campaign to convince musicians they should plan to be poor and churn out an album a month.
The other WGA demand that is probably relevant to musicians regards artificial intelligence. The demand stipulates that “AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material; and [minimum basic agreement]-covered material can’t be used to train AI.”
The beauty of this demand is not simply that writers have the choice to opt-in or opt-out of AI, but that AI is shut out of the industry. There is no opting. I should make it clear that this is a good thing because it’s a condition set between creative people and corporations trying to find new ways to make money off their work, or making their labor redundant. As musicians, we need similar agreements with labels, distributors, and platforms.
There are undoubtedly fruitful creative uses of AI, and it is entirely reasonable to say that we can work now to constrain the use of AI to intentional and consentful creative practice, and restrict it from automating creative labor in such a way that devalues—in strict market terms—human artists and their work.
It’s becoming clear as the years go on that if “disruption” means anything, it’s that tech believes it can antagonize workers and disrupt their right to a decent quality of life.
Of course, the music industry is very different, and significantly more consolidated, than the film and TV industry. A comprehensive union for musicians perhaps could only exist in an America with dragons and universal health care. But if there were any reason to work to form something like it, the reason would be confronting very consolidated, exploitative organizations. Again, all power to UMAW.
Of course, the film and TV industry’s consolidation is a big part of the flavor of injustice writer’s face. Ticket sales and television advertising are still lucrative income sources, and major conglomerates like Amazon, Disney, and Comcast own the streaming platforms and clearly have plenty of funds to pay creative laborers. Writers are asking for, in total, $429 million more a year, while the companies they’re striking against have been pulling in somewhere around $30 billion a year. So, on that front, it’s more important than ever that the WGA—and potentially DGA and SAG-AFTRA—fight now to make sure the jobs and good pay remain in the industry.
It is, in my opinion, reasonable to believe that the end game of those conglomerates is to break their industry in a similar way to how Spotify did, which is to make the case that the artists making the actual work that gives their companies value are convinced there is no feasible what they should ever expect to make a living off the stuff.
So, what’s on the line in the WGA strike is the viability of screenwriting as a profession. A New Yorker article from a few days ago talks about TV writers having three roommates, needing to move home with parents between jobs, and winning industry awards while their bank accounts remain empty.
Reading this, you might say, hey that sounds like the life of any person trying to make it as an artist or creative type today. You’d be right. And that’s why it’s really good that the screenwriters have a union. There is not a comparable structure for say, literary fiction writers, hip hop producers, commercial glassblowers, comic book inkers, or a whole litany of other industrialized artist professions.
There are two things we can root for WGA to do. One is to demonstrate that tech power hellbent on destroying working people’s lives has no choice but to answer to organized labor. Second, lighting a path for all artists and creative people whose work meets an industry to organize and fight for a good way of life, and that path is through unionizing and solidarity.
This has been my first post on my personal blog. Share it if you like it. I have ADHD and dyslexia so I apologize if there are typos and words in weird places.