State Champ Radio unions
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The Music Performance Trust Fund (MPTF), established 75 years ago and still one of the industry’s best-kept secrets, has announced its funding support allocation for the upcoming fiscal year.
“We were going to go to $3 million and now we’re looking at moving it to $3.3 million from the fiscal year that begins May 1,” says MPTF Trustee Dan Beck. That’s up from the current fiscal year, when the Fund distributed over $2.7 million in grants.
The New York City-based non-profit supports a wide array of admission-free events and initiatives aimed at enriching lives and uniting communities through music. In April, the trust fund aims to support over 250 live music performances in celebration of Jazz Appreciation Month, and later will be partnering with local businesses and organizations in events celebrating Juneteenth, as well as providing support for the Chicago Lyric Opera, the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans, the Make Music Alliance and the Broadway League’s annual Curtains Up! event held in Times Square.
The MPTF receives funding from the three major labels, as well as Walt Disney Records, and works closely with the American Federation of Musicians (AFM).
The numbers from the fund’s current fiscal year, ending April 30, are impressive; across North America, it helped pay for 1,200 concerts in parks and public spaces, 400 music events at schools, over 1,000 performances at senior centers and over 1,300 live virtual music events. These 3,500-plus performances, covering all genres, drew over 1 million people in total across in-person and virtual events, according to the fund. All performances must be free to the audience, with MPTF paying union musicians for their work at these events.
Confirming this, Beck says, “They’re all free, and that’s a requirement that has been part of the trust fund since the beginning. It all has to be admission free, can’t be tied to any other material event or political rally or anything like that. It must be something that’s…for the good of the community and to get the musicians paid a fair wage.”
To receive funding for an event, local unions apply to the MPTF for a grant to stage a musical performance and line up a local sponsor to match the grant to provide a fair wage payment for the musicians performing. In some instances, MPTF approaches unions and offers a themed event concept to bring to their local markets, but in most cases, the unions and their matching grant partners choose which union musicians and events their efforts will back.
“A lot of times it’s the municipal government or the Parks Department, or an Arts Council in the local city” that co-sponsor events, says Beck, who has been with the fund for 10 years. Beck was president of V2 Records North America before the turn of the century and also spent over two decades with Epic Records prior to that, rising to senior vp of sales and marketing, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Beck says MPTF proactively supports local unions’ efforts to organize community performances. “We monitor the budget limits and rules and try to help the locals successfully access our funds equitably and fairly,” he says, adding that events funded by the organization run the gamut. “Some locals have 30 members. Others have thousands. We are working with full orchestras and solo musicians.”
The funding that the MPTF distributes to local unions in the United States and Canada comes from a negotiated agreement between the labels and the AFM known as the Sound Recording Labor Agreement. That agreement, based on the labels’ annual sales and streaming revenue, calls for those companies to funnel payments directly to three funds: the American Federation of Musicians and Employers’ Pension Fund; the Sound Recording Special Payments Fund; and the Music Performance Trust Fund.
Beck is bullish about this year’s prospects. In addition to musical performances, the organization aims to fund over 500 music education programs in 2023-24 through partnerships with national and local organizations such as Save the Music and Young Audiences Arts for Learning. As part of its educational efforts, it will fund a minimum of $150,000 to be awarded to students in the fall of 2023 through its two scholarship programs, Music Family Scholarship and Music’s Future Scholarship. Last year, more than 90 Music Family Scholarships were given to AFM musicians with family members attending college, while 30 Music’s Future Scholarships went to music students unaffiliated with the union.
On the live performance front, the organization says it will bolster its signature national MusicianFest initiative that brings live music to senior citizens, a segment of society that has been strapped by fixed incomes, inflation, immobility and the devastation wrought by the COVID-19 virus.
While MPTF prefers the local unions to bring in a local funding partner, when the organization is trying to raise its funding distribution outlay, “we have selected certain times where we’ll go to the union locals and say, ‘Look, we will fund 100% if you have something for Black History Month,’” says Beck. For Juneteenth, MPTF did an event with Broadway League, funding a 12-piece band performance in Times Square. “Then we got to thinking about it and [said], ‘Hey, why don’t we take that and offer a Juneteenth event out to all the locals?’ And the response was just great,” Beck adds. “We’ll be doing that again; we will start that offer for Juneteenth literally the day after Jazz Appreciation Month ends.”
While things are looking good going forward, Beck says that MPTF faced major challenges when the pandemic hit — though Beck notes that it also created new opportunities for the fund, with livestreamed performances via Facebook coming to the rescue. “It didn’t matter what type of music someone played, we were able to crank up the livestream thing,” he says. “We have a small staff [of five], I was stunned that we could actually do it. Thankfully, our little grant management team that coordinates all the grants did a remarkable job working with each other. There are 175 union locals across North America, and we were generally working with half of them.”
Certainly, the parent umbrella union’s participation and support remain crucial. Ray Hair, international president of the AFM, said in a statement provided to Billboard that “MPTF is well-positioned to expand its mission throughout the U.S. and Canada for many years to come.” Other prominent supporters include the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), whose chairman/CEO Mitch Glazier and COO Michele Ballantyne said in a joint statement: “RIAA Members are honored to support this dynamic, living testament to the tapestry of American music.”
Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, also weighed in with a statement to Billboard regarding the MPTF, saying, “Your commitment towards supporting musicians, making music a part of every child’s life, and adding to public knowledge about music, is unmatched.”
Beck feels his music industry experience has been beneficial in handling the demands of his position. He recalls working in the major label distribution branch system pre-2000 when those companies had sales offices “around the country, and each had a special relationship with their accounts and with the markets that they worked in. I find that’s kind of very similar to what the union locals are like.”
For his part, Beck is just happy to serve. Referencing the Fund’s mission statement, he sees music as a unifying and healing force.
“I’m very grateful that opportunity came my way,” he says. “Where I am in life, there’s no better way to do things than to be working with people who are trying to make some nice community events happen. As divided as people can be, you put them in a little park together [for a musical event] and they all seem to have a good time and speak nicely to everybody else.”
Following Bandcamp’s sale to Epic Games last year, employees at the popular independent music streaming and sales platform are making efforts to unionize.
On Thursday (March 16), Bandcamp workers filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to authorize a union election, marking the latest push by music company employees to unionize. If approved, the workers will hold an election to officially form the union. The effort follows similar initiatives from employees at indie label Secretly Group and YouTube Music, as well as workers at broader tech and media companies like Amazon, Disney and Tesla.
Bandcamp United is a group of “designers, journalists, support staff, engineers and more,” according to a statement, that is “committed to protecting the benefits we have, fixing historical disparities within and across departments, and promoting equitable conditions and economic stability for all of our colleagues.”
“If you think about Bandcamp, it’s about paying artists fairly for the music that we love so much,” says Eli Rider, a Philadelphia-based data analyst for the music streaming and sales platform, and one of the union organizers, in a phone interview. “So, the workers that build the site and support it also would like to have fair and transparent wages.”
Rider wouldn’t elaborate on specific issues around wages or workplace conditions that prompted the employees’ move to unionize. She also wouldn’t specify how many workers were involved in the union effort, but said, “We have a broad base of support,” including from U.S. and international Bandcamp employees.
Discussions around unionizing began during online meetings last July, according to Rider. “Folks just started talking more about what they were experiencing at work,” she says. “It was mostly talk, but then someone had the idea of getting organized.” At that point, they reached out to existing unions, before deciding to affiliate with the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 1010.
Bandcamp was sold to Epic Games, the company that owns Fortnite, for an undisclosed amount in March 2022. After the sale, Rider says there was “a shift in our workplace conditions” that he describes as “unexpected.”
In a statement Thursday, Bandcamp’s CEO Ethan Diamond responded: “We are aware that some Bandcamp employees are seeking to organize a union and [we] are reviewing the petition to understand their concerns.”
Formed in 2007, Bandcamp was a crucial outlet for indie musicians after touring revenue disappeared during the COVID-19 quarantine period. Artists relied on the Bandcamp Fridays promotion to sell merch and music; on those days, they received 93% of the revenue compared to 82% on a typical day. On the first Bandcamp Friday after concerts shut down in 2020, fans bought 800,000 items from artists on Bandcamp totaling $4.3 million.
“It is important to us that Bandcamp’s artist-first mission continues with clarity and accountability, with all resources afforded to us distributed in the fairest and most transparent way possible,” the workers said on their website. “We feel a responsibility to support those who are most marginalized, to use our platform with integrity, and to provide reasonable protections and accommodations for those at-risk.”
To afford living in Austin, Katie-Marie Marschner works two jobs in the music business: In addition to her gig as a tour manager, she earns $19 an hour working remotely 40 hours a week as a YouTube Music subject matter expert — poring over spreadsheets for errors in the company’s charts algorithm. To manage it all, she alternates between her YouTube Music “office computer” and her “fun computer.”
Marschner’s employment for YouTube Music is through Cognizant, an IT company that contracts with the Google-owned music streamer to supply staff. But after she and her coworkers petitioned the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to hold a union election that would effectively unionize them, Cognizant is now mandating that all 58 employees report to work in Austin — even though Marschner and her colleagues say the company hired them with the understanding they’d work remotely, often outside the city. This kind of flexibility has allowed Marschner to travel on off-days as a tour manager and book hotels during her lunch breaks, and she says, “Returning to the office is completely unfeasible.”
Marschner and her colleagues see the new in-office mandate as a union-busting move: Rather than allow the workers to unionize, Cognizant is demanding they return to the office, and, presumably, will fire the workers who can’t. The remote employees – some of whom work far from Austin and even Texas – say they accepted their jobs years ago with the understanding they’d be able to work from home and accuse Cognizant of changing the terms after their union activity. In response, on Jan. 23, the workers filed an Unfair Labor Practice complaint with the NLRB. Three weeks ago, the workers went on strike, marching last Tuesday to Google’s downtown Austin headquarters for a rally.
The division’s union movement caught the attention of Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas). They wrote a Feb. 21 joint letter to the CEO of YouTube’s parent companies, Google and Alphabet, complaining the return-to-work announcement was an “anti-union posture” and requested the workers be “able to freely exercise their right to join a union as guaranteed by federal law.”
“These workers are inspiring people across the country,” Casar tells Billboard. “When the United Auto Workers started organizing at General Motors, their first strike was 50 workers. Soon enough, hundreds of thousands of autoworkers decided to join. That helped make auto-worker jobs stop being poverty-wage, dangerous jobs and made them into middle-class-family-sustaining jobs.”
A Google rep did not respond to inquiries, but a spokesperson has told reporters the striking workers are employees of Cognizant, not Google. Jeff Demarrais, a Cognizant spokesperson, sent a statement saying the company “respects the right of our associates to disagree with our policies, and to protest them lawfully,” adding that it is “disappointing” the workers decided to strike over a return-to-office policy the company has “communicated to them repeatedly” since December 2021. In an email, Demarrais accused the protesters of issuing “death threats” against other Cognizant employees and “blocked the office driveways with downed trees.”
Neil Gossell, who works for the striking YouTube Music division, calls the downed-tree claim a “flat-out lie,” saying a recent Austin ice storm was responsible for the blocked walkways. “I don’t know of any threats we made to anybody who chose to return to work,” says Gossell, a music generalist with YouTube Music who oversees “missing content” taken down due to copyright issues or missing artist names. “Sure, we’re frustrated with them, but we hope we can convince them into joining and help themselves have a better and fairer workplace.”
Gossell and Marschner are upset that Google, whom they see as their employer, has deferred to Cognizant. “I’ve gone through Google training. I go through their security training. I go through their ethics training…. [But] if we want to negotiate over pay, they say, ‘Pay is based on the contract we have with Google, so we can’t bargain over that.’” Marschner says.
The employees, affiliated with the Alphabet Workers Union, which has never held a strike, are awaiting National Labor Relations Board decisions on their election petition and the two Unfair Labor Practice complaints.
“It’s going to be a long labor movement, because we’re not stopping until we have a union,” Gossell says. Referring to recent union activity at Amazon, Disney and Tesla, he adds: “I’m not saying we’re the tip of the spear, but we’re part of something bigger that’s going on in America. All you have to do is pick up a history book to see how this ends.”
A group of musicians who have gathered together under the banner of the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) has published a petition calling for better pay for artists selected to perform at the annual SXSW conference and festival each March. The petition — which at press time bore the names of more than 400 artists, and which is being continually updated with more names — has been signed by artists such as Eve 6, Mountain Goats, Jeremy Messersmith, Speedy Ortiz, Zola Jesus, Pedro the Lion, YACHT and Emperor X, as well as the Songwriters of North America (SoNA). Of the signees listed on the site, a half-dozen are scheduled to play SXSW this year.
In the petition, the UMAW is taking aim at the compensation that artists receive for being officially invited to perform at the festival, which launched in Austin in 1987. The petition claims that artists who are selected to perform must first pay an application fee, which has risen from $40 in 2012 to $55 this year, while they are offered a choice of either a festival wristband or $250 ($100 for a solo artist) as compensation. International artists, the petition says, are only offered a wristband, with no possibility of financial compensation.
In light of those claims, the UMAW is requesting that compensation for artists be raised from $250 to $750 per act; that a festival wristband be included as part of that compensation, not as an either/or choice; that international artists be offered the same compensation as domestic U.S. artists; and that the application fee be eliminated. The petition is addressed to SXSW and Penske Media, which owns Billboard as well as publications like Rolling Stone, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter. (In April 2021, Penske Media Corporation became an investor in SXSW by taking a 50% stake in the conference and festival. A rep for PMC did not respond to a request for comment.)
“SXSW is honored to host over 1,400 showcasing acts every March,” a SXSW spokesperson said in a statement to Billboard. “We are committed to creating professional opportunities by bringing emerging artists together with media, the global music industry, and influential audiences. We appreciate the feedback from the UMAW and will be doing our policy review after next month’s event.”
The UMAW, which has 18 members on its steering committee, including Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz and Zachary Cole Smith of DIIV, has been active with petitions in the past. The most impactful has been the Justice At Spotify campaign, launched in 2020 to protest the low streaming royalty payouts from the music streamer, which was signed by more than 6,000 individuals and demanded both higher royalty rates and a switch to user-centric royalties. That initiative was followed up with a series of protests by musicians outside Spotify offices around the globe in March 2021; days later, Spotify launched a website called Loud & Clear intended to increase transparency around how it pays rights holders.
A few months after film and television music supervisors kicked off a national worker organizing drive, a group that works with Netflix has filed a petition for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board.
A number of music supervisors who are currently working with or have recently worked with the streamer on a project-by-project basis are seeking to be represented in collective bargaining by IATSE, the major crew union that represents music editors, camera crews, script supervisors and other crafts. (No in-house workers are included in the current effort.) According to IATSE, “an overwhelming majority” of music supervisors recently and now affiliated with the company asked the company for voluntary recognition, which Netflix rebuffed, so the group is now seeking to join IATSE through the NLRB process.
The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Netflix for comment.
Music supervisors at the company are seeking to “standardize pay rates,” join IATSE healthcare and retirement plans and “address structures that enable studios to delay workers’ pay for months at a time” with their unionization effort at Netflix, among other goals. As THR has previously reported, financial stresses and the craft’s dearth of union-provided healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic helped inspire the national union drive, which had been in the works for two and a half years before it was officially launched in June.
The Netflix petition is the first time that this group of organizing workers has filed for an NLRB election. Per IATSE, the streamer “is presently the largest employer of Music Supervisors out of any studio in the AMPTP,” referring to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the bargaining representative for studios and streamers with unions.
Workers involved in the craft-wide unionization effort have previously said that they at one point asked the AMPTP itself for voluntary recognition, which the AMPTP declined. The Netflix election petition suggests workers will now attempt to organize their field employer by employer. If the NLRB grants an election, the Board will determine the size of the potential bargaining unit for music supervisors at the streamer.
Music supervisors curate and/or oversee the recording of music that appears in films and in television shows and manage negotiations for the use of preexisting music. The craft entered the spotlight in the late spring and early summer when several prominent appearances of Kate Bush’s “Running Up that Hill (A Deal With God)” during the fourth season of Netflix’s Stranger Things prompted a major surge in streams for the 1985 single and subsequent news coverage.
IATSE claimed in June that 75 percent of an estimated 500 working music supervisors nationwide have signed union authorization cards and therefore signaled their support for the IATSE drive.
This story was originally published on THR.com.
Membership of the Secretly Group Union has ratified a contract with the company’s managers, the union announced on Twitter Wednesday (Oct. 12).
Although the union — which represents workers at indie labels such as Secretly Canadian, Dead Oceans and Jagjaguwar — declared it “could not be prouder to be the first independent label group union,” it did not disclose contract terms. It described contract negotiations with management as a “long and very difficult fight.”
In a Twitter statement Wednesday, Dead Oceans said, in part: “This agreement marks a new chapter in Secretly’s ongoing commitment to our staff, to our workplace and to the core values we bring to artist and label partners every day.”
Secretly reps did not respond to a request for a comment, and an anonymous union spokesperson said they weren’t ready to discuss the terms of the contract, announced last night. “At the moment, we’re all exhausted from yesterday’s events,” the spokesperson said.
Working with the Office and Professional Employees International Union, or OPEIU Local 174, the Secretly employees formed their union in March 2021 and set a recognition deadline for management — which the company quickly agreed to do. Secretly Group artists include indie stars such as Phoebe Bridgers, Japanese Breakfast, Bon Iver and Angel Olsen, several of whom have expressed support for the union effort over the past year.
Last year, a Secretly Group Union rep told Billboard, “The enthusiasm for the culture in which music industry workers contribute can be weaponized against them and lead to exploitation and unfair treatment. . . . We absolutely hope this inspires others to unionize.”
The company, which employs 150 people, responded, “It’s always difficult to hear that there are people within the company who are unhappy . . . but we hope that this union effort speaks to their belief that our common ground — love for the work we do, and for the music and culture we share with the world — is truly and deeply shared.”
Unions are common for musicians, who belong to longstanding groups like the American Federation of Musicians, but they’re rare among record labels. After the Secretly union began its bargaining process last year, the group put out statements from workers to draw support for its cause. “I believe we can set a precedent for ourselves — and others working in the industry — that mandates fairer wages, inclusivity, and increased diversity, all in a collaborative workplace,” Michael Brennan, a designer for the company, said in an August 2021 union Instagram post.
