Hard work, hidden from view: the invisible uncompensated labor that fuels the music industries

One of the most difficult challenges for musician compensation and attribution in the digital space is making sure that the information and money flows don’t just work for the biggest players, the major labels and the music services, but also for classical and jazz, for background musicians, and the more marginalized artist communities in music. We’re not satisfied with systems that work for people at the top of the pyramid — operating at mass-market scale— but that can leave many others behind.

FMC has done some work on health insurance, and that led us to the work of Sarah Kliff, a journalist covering the rollout of Obamacare. She recently wrote about the difficulty of navigating her own health insurance and made an interesting point, that the health care industry model is completely dependent on the free labor provided by patients.

And when a system relies on patients to do the work to figure out if your doctor takes your insurance, submit the papers, and negotiate between your doctor, insurance company, and pharmacy, that means that only people who have the luxury of time and patience will be able to benefit from the system. As a result, without intervention, the system simply doesn’t work for poor people, immigrants, and other vulnerable populations.

That rang a bell for us because the music industries often operate in a very similar way. The systems are extraordinarily complex, incredibly opaque, and there are powerful disincentives to simplify. The details musicians are responsible for in order to participate and succeed in the system are simply overwhelming — signing up for SoundExchange, choosing a partner to put out your record, entering your metadata, figuring out your writing splits, reporting to Nielsen, to Pollstar, sending your playlists to BMI or ASCAP, submitting your records to the Grammys for consideration, auditing your record label, sending DMCA takedown notices, figuring out if you need to file taxes in all the states you toured to, talking to DDEX about metadata standards. The infrastructure of the music industries is built to serve the people making the most money, and those people do OK. Everyone else endures death by a thousand administrative cuts.

Part of FMC’s mission is to try to help musicians navigate these murky waters; that’s why we create resources that demystify complex systems and help musicians of all kinds understand their options.

But there is much more work to do to make systems accessible and accountable to the full diversity of creators, including those who will never be in a position to have the assistance of a management team. Perhaps a first step is making this uncompensated administrative labor more visible, acknowledging how much happens outside of the view of consumers.