It’s Time to Organize Musicians

What started as “playing for exposure” has become structural exploitation. Union contracts could redraw the deal for good

Photo credit Grievance Imagery

An abridged version of this article was originally published by Michael Iverson, President of the Committee on Political Education for the IBEW 426 out of Sioux Falls, SD, and President of the Sioux Falls Regional Labor Federation.

For decades, musicians have been battling to stay afloat in an industry that has consistently abused them. Having heard stories of bands who barely break even on a tour, sleep in vans, and have poor diets during their months-at-a-time treks, musicians have often never had a life of comfort. Some have found success across various genres and industries, but most aren’t living luxurious lives. With printing costs rising and venues often taking a cut from bands that sell merchandise on their premises, it’s time the music industry received a shake-up.

It wasn’t always structured this way. In older club circuits, it wasn’t unusual for a band’s pay to be tied directly to how well the bar did that night: a percentage of drink sales alongside some part of the door. In other words, if the band filled the room and people drank, the band shared in the upside. Over time, especially as live music became more corporatized in the 1970s and 1980s, that balance slowly flipped. Venues and promoters began to treat alcohol as their untouchable revenue stream, while discovering that band merchandise — once a side hustle — could be treated like another concession to skim. Today, in many rooms, the bar is 100% the venue’s money, while the venue also reaches into the merch bin for a “commission” on sales.

As the vast majority of musicians are freelance and not hired by any employer or agency, many are left to go it alone (or with their bandmates) in an industry that thrives on the super-exploitation of musicians and fans alike. Having grown up in a more local, DIY music scene, conditions have drastically changed in the last 20 years. Oftentimes, bands would play at a venue and be given an undisclosed amount of money for performing at the end of the night. While this still happens, some promoters will ask bands what their “guarantee” is and will decide whether they are willing to pay that amount or not. In recent years, the trend has now become that bands themselves are acting as a quasi-promoter as they are tasked with selling tickets in order to guarantee a promoter/venue a certain amount of money. In some cases, bands are even dictated what slot of an evening they will play, depending on how much money they secured for the promoter. As you can imagine, the more money raised for the promoter, the later a band will play. The amount a band/musician makes also now depends on their ticket sales. For example, a promoter grants a musician $5/ticket sold to a $25 event.

Layered on top of that are merch cuts that would make a loan shark blush. It is now routine for mid-sized venues to demand 15–25% of a band’s gross merchandise revenue, before expenses, and arenas often push that higher. In the UK, some artists report venues taking around a quarter of the gross plus VAT. In North America, touring acts and industry reporting have documented extreme cases where cuts reach up to 40% of gross merch sales. The building gets the bar, the service fees, a piece of the shirts, and sometimes even control over who is allowed to sell the merch in the first place. The musician pays for the recording, pays for the van, pays for the gas, pays to print the shirts — and then cuts the venue in at the point of sale.

This creates a two-fold problem: a musician is now valued not by their artistry, the time they’ve put into learning an instrument or trade, but by how much money they can secure for the promoter, and now musicians are given the additional job of what a promoter should be doing. If a musician refuses, they are put lower on the list of an event, which typically means they will perform to fewer people, which translates to less exposure and merchandise sales on their behalf. This also gives the promoter no obligation to pay the musicians for their time due to the arbitrary rules that they have created.

There is a third, quieter problem as well: when ticket sales are pushed onto the band, that pressure doesn’t just sit between band and promoter — it seeps into the band itself. The guitarist with a big local friend group, the vocalist with family in town, or the one member who is more extroverted online can suddenly be seen as “pulling their weight,” while others are treated as dead weight because they sold fewer tickets. Instead of all members being valued for the music they create together, spreadsheets and sales tallies get weaponized inside the group. Fights break out over who is “worth” their split, resentment builds, and the very relationships that make the band possible are strained. It is divide-and-conquer, disguised as “opportunity.”

The merch side works the same way. If artists don’t agree to the venue’s cut, they can be told they aren’t allowed to sell at all, or quietly dropped from future bookings. Bands have shared examples where venues happily invent cocktails named after the touring act’s songs, pocket every cent of those themed drinks, and still demand 15–20% of the band’s T-shirt sales. Others have documented nights where the venue’s share of merch was larger than the band’s net profit from the same table. The message is crystal clear: you are not being treated as a partner creating a successful night; you are a vendor being taxed for access to your own fans.

This also creates an environment where bands are reluctant to speak out on these new conditions due to the threat of being blacklisted. Since these are all freelance musicians with no secure employment, it gives the exploiting party an easy option to pressure musicians to accept their new conditions.

You can see the fear in the way many artists talk about the issue publicly. A few well-established bands have started naming the problem directly: some have published venue-by-venue lists of who takes a merch percentage and who doesn’t; others have said bluntly that they would happily share merch revenue on any night they receive a percentage of the bar — a deal that almost never exists anymore in professional venues. Still others have floated the idea of artists refusing to play any room that takes a merch cut. Coverage in outlets like Loudwire and Louder has made clear that what used to be whispered about backstage is now a central fight over whether touring can remain viable at all.

So, what is the solution?

In February 2023, an article was written where lead vocalist Sam Carter of the band Architects called on bands to go on strike against venues taking a cut of merch sales. He is not alone. Artist-led campaigns in both the U.S. and the U.K. have sprung up to expose and resist merch cuts — from public pledges by “100% Venues” that refuse to take a percentage, to grassroots pushes like the #MyMerch campaign framing merch taxes as an exploitative practice that must be ended. The fact that some of the largest corporate promoters in the world have temporarily suspended merch fees at certain clubs, purely as a public relations move, is a backhanded confession: they could stop doing this tomorrow. They just don’t feel compelled to, because the people they’re taxing are not yet organized enough to make it non-negotiable.

Without any organization of musicians into a union, however, the threat of striking is empty. That is where musicians in the United States would benefit from organizing into a union such as the American Federation of Musicians, as they deal with musicians of various backgrounds, including freelance.

How would a musician’s union be implemented?

In many trade unions, the union hall is in charge of sending its members out to work. The employer is not in charge of who it can hire. Instead, jobs are posted on a union board, and members take the positions as needed. Hypothetically, a musicians’ union could operate the same way, in that the union would be the sole representative of its members, and organizations that are seeking musicians would need to inquire with the union to send out a call. The union would also set minimum wages either by performance or hourly if a company is looking to hire musicians for a full day or multiple days. In the event a band plays between 30-60 minutes, a minimum amount could be required so that venues cannot abuse an hourly rate. Contractually, a musician should not be required to sell tickets to an event, and their placement within said event should not be impacted by their refusal to.

A union contract can also draw hard lines where the market has failed to do so: banning merch cuts outright or capping them at defined percentages; requiring transparent accounting on any percentage-based deals; and, crucially, reviving the principle that if a venue’s profits are built on food and alcohol sales driven by live music, the musicians are entitled to a defined share of that success. Rather than each band haggling with each venue, the baseline would be set collectively, with real consequences for venues that refuse to comply — up to and including coordinated boycotts and strikes that no single band could pull off alone.

Of course, the above exercise is hypothetical as the true implementation of a musician’s union can and will differ by region and its specific conditions. Nonetheless, all musicians deserve a profession of dignity, free from coercion or fear. The current system has steadily migrated from “we’ll split the bar and the door” to “we’ll keep the bar, tax your merch, and still expect you to sell our tickets for us.” That didn’t happen by accident; it happened because one side was organized and the other was not. The only lasting answer is to change that fact.