It's no secret that streaming services don't exactly pay artists the best rates, with Spotify generally being the one that (rightfully) comes under fire.
As a brief recap, in November 2023, Spotify announced that they wouldn't be paying royalties for any song that didn't get at least 1,000 streams yearly, effectively getting free labor from some artists. Then in December the company laid off 17% of its staff, and then CEO Daniel Ek made some incredibly terrible comments about "the cost of creating content being close to zero."
Now in a new interview with Rock 108, Dorothy vocalist Dorothy Martin offered a pretty logical solution – unionization among artists against streaming services. Which on one hand is pretty extreme considering outside services like Bandcamp and hosting your music on your own website, is the only way to really be heard on the Internet. On the other hand, fuck you pay us.
"I think artists need to unionize and I think the streaming services need to pay us a lot more for the songs," said Martin. "It's great, because the streaming services, the pros of that are you have a much broader reach. You reach a lot of people. I mean, you can get a billion streams, right? So you're reaching people all over the world in every country.
"But we need to get paid more for it because now artists are sort of forced to tour. Not that we don't love to tour and see our fans, but I feel very strongly that we deserve to get paid for our art and it should be fair. And I think that the United States government needs to legislate a little bit on our behalf and get artists paid a fair amount for the streaming numbers.
"And then it's great. Then we can come on tour. You can buy physical merch, vinyl CDs, cassettes. We'll sign it for you. We love it. We'll kiss you on the forehead and sign your boobies. But touring is a grind, and while it's fun, it has its ups and downs. But also it's just fair at the end of the day.
"And I think artists should pull together and unionize and not be so competitive with one another, but have each other's backs. 'Cause when the artists start talking, all the business folks in the industry are like, 'Uh-oh. They banded together and they're rebelling.'"
