I Have A Bone To Pick With The Music Industry

By Dead Posey

I have a bone to pick with the music industry. The world of music is often perceived as glamorous and lucrative, with the promise of fame and fortune attracting millions of aspiring artists. However, the reality is often far from it, with many artists struggling to make a living and being taken advantage of by record labels, publishing companies and streaming platforms. As an artist for almost a decade now it's been frustrating to watch the industry I want to love screwing us over and killing us slowly. It's happening to many talented artists out there who are more and more struggling to make ends meet while these companies continue to make record profits. 

Let's talk about streaming services for a minute. While they're convenient for listeners, and can provide many artists opportunities to reach a larger audience much quicker than before, they're also the bane of many artists' existence. The small pay-per-stream system is severely flawed and doesn't come close to compensating artists for the time, effort, and money required for creating, releasing, and promoting music. It's disheartening to see our art reduced to mere fractions of a penny per stream. And while some might argue that we can make it up through touring and merchandise sales, that's not always an option for everyone because of their circumstances and an increasingly expensive touring climate. You might say “well maybe many smaller artists wouldn’t be able to put music out at all without the streaming services.” Yes, that’s correct but what's ALSO correct is the streaming services are currently earning billions of dollars only because of the music being made from large and small artists. If no more music was made they would no longer have a business to profit from. So it's actually the artists who have the power but we haven't quite figured out how to come together and act as a unified front in order to get paid fairly for all of our blood, sweat and tears.

The traditional music industry isn't helping either. Major labels and publishing companies are more interested in promoting their big-name artists which is of course easier than breaking and developing a new artist, leaving small & mid-level artists to fend for themselves more than ever before. When an artist does get signed, these companies pay increasingly dwindling advances (which the artist must use to fund recording, touring etc) and then take a huge cut of the earnings, leaving the artist with very little. In earlier eras of the music biz this made at least some sense because the labels in theory would fund and provide help with many expensive services to break an artist such as recording, radio promotion, physical creation and distribution of product like CD's, vinyl records etc. In the current era in which everything is digital/streaming many of those expenses are less costly than before and are now left up to the artist to mostly handle on their own, yet the labels still take the same cut of revenue generated by an artist's music as before. My former label, who let me go in under 2 years of signing (half of which was during a global pandemic), collects 82% of all revenues that my music generates - forever. Most of that music was recorded, released and started to see success independently before I even signed with the label. On top of that any expenses the label did pay for on Dead Posey’s behalf must be recouped only from my 18% before I see a ever dime of earnings. With all this in mind, being signed and what feels like immediately dropped with little to no help from the label while I was there feels like highway robbery. This practice is barbaric and is a broken system that has gone unchecked for far too long.

It's not just the financial aspect that's problematic. The pressure to conform to the industry's standards of vanity numbers, tastemakers' payola-like playlists and the feeling that a song has no value unless it goes viral on TikTok before it's released is immense. This obsession with metrics has created a culture of fear and hyper competition among fellow artists. It's no longer just about the music, but also about the numbers. How many streams do you have? How many followers or likes do you have on social media? How many tickets are you worth? These questions have always been valid but now seem to matter more than the quality of the music itself. As it has been reported in the media of late, all of this is taking a huge toll on artists' mental health, but that's a topic for another day. 

So what's the solution? We need a system that values artists and compensates them fairly for their work. If record labels, streaming services and publishing companies and are profiting big off the backs of artists of all sizes, then the artists need to be better taken care of instead of being used and abused. We need the entire industry to step up and prioritize the well-being of artists instead of ONLY the bottom line - otherwise there's a risk of no more artists existing one day which means no more money or music for anyone. And to my fellow artists: we need to support each other to create this better system, not just compete with one another. We need to wipe the stars out of our eyes and start pushing back together. Maybe let's start by taking notes from the WGA writers who are currently on strike and fighting for fair pay. Otherwise this vicious circle will continue to benefit only a lucky few artists and the companies that profit from us all.

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