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February so far has been an unusually courageous fortnight for pop music. A backup dancer for Kendrick Lamar unfurled Palestinian and Sundanese flags during the Super Bowl halftime show; Macklemore released a third installment in his series of withering protest anthems against genocide, oligarchy, the Resnick pistachio empire, and Elon Musk; the Black Keys gave a scathing interview to Rolling Stone on the insidious and destructive nature of corporate consolidation in the industry; and at the Grammy Awards, a visibly terrified Chappell Roan denounced record labels for not providing health insurance to young musicians toiling under record contracts.
And yet the impact and relevance of these acts was almost self-evidently nonexistent against the backdrop of Live Nation and Spotify and the entertainment industry merger mania expected to commence under President Trump. The Palestinian flag was cut from the national Super Bowl broadcast, the Black Keys admitted they could not share the details of their split with industry titan Irving Azoff or they’d “never work again,” and Macklemore has pretty clearly been throttled by the algorithms he predicted would suppress him in his first anti-genocide track, “Hind’s Hall.” No one has talked about “payola” scandals in close to 50 years, but the price artists pay when they so much as hint at dissatisfaction with the industry’s power dynamics has surely risen faster than the price of eggs.
“To see how consolidated the industry has gotten and how connected things have become, it’s mind-blowing.”
Chappell Roan’s small rebellion, during her acceptance speech for her “Best New Artist” award, was the one act that elicited so much as a response from the music industry. After warning the audience that her enormous golden witch hat was about to fall off her head, drawing laughs as it disappeared behind her, she opened a white notebook and began reading nervously.
“I told myself if I ever won a Grammy and I got to stand up here in front of the most powerful people in music,” she said, chewing gum in an apparent effort to calm her nerves, “I would demand that labels and the industry profiting millions of dollars off of artists would offer a livable wage and health care, especially for developing artists. Because I got signed so young—I got signed when I was a minor—and when I got dropped I had zero job experience and like most people I had a difficult job finding a job during the pandemic. It was so devastating to feel so committed to my art and so betrayed by the system.”
Artists cheered Roan’s speech, with some like Benson Boone standing up in support almost immediately. But the industry responded through a lacerating op-ed in The Hollywood Reporter by one Jeff Rabhan, a former executive for the label that dropped Roan in 2020, who accused Roan of hypocritically “taking aim at the very machine that got her there” and praised Bill Maher for roasting Roan’s “trendy, performative activism.”
“What would Prince say? Or Tom Petty?” he wrote, inexplicably referencing two artists who would have obviously given Roan’s speech a standing ovation were they not long dead from opioid overdoses they might have avoided with early-career access to comprehensive mental health care. “If labels are responsible for artists’ wages, health care and overall well-being, where does it end and personal responsibility begin? Should Chris Blackwell put a mint on her pillow and tuck her in at night, too?”
“Record labels are businesses, not charities, and the deal is simple: They put up the money, take the risk, and in return, they get a cut of the profits,” he went on. Roan’s label “ran the numbers, assessed potential revenue, and invested hard cash and company bandwidth to build her identity and a sustainable business around her music. That’s how the industry works.”
Rabhan exemplifies the type of personality required to succeed in the music industry (though it is unclear how much success he has actually enjoyed). He managed the star Michelle Branch, claimed in court to have “discovered” the boy band Hanson, played a role in the management of Kelly Clarkson and Jermaine Dupri, and now runs something called Bored of Ed LLC (incorporated just last month), a company that describes itself as a “solution that brings artists, audiences, and brands closer together, teaching, inspiring, and building relationships” and apparently envisions a future where traditional college music programs are replaced with trade school–style training for brand partnerships. Until 2021, he chaired the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University, a title that won him a wry profile in The New York Observer in which his entertainment executive wife, whom he met on a college trip to Israel, was quoted comparing their children’s preschool admissions odyssey to the Underground Railroad. He tweets frequently in support of Israel and likes to address anti-genocide activists on social media as “JEW HATER,” though he is better known in the music business as a reliable mouthpiece for the common mogul perspective that female pop stars are fundamentally interchangeable and disposable “vessel[s] for the artwork of writer-producers,” as he once described singer-songwriter Kesha’s relationship with the producer she accused of drugging, sexually assaulting, and abusing her.
The industry expects artists to cultivate a personal brand that aligns with future corporate partnerships at all times.
It is not clear if his distaste for Roan is rooted in her labor activism, her occasional expressions of support for Palestinian freedom, her frequent expressions of distaste for brand endorsements, or something else. But it is worth noting that Roan’s ascent to pop stardom appears to have been remarkably wholesome and low on profound trauma. The summer after her sophomore year in high school, she attended the prestigious Interlochen Center for the Arts summer camp in Traverse City, Michigan, wrote a song that impressed the faculty, uploaded a video to YouTube, and got a record contract a few months later. The late deep-state child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell were prolific benefactors of Interlochen, which they used as a hunting ground for vulnerable young aspiring artists before Epstein was arrested for the first time in 2006. But by the time Roan came along, the environment at the camp was idyllic, and her experience with Atlantic was arguably better than most. After introducing her to her most indispensable collaborator, Dan Nigro, and management team, the label unceremoniously dropped her in 2020 and somehow allowed her to gain control of her masters before she blew up. She has spoken in many interviews of the uncertainty and self-doubt that plagued her during this time, while always acknowledging that mending fences with her family, honing her inimitable sound and image as an artist, and learning to get by on a barista paycheck all helped her in the end. Like Taylor Swift, Roan’s ability to resonate so deeply with fans stems from the fact that her struggles are normal girl problems and not those of an abused child who has been irretrievably damaged by the predations of the Hollywood machine and the sickos it attracts; unlike Swift, her parents aren’t rich, and “money” topped the list of those normal girl problems.
Roan first came into the crosshairs of Bill Maher when she posted a somewhat rambling TikTok video attributing her unwillingness to “endorse” Kamala Harris to the vice president’s endorsement of Palestinian genocide and the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to support trans people. At a concert last summer, she dressed up as the Statue of Liberty and recited the Emma Lazarus poem: “I am in drag as the biggest queen of all, but in case you had forgotten what’s etched on my pretty little toes: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.’”
THE MUSIC INDUSTRY OPERATES AS AN OLIGOPOLY. Three labels comprise some 80 percent of the plays on Spotify; one company, Penske Media, controls the Billboard charts along with much of the entertainment media (Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone); and another company, Live Nation, controls nearly every venue at which a working pop artist can expect to perform a concert, which has provided the most reliable source of income for most pop musicians since the collapse of the CD business in the early 2000s. “To see how consolidated the industry has gotten and how connected things have become, it’s mind-blowing,” Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney said in the Rolling Stone interview. “When you control ticketing, promotion, and all this stuff, and then you get into owning the venues and then having shared interests with management, it just becomes harder and harder [for artists] to do business … [For] a capitalist society to function, there has to be competition. And if everything’s connected and all the interests are shared on one side, there’s no way to compete.”
The upshot of the Black Keys’ odyssey is that their manager, Azoff, did not have their interests at heart. Azoff had booked them to pay certain venues because he made money when they booked the venues, regardless of whether enough fans showed up, then advised them to cancel the tour when some of the dates didn’t sell fast enough, because canceled tours can be almost as profitable for the entities collecting the security deposits as tours that sell out, and so much less work. In Europe in particular, the band’s schedule was repeatedly and inexplicably juggled, with their Manchester show getting rescheduled multiple times due to venue delays.
Last year, the Biden Justice Department sued Live Nation, which Azoff helmed until 2012, along with Azoff’s live events promoter Oak View Group for, inter alia, conspiring to screw over artists and their management teams by agreeing not to bid against one another for acts while giving off the illusion that they were in fact competitors. Oak View owns or controls many of the venues the Black Keys had been scheduled to play, including the loathed ManchesterLive; but Carney gave the impression that the band had not known that until the complaint was filed.
Alas, in December a federal judge denied the DOJ’s request to produce emails between Live Nation, OVG, and a private equity firm with which they were colluding, determining that the emails were privileged due to the companies’ agreement to expand their collusion into the realm of a joint legal defense strategy. But the emails quoted in the original complaint, in which Azoff refers to his company as Live Nation’s “pimp” and “hammer”—roles for which Oak View receives “significant annual incentive payments”—are plenty damning. The judge in that case, who also happens to be presiding over Diddy’s sex trafficking and conspiracy case, is expected to rule soon on Live Nation’s motion to dismiss. Meanwhile, Azoff and Live Nation spent much of last month openly collaborating to plan a benefit concert for Southern California fire relief efforts that ended up raising $100 million.
“People are terrified of upsetting Live Nation and Ticketmaster,” Robert Smith of The Cure told The New York Times in November, recalling his own recent crusade to force the monopoly to make his concerts affordable to his youngest fans. “It’s really bizarre, actually, because the power of the artist, it’s the ultimate power.”
CHAPPELL ROAN ENDED UP WINNING THIS ROUND against Rabhan and the Machine. She donated $25,000 to a nonprofit that facilitates mental health care for music industry professionals. Charli XCX and Noah Kahan pitched in, Halsey wrote a spirited rebuttal of Rabhan’s “boot licker behavior” on Instagram, and Live Nation donated $25,000 as well.
But the vehemence with which Rabhan, Bill Maher, and their ilk instantly struck back at her brief invocation of a more egalitarian music industry shows how entrenched their worldview has become. By dressing down Chappell, Rabhan is advocating for a world where there is no sunshine between the worker and the brand. The industry expects artists to cultivate a personal brand that aligns with future corporate partnerships at all times.
The hypocrisy of this system is glaring. Artists are free—encouraged even—to partner with brands promoting alcohol, gambling, pharmaceuticals, or, as the Black Keys were forced to when the canceled tour zeroed out their revenue for the year, crypto. Yet advocating for something as basic as better health care for fellow artists? That’s where the industry draws the line, unless, like Roan, she is satisfied to channel her energies into something harmless and superficial like a 501(c)(3).
