Quite a bit is predicted from musicians, however no person needs to pay for it. That contains music venues and festivals.
The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), identified for his or her steadfast campaigns towards Spotify, are pushing venues and music festivals to cease taking percentages of musicians’ merchandise gross sales.
The marketing campaign, dubbed “#MyMerch,” has introduced within the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) and Canadian rapper Cadence Weapon to help. It comes after a profitable marketing campaign within the U.Ok. that FAC accomplished earlier this 12 months.
The pandemic examined each sector of the music business, particularly the reside music area—however artists nonetheless appear to get the brief finish of the stick. They sometimes foot the invoice for the overwhelming majority of the prices related to their merch, together with design, manufacturing and delivery.
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When musicians carry attire on tour, venues and festivals might take between 15% and 35% of the income although that they had no involvement in its improvement.
“A merch reduce is when a venue or competition takes wherever from 15% to 35% of the artist’s merch gross sales,” in line with UMAW’s marketing campaign. “This is an exploitative observe that interferes with one of many few methods followers can immediately assist artists on this difficult financial local weather, and it should cease. Artists carry the monetary burden of designing, producing, and delivery merch, and promoting merch is without doubt one of the few methods artists could make a revenue on tour.”
UMAW is now calling on musicians to share their tales of venues or music festivals taking a reduce of their gross sales. You can discover a checklist of the marketing campaign’s venue listing right here.