30 MusicWeek 28.06.13 VIEWPOINT THE MUSICIANS’ UNION
A STORY AS OLD AS TIME J
Why the industry and its musicians should think very carefully about ‘playing’ for free
LIVE BY HORACE TRUBRIDGE
ASSISTANT GENERAL SECRETARY, MUSICIANS’ UNION
ohn and Peter are busy putting together the final arrangements for the Last Supper:
“Venue?” “Check.” “Caterers?” “Check.” “Booze?” “Check.” “Security?” “Check.” “Well that’s it then,” “Yep, lucky too ’cause we’ve run out of money, that’s
the budget all gone.” “Oh, that’s a shame, I thought of something else
that would really make the party go with a swing.” “What’s that?” “A band!” “Oh that’s a brilliant idea, Jesus loves music!” “Yes, but we’ve got no money to pay the
musicians, remember, budget all gone and stuff.” “Oh yeah……. hold on though, us disciples are pretty
important people right, so why don't we just tell the musicians that we can’t pay them but it will be great exposure for them?” “Brilliant! I’ll get on to it.”
Whilst it may be the case that Leonardo Da
Vinci encoded musical notes in his masterpiece depicting The Last Supper, the Bible makes no mention of musicians performing at the gathering, which suggests to me that when approached by John they turned him down and let it be known in no uncertain terms that ‘exposure’ does not pay the bills. Fast forward a couple of thousand years and, in
2012, the UK is in the grip of Olympics fever. Vast amounts of money have been spent, and the arts community in the UK has seen millions of pounds of money otherwise destined for cash-strapped groups diverted to the Cultural Olympiad at a time when arts and culture in the UK is suffering from the most swingeing cuts in funding seen for many years. Then I get a call from a professional musician telling me that his band has been offered a load of work during the Olympics. But yes, you guessed it, there is no money to pay them with. But they are told not to worry about that, because it will be ‘great exposure’. And then I get another call, and another. In the lead up to the Olympics, the MU dealt with countless cases where professional musicians were being asked to work for free during the Games. Again and again our members were told that ‘there was no budget for music’, but that ‘playing as part of the Olympics would be great exposure for them.’ But hang on – most of these musicians weren’t being asked to headline the opening and closing ceremonies. They were being asked to play gigs around the Olympic Park, or in some cases they were asked to busk but were warned that they would
ABOVE Play fair: The MU’s Horace Trubridge is campaigning for professional musicians’ right to be paid to play
not be allowed to collect money. Over £240 million was spent on security, lord
(yes, him again) only knows how much spent on staging, lighting, equipment, Portaloos, catering and the like but exactly how much Olympic budget was spent on musicians? I ask because I simply do not know. What I do know is that, with the exception of a handful of musicians in the opening and closing ceremonies, the MU did not speak to a single one who was offered a paid gig as part of the Olympics. This is despite the fact that LOCOG signed a
Principles of Cooperation with the TUC which specifically stated that professional workers would be paid for their services and were distinct from the unpaid volunteer workforce. By their own definition, a volunteer in our sector was an amateur musician, in other words, a musician who does not make any money from music. Only amateur musicians should have been offered unpaid work. The truth was quite different. From what we could gather at the time, pretty
much every other sector involved in the Olympics, other than the volunteers themselves, were being paid. So security, staging, equipment hire and catering were all paid for. But some bright spark at LOCOG came up with the great idea that they could get away without paying professional musicians. It’s a disease. Otherwise perfectly decent, honest, fair-minded people genuinely seem to believe that
musicians do it simply for the love of it and are happy to turn out a tune whether paid or not. It’s no wonder that so many of the MU’s members have to supplement their income from music by doing other jobs like tiling, plastering and plumbing. It didn’t start or stop with the Olympics either.
We’ve had Café Rouge running charity events and asking musicians to work for free even though - yes you’ve guessed it - everyone else was being paid, various music festivals paying for everything except the music, and countless individual examples of organisations, charities or individuals looking to secure the services of professional musicians for free. The MU therefore launched Work Not Play late
last year (#worknotplayMU) to highlight the issue of musicians constantly being asked to work for free, and to start listing examples of the practice. Although the campaign’s popularity has been very encouraging, it is extremely depressing to read almost daily examples of professional musicians being expected to give their services for free. As the music industry, we need to tackle this
issue head on. As one musician says on the [Work Not Play] website, musicians and their families need to eat too. Aside from the big stars who earn the mega bucks, your average jobbing musician is lucky to make £20,000 a year. Even that amount is increasingly under threat from the offer of ‘free’ gigs. The danger is that a career in music becomes unviable. And we should all care about that. To anyone who doesn’t agree with me, I
respectfully suggest that you try this: next time you hear your plumber whistling a theme from Wagner’s Tannhauser with a smile on his face, tell him that he doesn’t need paying because he’s clearly enjoying himself and anyway it’s great exposure because you’re going to tell all your friends what a great plumber he is. Good luck.
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