Fair Pay at SxSW!
In Spring 2023, MWA joined in Coalition with United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) and a number of other organizations to fight for Fair Pay at the SxSW festival.
On May 31st, MWA and UMAW organized a demonstration outside the Corporate headquarters of Penske Media, SXSW’s largest shareholder, to demand FairPay@SxSW.
Within a month, SxSW management announced a $100 per band raise for its Austin Festival (from $250 per band to $350) and they raised pay at their new Australian festival from zero to $350 per band!
Of course, this was far short of the $200 per person MWA/UMAW had demanded: so we vowed to keep fighting.
But we won $100-$350 each for thousands of bands, and we proved, once again, that Solidarity Works!
Some Background:
Since SXSW launched in 1987, musicians have been the festival’s backbone and main draw. Yet despite SXSW’s consistently growing profits and ever-expanding programming over the past 30+ years, the musicians performing at the festival have been exploited with low pay, high application fees, and other insults.
For at least a decade, SXSW has offered its showcasing artists the same unjust compensation options: either take a wristband to attend the festival, OR receive a one time payment of $250 (or $100 for solo artists). International artists do not even have this choice, and are only offered a wristband with no possibility for compensation.
While SXSW has maintained these insultingly low wages since at least 2012, the festival has regularly increased its application fees. In 2012 the fee was $40, and now it’s $55, a 37.5% increase. Even without accounting for skyrocketing inflation, these stagnant wages and growing fees have meant an actual decrease in wages for SXSW performers over the past decade.
Enough is enough. Artists built SXSW and we must be fairly compensated for our work.
SXSW regularly boasts about bringing hundreds of millions of dollars into the Austin economy. The festival is now owned by Penske Media, who also own Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, and the Hollywood trade publications. The corporation’s CEO Jay Penske is the son of billionaire Roger Penske, and is himself worth roughly a quarter of a billion dollars. The festival brings high profile politicians and business people from all over the world for high level speeches, panels, and networking. Yet SXSW continues to severely mistreat the artists who are the backbone of the enterprise. We demand fair pay for musicians at SXSW.
After our efforts in Spring 2023 we supported legislative efforts in Austin to raise wages for music workers, and ultimately hope to organize around an equitable contract for SxSW musicians. We hope that our coalition members, including UMAW and the AFM, ultimately support allowing the musicians who work these festivals to have democratic voice in their representation.
MWA is 100% committed to the principle that the workers on the gig—and ONLY the workers on the gig—get to decide what to demand, how to fight for that demand, and what deals to accept or reject.
MWA stands ready to support such union democracy in future negotiations.
