United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) celebrates the introduction of the Living Wage for Musicians Act – led by Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman – to Congress. By creating a new streaming royalty, the bill would help ensure that artists and musicians can build sustainable careers in the digital age.

Music workers create the enormous wealth that streaming platforms accumulate for their CEOs and investors year after year. But artists continue to be underpaid, misled, and otherwise exploited by streaming platforms. While artists experience declining wages and increasingly precarious employment, the music industry as a whole has reaped unprecedented profits, and CEOs of tech companies have become billionaires.

The Living Wage for Musicians Act is built to pay artists a minimum penny per stream, an amount calculated specifically to provide a working class artist a living wage from streaming.

The Living Wage for Musicians Act would create a new royalty from streaming music that would bypass existing contracts, and go directly from platforms to artists.

The mechanism behind the Living Wage for Musicians Act is simple. The royalty would be funded through platform subscription fees and a 10% levy on non-subscription revenue. This money would be paid into an Artist Compensation Royalty Fund, which will then be distributed directly to both featured and non-featured artists by a non-profit administrator. Congress set this precedent by unanimously passing laws in the 1990s that established a similar fund for money collected from manufacturers of recordable digital media, and a similar direct payment system to artists from Satellite Radio and Internet Broadcast platforms. As a result, the administrative system for collecting funds and distributing them directly to musicians already exists. The Living Wage for Musicians Act makes use of these same mechanisms for new digital audio technologies and applies them to streaming for the first time.

The Artist Compensation Royalty Fund would then be distributed directly to recording musicians by a non-profit organization—just as SoundExchange does now for satellite radio and internet broadcast. Payouts from the fund are proportional to streams by track, same as they are calculated now—but with the crucial difference that this new money will go directly to artists, and not pass through labels.

Finally, the Living Wage for Musicians act includes a maximum payout per track, per month, in order to generate a more sustainable income for a broader and more diverse set of artists. Money exceeding this cap (as it stands, 1,000,000 streams for a track in a month) will be used to increase the payout per stream for all recording musicians. This will help us achieve our goals of helping musicians in every genre, across the US, have a more sustainable career.