Support the Living Wage for Musicians Act

Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman recently sponsored and officially introduced the Living Wage for Musicians Act, aka Artist Compensation Royalty Fund (fka H.Con.Res.102). The legalese of the resolution may be hard to parse through but accompany announcement summarizes it fairly well:

The Living Wage for Musicians Act would create a new streaming royalty, with the aim to compensate artists and musicians more fairly at a penny per stream when their music plays on streaming services. Currently, musicians make tiny fractions of a penny per stream, while streaming has grown to represent 84% of recorded music industry revenue in the U.S. Spotify, the world’s largest streaming service, pays rights-holders an average per-stream royalty of $0.003, which means it takes artists more than 800,000 monthly streams to equal a full-time $15/hour job.

A bit more discretely put, it collects money from music platforms and then has a third party service pay out those funds, bypassing labels. The intent is to ensure that streaming services are paying musicians a fair wage, which public sentiment all agrees they are not. The resolution does include a payout cap per artist per month to ensure the funds are spread out more equally and the payouts are based on actual streams played, not just having music available on a DSP.

There's lots of lively discourse on Reddit of course - which I recommend reading. For the most part, they feel the bill is misguided at best and total trash at worst. They don't propose alternatives but, hey, Reddit gonna Reddit.

Of course, if this passes and the tax is applied to DSPs, they will simply pass that cost along to consumers, increasing the cost of subscriptions. Personally, I don't think $15/mo (or more!) is too expensive for access to the wealth of music that is available but I can understand how others would disagree.

It's not a simple topic and I'm sure the resolution has its flaws. However, it's more than anyone else has done recently and I'm glad to see the conversation moving forward. You can help by signing the petition of support and then contacting your representative to tell them you support it. The UMAW site makes both extremely simple, please go for it.