How the Musicians’ Union wants to make streaming fair for artists – interview with Naomi Pohl

Naomi Pohl spoke to Left Foot Forward at this year’s TUC Congress

The shift from physical music sales to digital streaming has transformed the way the music industry works. While fans have access to millions of songs and albums at the touch of a button, musicians have frequently spoken out about the impact this has had on their incomes.

The Musicians’ Union (MU) – which represents over over 35,000 musicians across the UK – is among those calling for a fairer deal from streaming services. According to polling carried out on behalf of the union, 80 per cent of musicians and music creators earn less than £200 a month from streaming.

At this year’s TUC Congress in Brighton, Left Foot Forward spoke to MU general secretary Naomi Pohl about the current problems with the streaming model and what steps her union wants taken to fix this.

Pohl told Left Foot Forward that the MU’s campaign on streaming services began during the pandemic. She said: “We started running it during the pandemic when live performance basically closed down, so most of our members weren’t earning any money and it became clear that they’re just not receiving fair royalties from music streaming – so recorded music isn’t playing the part it should in sustaining musicians’ careers.”

Asked what changes the MU is specifically looking for in the streaming industry, Pohl told Left Foot Forward that the two key asks were improved royalties for featured artists and guaranteed royalties for session musicians.

She said: “What we’re calling for is a minimum modern digital royalty rate for featured artists. So, if you’re signed to a label, if you were signed decades ago, you might be on a very low royalty rate, like – say – 10 per cent on music streaming. We think that’s just not fair. So we would like to see a minimum digital royalty rate of more like 25 or 30 per cent, which is the modern rate. All artists should be on a modern rate. So that’s one of our asks.

“And another ask is to have a guaranteed royalty for session musicians. Currently, session musicians get no royalties whatsoever. So you could be somebody who’s played on a massive track – like an Adele track for example. You’re a string player, you played on the Adele track, you got £130 for the session, and then it’s making billions of income from music streaming and you get no share of that whatsoever.”

At this year’s TUC Congress, many trade unions were cognisant of the fact that some of their demands will require additional investment from the new Labour government – a government which has been seeking to make clear that it does not intend to ramp up public spending. Pohl is no different, acknowledging that one of the MU’s big campaign asks around restoration of arts funding may not be forthcoming.

However, she is also clear that beginning to address remuneration from streaming services wouldn’t cost the government a penny. “Arts funding would require investment by the government, but the music streaming issue, it actually wouldn’t cost the government any money to change the law to provide a better royalty, or to help negotiate a voluntary agreement with the industry,” Pohl told Left Foot Forward.

Alongside the challenges posed by streaming services, the MU has major concerns about other issues currently facing the creative sector. Artificial intelligence (AI) is among those, with Pohl telling Left Foot Forward: “our members are very worried that’s an existential threat to their careers.”

Two of the big questions posed by AI are around performers’ image rights and the remuneration model for the works that AI is trained on.

How would the MU want its members to be protected against these threats posed by AI? “We’d like to see a new right for performers and creatives so that they have control over their personality and image rights, for example – so some controls to protect against deepfakes.

“We also want to make sure that individual creators and performers get consent for ingestion of works. So, you’ve got AI models being trained on artistic works and, at the moment, the record labels and the publishers, their position is that they believe that they hold the rights for the works in their catalogues and that they can license them for ingestion.

“But we’ve not had an answer to if they did that, how would they actually pay the performers and creators. Would it be a one-off payment? What kind of share would be paid out? Is it going to be an ongoing licensing situation that’s going to continue to generate money?”

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development a Left Foot Forward