“The music industry is not struggling anymore - only musicians are”, declares a scathing open letter signed by over 600 musicians - including Tegan And Sara, Amanda Palmer and Cadence Weapon.
The letter demands immediate action from record labels, streaming platforms, ticketing companies and venues to protect musicians’ livelihoods and music history, while also taking aim at Live Nation, Spotify, the major labels and the equity funds buying up music rights,
At its core is opposition to what they call an “unjust lawsuit” filed by Universal Music, Sony Music and Concord against the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project.
“We don’t believe that the Internet Archive should be destroyed in our name”, they write, adding that, “artists and labels alike should partner with valuable cultural stewards like the Internet Archive - not sue them. It’s time to support non-profit music preservation to ensure that our music and our stories aren’t lost to history”.
That lawsuit is part of a trend of normal musicians being “screwed over” by the “corporate profiteering” of big music companies, say the letter’s signatories.
Although “music industry revenues will exceed $100 billion” by 2031, it adds, “a disproportionate cut of those billions are made by private equity exploiting the back catalogues of legacy musicians, many of whom are no longer living”, while “working artists” get “as little as 12% of music industry revenue”.
The IA’s Great 78 Project has digitised and made available over 400,000 recordings that were originally released as 78rpm records. The venture, according to the majors’ lawsuit, is “wholesale theft of generations of music”, making IA liable for “blatant” and “immense” copyright infringement.
Not so, say the musicians, who state that “the music industry has a moral imperative to keep its history archived”, but that the industry itself can’t be trusted to meet that task. As a result, old records “are falling to pieces” and “without proper digital preservation, they’ll be gone for good”.
The masters of “big money-making recordings are going up in flames” the letter goes on, referring to the 2008 fire at a Universal Music warehouse in LA that resulted in legal action in 2019. Meanwhile, “lesser-known musicians are even more vulnerable to erasure”.
The letter points out that IA’s Wayback Machine helped save nearly half a million articles from the MTV News archives when the broadcaster switched off its website earlier this year, and argues that the industry should be embracing IA’s work to archive its old recordings.
Although the record industry’s legal battle with IA is at the core of the letter, it also addresses a number of other grievances, arguing that the majors should spend less time suing not-for-profit archiving projects and more time addressing the issues that artists and musicians are currently facing.
The Spotify business model - and the majors’ alliance with the streaming services - is strongly criticised, with the letter stating that, when it comes to streaming, “artists have clearly voiced concern that the numbers aren’t adding up in our favour”.
It then cites the proposal made by US Congress members Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman earlier this year that would add a levy of about 50% to current streaming subscription fees, with the money going directly to musicians.
The letter also criticises the live side of the business. “We’re shut out of sharing in today’s historic highs in live concert revenue”, it says, blaming “monopolies double-dipping into both ticketing and venue income”, a clear reference to Live Nation and its Ticketmaster division.
Expanding on specific issues to be addressed within the live sector, the letter references the campaigns in the UK and North America calling on venues to allow artists to keep 100% of merchandise revenues generated at shows. It then adds “we need transparent ticketing practices that prioritise income for artists and clarity for fans, so that live music work can actually make artists a living”.
Connecting the support for IA with the wider list of grievances, the letter calls for “immediate and sustained action to protect artists’ futures, and the long-term preservation of their works”. To that end, it concludes, “we implore our labels, our agents, our publishers, and our venues to stand with us in demanding fairness for the artists on which this industry is built”.