This week, a group of Democratic members of congress held a spotlight forum on the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly, and the Department of Justice’s settlement of antitrust action against the company. Two members of the National Independent Venues Association (NIVA) spoke to the issue on behalf of venue owners and promoters. And Franz Nicolay of the Hold Steady testified eloquently to working artists’ view of the problem. All applauded ongoing efforts by state Attorneys General to continue antitrust actions, despite the DOJ settlement.

But another issue facing musicians emerged from Franz’s testimony, one which needs a different solution.

“I have… witnessed the shift from an industry in which live performance - touring - was a loss leader meant to promote record sales, to a contemporary one in which albums are given away, practically speaking, for free on streaming services, to promote our shows. Our business today lives and dies on ticket sales, and the merchandise we sell at those concerts. My personal income from music over the last five years, post-pandemic, has averaged about 10% from record royalties and 90% live-performance and non-album merchandise income (T-shirts, posters, and so on). For the band I spend most of my time with (though I’m speaking here as an individual, not a representative of any particular group), the divide is even starker. We aren’t in the recording business; we’re in the performance business.”

It seems that even a successful recording artist like Franz Nicolay, whose band the Hold Steady had a Top Ten Billboard album release as recently as 2021, and whose streams number in the tens of millions, cannot earn more than 10% of professional income through record royalties. If the Hold Steady is effectively no longer in the recording business, as Franz said in his testimony, who still is?

The Living Wage for Musicians Act, H.R. 5664, has been introduced to the House Judiciary Committee to address this problem. Recorded music as a profession is being eliminated by unregulated streaming music platforms, which according to the RIAA currently account for 84% of all recorded music income in the US. But that 84% doesn’t make a sustainable income for even a popular and successful artist like the Hold Steady, whose albums, as Franz put it, “are given away, practically speaking, for free on streaming services.”

To correct this, the Living Wage for Musicians Act creates a new royalty payment from streaming platforms direct to recording musicians. This would not be the first such direct royalty payment, however; recording musicians already receive direct payment from other digital distribution of their recordings thanks to acts of Congress passed in the 1990s. The Living Wage for Musicians Act uses the same mechanism, and even much of the same language as laws that Congress previously passed unanimously to create direct payment from satellite radio, internet broadcast, and so-called “non-interactive” streaming platforms like Pandora. This system is already in place, it is administered by a nonprofit, recording musicians are already registered for it, and we currently receive payments from it just as Congress designed.

Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music do not pay into this existing system because they have set themselves up to avoid its regulation: they are “interactive” rather than “non-interactive” streaming, and thereby exempt from any direct royalty to recording musicians. This is why 84% of recorded music income doesn’t add up to a hill of beans even for a band like the Hold Steady. Imagine what it is like for those of us without Top Ten Billboard album releases, including entire genres of recorded music which do not fit the pop model: Jazz, regional musics like Tejano and Zydeco, Worship music, and so on. The Living Wage for Musicians Act closes this loophole, restoring income to all recording artists from the digital distribution of our work.

A United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) petition to pass the Living Wage for Musicians Act has been signed by thousands of musicians and music workers from every corner of the country – we have sorted it by congressional district, and we are not missing a single one. Every elected official has constituents who need this bill to make streaming pay, and make recording careers sustainable again.

The City Councils of New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Chicago have now passed resolutions calling on Congress to make the Living Wage for Musicians Act law.

We need congressional action on this fundamental problem facing recording musicians. Add your voice to make it happen.

Listening to: Happy Today by Jeff Parker ETA IVtet

Cooking: tarragon which somehow survived a New England winter

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No one needs another think piece about Geese, so this won’t go there. Still I haven’t seen enough response to what was to me the key statement in the Wired article that set off the latest kerfuffle around the band:

“It’s an open secret in the music industry that all the numbers - play counts, followers, stats - are fake or at least obfuscated.”

All the numbers…

Let’s put that sentence into a loop pedal while I cue up another recent piece of music industry news: evil hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman’s bid to buy the biggest of the major labels, Universal Music Group.

It’s possible that Ackman has a political motivation for this offer - like Bezos did when he bought the Washington Post, or Musk when he bought Twitter. What’s sure is that Ackman doesn’t come from the music business, or the entertainment world, or even media loosely defined. He is a numbers guy who profits from economic losses as much or more than from gains – what we used to call, back in alt rock days, a “corporate raider…

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Originally published by Artforum (March 30, 2018)

Music Festivals are all about scale.

On one hand, festivals solve financial problems of presenting live music by scaling up — what if, says the ambitious promoter in Tennessee, instead of eighty shows selling a thousand tickets each, we put on one show that sells 80,000 tickets…? And thus Bonnaroo is born, with an astronomical budget to work with. (Tickets this year are $337.50, which means a sell out will gross $27 million — before merch or sponsorships.)

But on t…

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The generative AI music company Suno is, I learned recently, headquartered just down the street from me in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This won’t be the first near neighbor of mine to disrupt/destroy the music industry. In the late 1990s, it was Napster emanating from a Northeastern dorm across the river. Then in the mid-2000s the video game company Harmonix started hiring every out-of-work musician in town to develop Guitar Hero from offices in Central Square, Cambridge, hard by the Middle East where their real-life bands played. The Echo Nest was a startup by the Red Line T stop in Davis Square, Somerville, which collected data all digital music platforms used for their recommendation algorithms – until Spotify bought the company in 2014 to take it in-house. And now Suno is generating seven million AI songs a day from offices above Mike’s Pastry – “Home of the Cannoli” - in Harvard Square.

Seven million songs a day?

I can’t get too excited about this latest music tech phenomenon, perhap…

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The last time I had been to South by Southwest was, I think, in 2005. I remember Carrie Brownstein shouting in my ear at the Sub Pop showcase, “If I see one more Gang of Four wannabe, I’m going to scream.” Naomi and I had been on Sub Pop all through the 90s, and played our share of SXSW gigs – always chaotic and with terrible sound, always absurdly underpaid. But the packed rooms and streets could be a thrill, filled as they were with musicians and nervous record label execs. Competition was, for me, the unpleasant drug that fueled much of the energy – bands are generally cool with one another, but the music industry thrives on getting there first with the least, or last with the most, and both can be ugly scenarios. For better and worse it was a febrile atmosphere. Still, much of the music and all of the food was great.

This year was SXSW’s fortieth anniversary, and I went not to play but as part of a crew from United Musi…

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I’m posting more selections from my published books here at Dada Drummer Almanach, in response to an irony of my writing life: only my latest book is in print, yet all are being mined for AI.

This is more than a paranoid assumption. A searchable database provided by The Atlantic in September 2023 detailed just one source of texts used by AI models. I learned then that not only my nonfiction but even my prose poetry had gone into the AI mill. My three full-length books to that date, Ways of Hearing, The New Analog, and The Memory Theater Burned were all in the database, alongside various journal publications of mine.

Use of my published work in this way without my knowledge or permission fell into the category covered by a class action suit brought against the AI company Anthropic (same company that created Claude, which I interviewed lately about AI music). I opted in and joined the suit, filing a claim which used a modified version of The Atlantic’s…

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Originally published by the Boston Phoenix (July 4, 2003).

Video from Youssou N’Dour’s UK and EU tour for his album Egypt (2004):

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In this image, only the white point and the first blue shade at the top peak above the 1,000 streams per annum level - which means those are the only tracks Spotify accounts to for any royalties. 88% of streaming tracks fall below the line and earn $0.

It’s no mystery why professional musicians are having so much trouble making a living through our primary work. Recorded music is dominated by streaming - on its most recent report, the RIAA calculates that streaming accounts for 84% of all recorded music revenue. And streaming is directing all its revenue to 12% of tracks.

Speaking as someone from that rarified 12%, the actual numbers we receive are absurd in any case — Spotify’s average payout to record labels is $0.003 per stream, gross. That fraction is then divided up, with artists receiving anything from 1…

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There’s no room for art under Fascism. Kitsch and propaganda, yes. But the rest is Entartete Kunst, degenerate art.

What is the artist to Fascism? This letter from the current director of the Kennedy Center to musician Chuck Redd is as clear a statement as any.

I write to you as President of The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts regarding your abrupt cancellation of your scheduled performance, Jazz Jam, on December 24, 2025, for partisan political reasons.

Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution.

Regrettably, your action surrenders to the sad bullying tactics employed by certain elements on the left, who have sought to intimidate artists into boycotting performances at our national cultural center.

Nevertheless, it is w…

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Spotify cried foul last week when a non-profit hacker project managed to gain access to its metadata and audio files. Spotify referred to Anna’s Archive as “anti-copyright extremists.”

Musicians might note that 87% of tracks will now receive the same payment from Anna’s Archive as they do from Spotify: zero.

Since April 2024, no track with fewer than a thousand streams a year on Spotify can claim any royalties from the platform. According to music data researchers Luminate, that’s 175.5 million tracks unaccounted to by Spotify, out of a total 202 million. Demonetizing these tracks was a unilateral decision by the platform with no approval from rights holders. It is, you might say, anti-copyright in the extreme.

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I interviewed Claude, the Anthropic AI assistant, to learn more about AI and its relationship to music. Thank you to artist Heather Kapplow for sharing an observation with me about AI and time, which suggested the initial question below. And thank you to filmmaker Christopher Ming Ryan, who introduced me to Claude.

Q: Does AI exist in time?

In one straightforward sense, yes - AI systems exist as physical computational processes running on hardware, and those processes unfold over time. My responses are generated sequentially, token by token. Training happened across hours…

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Originally published by NPR Music (August 19, 2020)

Spotify and Bandcamp could not be more opposite. Where Spotify highlights playlists, most often of its own creation, Bandcamp sticks to the album (or any other format, as determined by the artist). Where Spotify pays royalties according to little-understood formulas that can only be analyzed by reverse calculation, Bandcamp lets artists and labels choose their own prices. Where Spotify requires working through a limited number of distributors to access their services, Bandcamp is open to anyone. Where Spotify has revenue streams dependent on ads and data, Bandcamp operates on a simple revenue share with artists and collects no information on its users.

Spotify is now worth an estimated $54 billion on the stock market, despite having never shown an annual profit. Bandcamp is privately owned, has been in the black since 2012, and continues to grow... slowly. You might be tempted to say that one is a 21st-century business, and the other belongs to an earlier age. But neither could exist at any other time.

Which poses the question: does our 21st-century business world really have to be so much like Spotify, and so little like Bandcamp? I spoke with Bandcamp CEO and co-founder Ethan Diamond to try and understand better how and why his company does business the way they do.

Given how differently Bandcamp has behaved from a typical startup, I asked Diamond a fundamental question: Is Bandcamp a digital business?

There was a long pause.

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Music always seems to go first in tech/media disruptions. It was our files that blazed the way for digital sharing and piracy, paid downloads, unpaid streaming, and now fully generative AI. Last week, the streaming platform Deezer and data research firm Ipsos announced results of a survey about AI music:

“All participants were asked to listen to three tracks and determine whether or not they were fully AI-generated – 97% of the respondents failed.”

This isn’t the future of music. This is the now. We’re already in the Napster moment, the iPod moment, the Spotify moment with regard to AI music. It’s all around, whether you realize it or not. (97% may not be able to tell the difference, after all.) Last week Deezer also announced that 50,000 fully generative AI tracks are uploaded to the platform each day, accounting for more than a third of its new music. As Stuart Dredge of MusicAlly pointed out, that number is up from 10,000 tracks a day in January 2025; 20,000 in April; …

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The Living Wage for Musicians Act was reintroduced to Congress this week, and a group from United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) went to Washington DC for a press conference at the Capitol, with celebration afterwards at - where else - an independent music venue, DC9.

We also held meetings in Representatives’ and Senators’ offices, talking about the bill and, since we had guitars, singing. “I’ve never had a meeting like that!” says Rep. Katherine Clark’s senior counsel at the end of Julia Holter’s and my semi-improvised rendition of a Joni Mitchell tune (with an altered verse about streaming).

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Meanwhile, those same major labels have sued and are now negotiating with AI-music generating platforms Suno and Udio… in order to similarly take a piece of the AI action, rather than protecting art…

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Last March 2024 - a lifetime ago in Washington DC - the Living Wage for Musicians Act (LWMA) was introduced to Congress by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, with cosponsors Rep. Jamaal Bowman, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Delia Ramirez, and Rep. Benny Thompson.

This September 29 2025, Rep. Tlaib will reintroduce the Living Wage for Musicians Act to the current Congress. Write your congress people now urging them to cosponsor the bill. And come join me and other musicians and music workers from UMAW in Washington DC that day to make some noise.

SEND A LETTER

The New York City Council has already sent their letter supporting the LWMA! Other cities are working on similar endorsements.

The Living Wage for Musicians Act will establish, for the first time, direct payments from streaming platforms to recording musicians for use of our work. It is based on acts of Congress passed previously for direct payments from platforms to recording musicians for satellite radio, and “non-interactive” stream…

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New York Times culture editor Sia Michel recently made “some changes in assignments” for a number of the paper’s critics, removing them from the duty of daily reviews. These jobs are not necessarily being replaced – in a telling gesture, classical music critic Zach Woolfe was, according to Hell Gate, offered reassignment to the obituary desk. Indeed, no one seems to know what comes next for theater, television or music coverage in the paper of record – a pivot to video, which the Times was already busy pushing, doesn’t seem to be enough any longer. Michel’s internal memo to staff, leaked first to Variety and then published in full by Playbill, reads less like a directive than a call for suggestions:

"This department has already made major strides to adapt to t…

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Liz started by reading a few selections from the book, including the following:

I’ve long been confounded by the expectation that we simply accept the dealings of the powerful as unexplainable. It’s a perspective informed by my background in DIY music spaces, where we try to live the reality that there are other ways to think about collective culture. Grassroots music communities often work directly to demystify the process of making, distributing, and sharing art. If you show up to a gig an hour before doors, someone might ask if you can help set up chairs or run to the store for some ice. At the end of the show, it’s not uncommon to discuss what each band was paid and whether the splits were fair. When it comes to recordings and labels, transparency is h…

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My mother, now 94, is also a native New Yorker and also a professional musician – jazz singer Nancy Harrow. She has been recording and performing since the early 1960s.

I grew up with my mother and her musician friends trading stories about the music business, and the difficulties of making a life as a professional musician. I am under no illusions about how hard that has always been – music, like all the arts, is work without the security of predictable income. That comes with the territory.

However, there has been a profound change in the last twenty years for recording musicians that has made everything harder than before. Ever since streaming technology entered the marketplace, our incomes have plummeted.

Streaming is now responsible for 84% of all revenue from recorded music in the United States. However, unlike previous technologies for sharing recorded music, streaming is unregulated and pays recording musicians nothing directly. Nothing. This has wreaked havoc in the lives of working musicians who, like me, not to mention my mother, started our careers in a different paradigm. But what is even harder to accept is that streaming is making it nearly impossible for younger recording musicians to build a career as professionals.

This is not because streaming isn’t making money. Indeed, it is often said that streaming has rescued the music industry for the digital era, because it is now generating billions of dollars. This is true. But none of it – zero – is paid to recording musicians directly. All the money in streaming goes to technology platforms - Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Google and the Chinese company Tencent control 96% of streaming globally. The technology platforms in turn share that income with a handful of distributors and with record labels, primarily the three major labels – Universal, Warner, and Sony. These corporations, some of them among the largest in the world, are earning billions from streaming.

Meanwhile, nearly all musicians who make the recorded music content for streaming are working multiple jobs, struggling to survive while continuing to create new recordings that have almost no way to reach our listeners but through this same system that doesn’t pay us directly. It has never been harder to survive as a recording musician as a result.

The Living Wage for Musicians Act, introduced last Congress by Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Detroit and Rep. Jamaal Bowman of the Bronx and Westchester, and cosponsored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the Bronx and Queens, would right this wrong and for the first time require that some portion of money generated by streaming be paid directly to those who make its content: recording musicians. We aren’t asking for anything that hasn’t been done before for previous technologies of distributing recorded music. But taking action now is urgent for the survival of recording music as a profession.

Thank you for supporting the Living Wage for Musicians Act, and calling on Congress to pass it with New York City Council Resolution 368.

- Damon Krukowski

I presented this testimony at New York City Hall on April 17 2025, alongside a number of my fellow music workers in United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW). Paco Cathcart’s impassioned testimony, which closes the video segment from that hearing included here, can also be found in written form at The Cradle’s Instagram.