UMAW Is Changing How We Think About Musicians’ Rights
Five years after United Musicians and Allied Workers began its fight for a fairer industry, organizers and members consider how far they’ve come—and what’s next.
For so many musicians today, trying to make a decent living can feel like scaling a slippery iceberg while simultaneously getting battered by gale force headwinds. Those stymieing forces can take many forms, from woefully inadequate streaming royalties to the skyrocketing cost of touring. Overarching economic factors including widening inequalities, America’s broken healthcare system, and out-of-control rents only make things more impossible for music’s hollowed-out middle class. “The concentration of power and money at the very top has gutted independent music scenes, to the point where it’s harder to make money because all of the eyeballs are on a small number of corporate artists on social media,” says Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, guitarist for the political punk band Downtown Boys. It’s enough to make anyone who cares about music throw up their hands at the intractability of it all.
Not DeFrancesco, though. “I don’t think it’s hopeless,” adds the 36-year-old, who is a founder and organizer at the advocacy organization United Musicians and Allied Workers. Talking via video from his apartment in Astoria, Queens, DeFrancesco sounds both resilient and realistic, defiant and weary. The battle against the powers that be is constant, arduous, and often thankless. But if we stop, they win. Everyone else loses. Why would we let that happen without a fight?
For DeFrancesco, music and organizing were always inextricably tied together. Downtown Boys, one of the most outspokenly progressive groups of their era, originally came together through band members’ involvement in a hotel workers union in Providence, Rhode Island. (Fun fact: An incredible video of DeFrancesco quitting a shitty hotel job—backed by a celebratory marching band—went viral in 2011.) So when Covid hit, canceling live music around the world and in turn erasing one of the only remaining avenues for musicians to generate income, DeFrancesco started emailing and Zooming with like-minded artists in an effort to create meaningful solidarity, and solutions, amid a crisis. Thinking back to the beginnings of UMAW, he says, “Everyone was pissed off, there was so much happening that we needed to respond to, and here was a way for us to funnel a lot of that energy. We weren’t forecasting that far into the future.”
Five years later, UMAW is still here, still fighting. It currently counts around 1,100 dues-paying members who work in the industry and share the group’s values. It has spurred more than 70,000 musicians and music workers to take part in actions like in-person rallies and writing letters to elected officials to demand fair pay from Spotify and the South by Southwest music festival. Hundreds of thousands of others have been made aware of UMAW’s concerns via the group’s social media channels, which offer a much-needed respite from timeline hell. At this point, for many artists, industry workers, and conscientious fans alike, UMAW is the most vital music advocacy group out there, offering a way for people to fight back against a system that seems more irredeemably fucked with every passing day.
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“Most new organizations don’t last because they can be really hard to figure out—particularly in this case, where it was just a bunch of musicians who hadn’t started a big national organization before—but we’ve made it into a sustainable and continuously growing thing,” says DeFrancesco, who has devoted countless, largely unpaid hours to the cause when he’s not on tour or working as a senior campaigner at the grassroots activist organization, Demand Progress. “UMAW has achieved successes that we couldn’t have anticipated at the beginning.” Some of those wins have already resulted in material gains for working musicians.
