Imagine thousands of artists going on strike against digital music services, demanding their content be pulled to protest a business model that has been widely criticized during the last few years.
Imagine what would happen to these services’ catalogs. The absence of a few thousand artists wouldn’t put much of a dent in a catalog of more than 20 million songs, but there’s a good chance any one listener would notice that some favorite acts had gone missing. An all-you-can-eat service would lose value as music started disappearing.
People go on strike all the time. Fast food workers in more than 60 U.S. cities have gone on strike this year to protest their wages. Inspired by them, Walmart employees protested their wages in 15 cities on Sept. 5.
Regardless of the merits of such a strike, without taking sides in the matter, it’s clear that many artists are concerned about digital royalties and are yet unable to effectively speak their mind. Digital services are often criticized for contributing to less-than-livable wages for artists.
It’s possible for artists to go on strike, to use the term loosely. (“Protest” might be a better word since artists aren’t employed by digital services.) However, artists cannot opt out of services like Pandora. Webcasters that operate with the Section 114 statutory license don’t need labels’ and artists’ permission to stream sound recordings.
But artists can keep their content off subscription services like Spotify. In fact, they do it all the time. Adele kept 21 off Spotify for more than a year. Metallica and the Eagles were among the many longtime holdouts. The Black Keys and Coldplay also withheld recent releases from Spotify for extended periods. Every week, a handful of new releases, usually from independent labels, are “windowed,” or released to digital stores before they appear at subscription services.
Fewer artists and labels have actually walked away from digital services. Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich recently pulled their songs from subscription services in protest of the business model’s economics. Century Media, Projekt Records and ST Holdings walked away from various subscription services in 2011, although Century Media returned to Spotify the following year.
Why aren’t artists going on strike in the numbers one might expect, given that concern and discontent over subscription services seems widespread?
Are artists indifferent? No. Many seem to care quite passionately about the economics of new business models — even if their royalty checks would still be slight if payouts were vastly improved. Are they uninformed? No. The information on both sides of the argument is easy to find online. Do they lack the proper mechanism to stage a strike? Yes. Musicians’ unions do exist (SAG-AFTRA and the American Federation of Musicians, for example), but no organizations have taken the lead by building artist support around this issue. Music businesses tend to unify behind industry talking points and positions. Individual artists don’t. Finally, the digital distributors that brokered the licensing deals with subscription services aren’t taking the lead — they signed the deals, after all.
The right combination of leadership and technological solution — maybe an online form that submits removal requests to distributors that are routed to services — would create the right conditions for an artist strike. Even an online petition signed by a few thousand artists could help give them a greater voice.