Five Common Sense Solutions for Indie Organizing

The problems and solutions document below helps explain why the Indie Musicians Caucus of the AFM is asking candidates for Union Office to support our proposals. Our goal is to make organizing for empowerment of indie musicians through the Union possible. Organizing doesn’t mean shoving work rules and contracts written by those in other industries or other sectors of our industry down indie musicians’ throats. It means giving working indie musicians—and DJ/Producers—the voice to write our own and helping us organize the power to win them. First we must remove the obstacles to the empowerment of indie musicians within the Union by adopting the IMC-AFM Proposals. Here’s why:

  1. Because no one is going to join a Union controlled by people who do not work their job.

    The governance of the AFM is captured by elites from among the core constituencies-- Symphonic, Broadway, Club-date, Major Label and Major Film recording—long under Union contract. It does not reflect the membership of the Union let alone the demographics of the industry.

    Solutions:

    • Remove obstacles to indie musician/DJ/Producer participation in Union governance.

    • Permit DJ/Producer members. People can’t participate in governance if they can’t join.

    • Restrict the clauses permitting officers to fine members for accepting non-Union work to situations in which the member has violated an active Do Not Work order.

    • Create—and fund—effective strategies for organizing indie work.

  2. Even if the Union complied immediately with #1, it will be years before the effects of 100 years of institutional bias is ended, and a Union reflecting the current recording/recording-related touring industry created.

    In the meantime, no one is going to give a Union whose officers don’t work their jobs the right to determine the terms of their contracts—and effectively decide when and whether they can work. The large majority of musicians do indie work, and if the AFM wants to reverse its long decline in membership and power, it needs to organize that work. Here’s how we can break this vicious circle:

    Solutions:

    • Formally commit the AFM and all locals to respect Union workplace democratic rights, even in organizing situations outside the National Labor Relations Act process. Musicians/DJ/Producers on the gig alone determine whether to make demands, what those demands are, how to leverage them, who bargains for them, and when and if to settle.

    • Remove the Alligator Clause,which imposes demands on Indie Sector musicians and violates our workplace democratic rights.

    • Simplify recording contract language and create a member accessible online platform with multiple choice questions enabling any member to know exactly what recording contract is appropriate and what scale applies in every situation—without the intervention of AFM officials they didn’t vote for and/or business reps who are not accountable to them.

    • Enable indie participation in Union governance by implementing the IMC-AFM Proposals.

  3. No one is going to join a Union whose dues exceed the amounts gained by their work under Union contract.

    Indie “employment” consists of intermittent freelance gigs. The tactic of ordering indie Union members to simply refuse non-union work has failed as a strategy for nearly fifty years. These gigs must be organized one at a time, and it will take multiple contracts before benefits exceed dues. If the Union demands full dues as a condition of organizing, the organizing drives will fail and there will be no dues at all.

    Solution:

    Permit tiered dues structures for new member indie musicians/DJ/Producers in active organizing projects.

  4. No one is going to join a Union that lacks the capacity to organize their work.

    Hip-Hop/Urban Contemporary recordings are rarely produced under AFM contract, even though the labels releasing/distributing them are AFM signatories.

    In 2020, 802 President Adam Krauthamer publicly announced the Union’s intention to change that by organizing Hip-Hop.

    However, he didn’t explain how a Union which doesn’t accept the DJ/producers who create Hip-Hop as members and no longer has an organizing department could accomplish this.

    In fact: it can’t.

    Solutions:

    • Permit DJ/Producer members.

    • Commit to hiring the organizing staff needed to organize the indie sector, including hip hop.

    • Commit to the institutional changes above, and any others needed to make indie—including hip-hop--organizing possible.

  5. Diversify leadership

    Winning contracts in the indie sector is impossible without the solidarity of Black and Latinx musicians. Few Black/Latinx musicians will join a Union whose leadership contains at best token representation and whose % of Black/Latinx members doesn’t even match the % in the general population—let alone reflect the human and economic importance of the Black/Latinx musicians whose labor has created much of the value of the music industry.

    Demanding anti-discrimination measures from the Symphonic, Broadway, Club-date, Major Label, and Major Film employers with whom the Union has long held contracts is very important, but will never, by itself, enable the AFM to achieve racial balance.

    To overcome structural racism within the AFM, the Union must win economic justice for the Black/Latinx music workers currently outside the AFM: it must organize the clubs/festivals/touring circuits and the record labels in which and for which most Black/Latinx musicians actually work: Jazz, Hip-Hop, Salsa, Reggaeton (and other Latin music forms), R&B, Techno, EDM, etc.

    The overwhelming majority of those are currently non-Union gigs in the indie sector.

    Solutions:

    • Commit to ending structural racism in the AFM.

    • Commit to organizing solidarity to win economic justice, dignity, and freedom from abuse and exploitation on the gigs most Black/Latinx musicians/DJ/producers actually do.

The AFM’s failure to organize the indie sector is a major contributing factor to the structurally racist imbalances within the Union. Making the institutional changes necessary to organize the Indie sector is a necessary precondition for achieving both Racial Justice for Black/Latinx musicians/DJ/Producers within the AFM and Economic Justice for music workers throughout the field.