Pay Your Creatives: How the Art Industry Exploits Queer Talent

By Laurine Payet, Music Journalist

We all enjoy music differently, but what is certain is that music follows us on our daily journey through life. It might be that you like to party, or you listen to music while working, music is here for our every step of the day. No matter the genre you like, each track has a long background and requires a lot of work. From writing to recording, producing, releasing and marketing, it takes artists weeks, months and sometimes years before releasing a single track. With that knowledge, why is it that creatives still struggle that hard to get paid for their work? In what way does the art industry exploit queer talents?

From recorded music to live shows, creatives, especially independent artists, have to constantly fight to get paid for their products and services. This is shown by the number of musicians surviving thanks to side jobs, often on a full-time contract. When doing a simple Google search, there are tons of articles on ideas for side jobs for musicians. The online magazine Vulture even wrote a list of famous independent artists and the way they make a living when their music cannot. This shows that even public recognition does not equal income.

One of the reasons for this is that more than half of the population of the US, UK and Canada now use streaming services instead of analogue radio or physical music purchases. While those services make listening to music easier and fairly accessible, the streaming fees paid to the artists are incredibly low. With the example of Spotify – which pays an average of $0.00437 per stream -, it would take 229,000 to make $1,000 and over 400,000 streams per month to earn a living based on US minimum wage. After taking away the taxes, label and management fees that also apply, most independent artists are not able to live on those royalties.

In a time where live music has suffered, artists cannot even rely on touring income, but have they ever been able to? When it is easy to calculate how much an artist will get through streams and recorded music depending on the number of streams and downloads, live performances are a lot different. There is no set price regarding the worth of any artist on stage. Most worldwide stars can charge a definite fee for promoters and festival bookers due to their high popularity, but it is not the case for other performers that don’t fit into that case. While millions of dollars go to the same few artists, there is nothing left to pay smaller acts.

Promoters also take advantage of the competition within the industry to offer exposure in exchange for their performance. It has been taken for granted that small artists will play for a very small fee, or even for free. Promoters will sell it as a golden opportunity, so artists should be grateful just to be able to perform. But this is forgetting there is no event without artists. You might ask “then why agreeing to play for free?”, but in need to push their career when there is no better offer, artists often have no choice but to accept. And if not, promoters will easily find a replacement.

This is even worse for queer creatives. As well as other marginalised groups, LGBTQ+ artists struggle even harder to get recognition and therefore often accept low paying gigs, when they know they deserve more. Festivals tend to fill their artist spots with straight-cisgender-male-centric acts, leaving queer artists to take any opportunity given to them, even if it involved playing for ridiculously small pay. Exposure doesn’t pay your rent, and in any other industry, this would be seen as obvious exploitation.

Music is often not considered a job. Any sort of art has always been hard to put a price on due to its subjectivity. However, music – recorded or live – requires an insane amount of work and should be considered as much as a job as a doctor or a hairdresser.

The importance of paying creatives lays in a lot of reasons. Having a side-job is mentally and physically draining. It leaves the artist no time to devote to their art. It is especially the case for queer peers and minorities who have to deal with a higher mental charge, often encountering discrimination in the workplace as well as in their personal life. Working on the side is likely to lead creatives to give up or put on hold their musical or creative career. Or it means the only artists able to flourish are those with the financial means to not need an income, making the industry completely inaccessible to many.

This is a reason the art sector doesn’t prove to be diverse, however, creativity comes from one’s background, experience and lived life. What makes music interesting is how it can be shaped by different genres, inspirations and cultures. With the current functioning of the industry, access to the arts is filtered to rich people, but also men, white and non-LGBTQ+ people. While the art sector pretends to be more accessible because it does attract people from every background, it is just the façade of a system similar to the structure of every workplace.

While music is an outlet queer people often chose to express their experiences and create communities, they can rarely make a living out of it. This issue doesn’t just affect the creative side, but every worker of the music industry. Getting a job is very unlikely to happen without a year minimum of experience in unpaid/low-paid internships. The structure itself is then also only accessible to the same profile and in consequence, rarely pushes the career of minorities and queer artists. However, if we put pressure on the industry to change this norm so that paying people what they are worth becomes the standard, not the outlier, then we can create change and an environment where diverse creative talent can prosper.