Yahoo Lifestyle Was Chappell Roan’s Grammys Speech Naive or Necessary? Why Both Sides of the Debate Are Right, and Sometimes Not
Late Wednesday evening, an uproar erupted across the music industry over an op-ed published in the Hollywood Reporter, in which Jeff Rabhan (former chair of New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music) unpacked some of the implications of Chappell Roan’s passionate statement about music companies owing musicians “a livable wage and health care” during her speech accepting the best new artist award at the Grammy Awards.
As is the case with many such situations, both sides are right about some things and less right about others. That segment of Chappell’s speech bears repeating in full:
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“I told myself if I ever won a Grammy, and I got to stand up here in front of the most powerful people in music, I would demand that labels and the industry, profiting millions of dollars off of artists, would offer a livable wage and health care, especially to developing artists.
“Because I got signed so young — I got signed as a minor, and when I got dropped, I had zero job experience under my belt and, like most people, I had a difficult time finding a job in the pandemic and could not afford health insurance. It was so devastating to feel so committed to my art and feel so betrayed by the system and so dehumanized to not have health [care]. And if my label would have prioritized artists’ health, I could have been provided care by a company I was giving everything to.
“So, record labels need to treat their artists as valuable employees with a livable wage and health insurance and protection. Labels, we got you, but do you got us?”
Some of the debate stems from a technicality: If Chappell had simply said “a livable wage,” there wouldn’t have been much to dispute without taking that term totally literally. But the fact that she also mentioned insurance and the term “employee” sent executives spelunking into finer details of the implications of those concepts, and why it is unworkable under most circumstances: Such an arrangement effectively would make an artist a literal employee of their label, which is ostensibly the opposite of what she had in mind. Rabhan also criticized her for making the statement from a position of privilege, as a fast-rising superstar who’d just won a Grammy for best new artist.
Without hammering these points too hard, the situation is not only a classic art v. commerce standoff, it also has many hallmarks of a classic male/female difference of perspective: a woman shouting “This is wrong!” while a man ‘splains, “Hold on a minute, little lady, let me tell you how things really work.”
Everyone agrees that music business contracts are, to put it mildly, fucked, and Chappell has spoken often of the bad experience with her first deal, which she signed with Atlantic Records as a 16-year-old. But modifying music contracts is a ground war and since everyone’s deals are different — even “standard artist contracts” are nearly always modified — wholesale change is a steep challenge.
In the most basic terms, an artist signs a contract and receives an advance on their future earnings — which is effectively a loan. (That is a point that artists, particularly ones who blow their advances on cars or jewelry, often fail to grasp.) While terms differ exponentially, an artist is usually responsible for the costs of recording, manufacturing and promoting their own music — everything from studio bills to radio promotion to free hoodies the label sends to tastemakers — which is a major reason why many end up thousands or millions of dollars in debt to their record labels: because they haven’t recouped that advance.
Are some of the things Chappell was asking for, like a wage and insurance, possible for the artist’s team to construct into their label deal — or, perhaps more easily, into how the advance is spent? Absolutely, as Rabhan says. But that is a relatively recent option that requires a level of expertise that not every artist or their team has, especially when Chappell signed her first record deal as a 16-year-old nearly a decade ago.
More to the point, artists actually are contractually eligible for health insurance via an arrangement the major labels have with SAG-AFTRA that has existed since 1952, and in recent years labels have provided guidance on other opportunities for coverage, although how much those opportunities are mentioned during the rush of signing a deal or utilized by musicians (or how competitive those insurance plans are) is difficult to determine.
Yet there’s no disputing her point. As with many businesses, creators have been viciously exploited by music companies and executives since musicians and songwriters first figured out ways to make money from their intellectual property, and although things are changing, they aren’t changing quickly enough. More artists have learned the value of owning their copyrights and more artists are taking more elements of their business into their own hands.
And more artists are speaking out. Taylor Swift, to her enormous credit, has used her own experiences as teaching moments for fellow creators and the world — taking on streaming services and essentially forcing them to change their royalty-payment policies, and re-recording her first six albums because she feels she was unfairly treated when the rights to those albums were sold without her consent. More and more artists are striking deals in which they own their masters and thus have greater control of their music.
Raye, in an acceptance speech for one of her seven Brit Awards last year, demanded that record labels provide a percentage of album and song sales revenue (“points on the master”) to songwriters, who have been shunted to the bottom of the streaming economy and often can barely make a living.
And James Blake has taken his entire business under his own roof, from releasing his music via a proprietary streaming platform to booking and selling tickets for his tours himself — in partnership with other independent companies, of course, but with a much greater level of personal involvement. It’s admirable, and as he himself has said, exhausting and exhilarating at the same time.
Added to that, Chappell, Iggy Azalea and many other artists have called on labels to provide non-recoupable mental health assistance for their artists, as they grapple with the fame that those labels have, for better and worse, helped them to achieve. (Chappell is now signed to Amusement Records, the label launched by her collaborator and producer Daniel Nigro, which has a distribution deal with Island Records, a subsidiary of the world’s largest music company, Universal — so she’s both deep within the system and slightly outside of it.)
Hours of conversations with knowledgeable people on both sides of this argument have, at the very least, exposed these polarities in thinking. “Signing a 16-year-old and not helping to guide them is just wrong!” and “It’s the label’s responsibility to set up the artist to win — they benefit from the artist being healthy!” on the one side; and “just another entitled superstar whining about the system that’s making them rich” and “isn’t that how capitalism works?” on the other.
But ultimately, whether or not Chappell’s speech at the Grammys was airtight from a business sense is beside the point: It brings light to an unfair and untenable system, and also helps more creators to understand — in vivid terms — that knowledge is power.
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