Beyond the individual artists leaving Spotify, a powerful force for change is emerging from the organized labor movement. The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), formed during the pandemic, is shifting the fight from isolated boycotts to a collective battle for systemic reform, using union tactics to hold corporations like Spotify accountable.
UMAW’s approach is rooted in the principle of solidarity. Co-founder Joey DeFrancesco acknowledges the importance of individual protests but emphasizes their “limits.” The union’s strategy is to unite music workers to exert collective pressure, a classic labor tactic that has proven effective in many other industries. This transforms the struggle from a series of personal grievances into a unified campaign for workers’ rights.
A prime example of their success is the campaign against the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. In coalition with other groups, UMAW successfully pressured the festival to drop the U.S. Army and major weapons manufacturers as sponsors. This victory demonstrated that an organized front of artists can achieve concrete results on ethical issues that a single artist might struggle to influence alone.
The union’s flagship initiative is its advocacy for the Living Wages for Musicians Act. This proposed legislation, backed by Representative Rashida Tlaib, aims to fundamentally alter the economics of streaming. By creating a new royalty pool and mandating higher per-stream payouts, the bill would tackle the problem of low royalties at its source, ensuring a more equitable distribution of the billions of dollars generated by the industry.
The rise of UMAW represents a maturation of the artist rights movement. It signals that musicians are increasingly seeing themselves not just as individual creators but as workers in a massive industry. By organizing, lobbying, and fighting for structural change, they are moving beyond simply criticizing the system and are now actively working to rebuild it on a foundation of fairness and solidarity.
