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Music

Anna’s Archive Sued For $300 Million By Spotify

May 12, 2026 Miranda Wollen, Paste Magazine. , , , ,
If we know anything about Spotify, it’s that they need more money. How’s one to pay their artists with a measly annual operating income of $2.7 billion? Thank goodness, then, that justice was served this week when nefarious open-source activist group Anna’s Archive was ordered to pay the streaming behemoth $300 million. A judge accused Anna’s Archive of scraping “nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings” from the platform, as well as Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Entertainment. The three latter companies are to receive $7 million in damages. 

Reshaping The Music Industry Through Solidarity

October 6, 2025 Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
The music industry doesn’t have to be exploitative. What if artists owned the platforms we depend on? What if musicians shared resources, power, and profits—together?  Recorded live at AmericanaFest 2025, this panel explores how music cooperatives are reshaping the industry through solidarity, not exploitation. We discuss:  Why artists need alternatives to Spotify and corporate streaming.  How cooperatives create sustainable careers for musicians.  Building movements rooted in community, equity, and ownership.  This conversation is just the beginning. Together, we can build the music industry we actually want to exist in.

Mutual Aid And Mosh Pits

October 18, 2024 Briana L. Urena-Ravelo, In These Times. , , , ,
Chicago — On the Fourth of July, a group of punks and appreciators gather around the canal on the South Side for a mutual aid benefit show. They’re raising funds for Comedor Comunitario (“Community Dining Room”), a weekly Tuesday dinner run by Venezuelan migrants at a community church. With keffiyehs and Palestinian flags throughout the space, curious holiday revelers watched from their passing boats as folks slammed to the bands Hide and Stress Positions, their lyrics decrying American settler-colonialism and nationalism in a defiant take on the holiday. All told, we raised over $3,000to support the comedor.

Gig Organizing 101

October 6, 2024 David Rovics, This Week with David Rovics. , , , , ,
The great Seattle-based songwriter, Jim Page, was coming to the east coast back in the mid-1990's. I was living in Boston then, and offered to organize a gig. I was already well into my twenties, but I had never done such a thing before. Jim was and is fairly well-known in Ireland, with one of Ireland's most revered musicians, Christy Moore, having recorded a number of his songs, one brilliant example of which became a real anthem for anti-nuclear sentiment in Ireland, "Hiroshima-Nagasaki-Russian Roulette." Boston had (and has) a large population of people who were born and raised in Ireland, and a much larger population of people of Irish descent.

Band Walks 870 Miles On Tour To Promote More Sustainability

November 9, 2023 Paige Bennett, EcoWatch. , , , ,
Filkin’s Drift, a band of two based in Birmingham, UK, have been highlighting sustainability in their latest tour by walking about 870 miles along the coast of Wales. Musicians Seth Bye and Chris Roberts walked between stops for their 60-day tour, carrying the instruments they needed and just enough clothing to walk and perform each day. Bye and Roberts each carried a 33-pound bag on their journey, the BBC reported. “We’re not at all suggesting that everyone should give up driving and walk to all their gigs because it has completely taken over our lives, but things like choosing more sustainable routes (should be considered),” Roberts said, as reported by the BBC.

Musician Cooperativism At Groupmuse

September 23, 2023 Mosa Tsay, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , ,
I am a cellist and worker-owner of a cooperative. As an ICDE fellow, I hop out of my usual action-oriented work to reflect on why cooperativism is an alternative to the status quo for freelancing musicians. As a professional cellist, I witnessed the infrastructural fractures that musicians in the United States have to navigate. In 2020, I returned to the U.S. from a year of studying in France, after contemplating during quarantine about the economics of working as an artist. One important question I wanted to solve: Rather than competing with my colleagues for limited paid gigs, how can I generate new opportunities and resources with them?

Employees At Epic-Owned Bandcamp Form Union

March 18, 2023 Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch. , , ,
U.S. employees at Bandcamp, an online audio distributor, have announced their formation of a union. Last year, the platform was acquired by Epic Games, the multibillion-dollar company behind games like Fortnite and the Unreal gaming engine. According to the union, known as Bandcamp United, a super-majority of workers are in favor of forming a union. They have authorized The Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU)’s Tech Workers Union Local 1010 division to represent their 62-person unit; this is the same group that supported Kickstarter United to form a historic first union among U.S. tech employees.

Why Movements Need To Start Singing Again

December 3, 2022 Paul Engler, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
Social movements are stronger when they sing. That’s a lesson that has been amply demonstrated throughout history, and it’s one that I have learned personally in working to develop trainings for activists over the past decade and a half. In Momentum, a training program that I co-founded and that many other trainers and organizers have built over the last seven years, song culture is not something we included at the start. And yet, it has since become so indispensable that the trainers I know would never imagine doing without it again. The person who taught me the most as I came to appreciate the impact that song can have on movement culture is Stephen Brackett, an activist and hip-hop MC known on stage as Brer Rabbit.

This Is Not A Drill’: The Music And Politics Of Roger Waters

October 2, 2022 Chris Hedges, The Real News Network. , , ,
Roger Waters, the British rock legend and co-founder of Pink Floyd, is in the midst of his “This Is Not A Drill” tour. In his concerts he weds his musical genius to the most pressing social issues of our day, including permanent war, police violence, the crimes of Israeli occupation against the Palestinians, the killing of the Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, and the imprisonment of Julian Assange. Waters has been an outspoken opponent of the NATO-fueled war in Ukraine, and a vocal supporter of contemporary social movements such as the Water Protectors at Standing Rock and global protests against police violence from the United States to Brazil and Britain. He joins The Chris Hedges Report for a wide-ranging conversation: from his youth and musical career to the political worldview that undergirds his provocative ‘This Is Not A Drill‘ tour.

Hundreds Of Musicians Sign Onto Boycott Letter

May 29, 2021 In Palestine Today. , , ,
Hundreds of musicians, including members of Rage Against the Machine, have signed on to an open letter that asks other artists to boycott performances in Israel until it ends its occupation of Palestine.

Anne Feeney, Folk Singer And Political Activist, Dies At 69

February 4, 2021 Scott Mervis, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. , ,
Anne Feeney, the legendary Pittsburgh folk singer-songwriter and self-described rabble-rouser, has died of COVID at age 69. Her daughter, Amy Sue Berlin, shared the news in a Facebook post on Wednesday night, writing, in part, “It is with a very heavy heart that we must announce the passing of our courageous, brilliant, beautiful mother, Anne Feeney. We were very lucky that she fought hard enough to open up her eyes, and give us a couple days to be with her before she finally decided it was time to let go.” "It is with a very heavy heart that we must announce the passing of our courageous, brilliant, beautiful mother, Anne..."

No Music For ICE! Musicians: Pull your Music From Amazon This Holiday Season

November 29, 2019 Staff, Medium.com , , , ,
In an escalation of our NoMusicForICE campaign, we just issued takedown notices to pull our music from Amazon’s digital platform, and you can too. We’re calling on musicians & labels who oppose ICE’s human rights abuses to join us during the holiday season. Read on for why, and how, you can join us in a collective digital takedown, in solidarity with groups fighting Amazon’s support of ICE nationwide. Mass takedowns will begin on Black Friday and continue throughout Amazon’s all-important holiday shopping season.

Oklahoma’s Working Class WoodyFest2019: Second Wave Of The Sixties

August 2, 2019 Mark Maxey, AmericanHighways.org. , , ,
(Okemah, Okla.) The hot humid days of July annually in Okemah rallies around their hometown socialist, Woody Guthrie. Okemah, a rural town of about 3000 citizens in northeastern Oklahoma.  July 10-14, 2019 the 22nd Woody Fest[1]celebrated, remembered, cried, and rallied behind the songs of the working class. Songs were written over 80 years ago of the working class, unions, and immigration is just as relevant today as it was then. Woodrow Wilson (Woody) Guthrie[2]was born to Charley and Nora Belle Guthrie in Okemah, Oklahoma on July 14, 1912. Woody’s parents, who were staunch Democrats, named their son after the man who had been elected President that year. In the 1930s, Woody joined thousands of others who migrated to California during the Dust Bowl Era, becoming known as the Dust Bowl Troubadour.

AfGJ Reviews Year’s “Best” Albums For Activists

January 1, 2018 James Patrick Jordan, Afgj.org , ,
It’s that time of year when we look back on the old year while entering the new.  On the music front, there were many releases in 2017 to pique the interest of the socially and politically conscious. With the plethora of best album lists coming out right now, the Alliance for Global Justice has given me the thumbs up to put out our own. I hope this little guide will give you some good material to explore. This is rather long, so no need to read it all as one big piece. Glance it over and if you see something that catches your eye,check out the review, and then give the album a listen and see if you agree! Enjoy – and Happy New Year! You can support these artists best by buying your own copies of their music.

Chilean, Trained By School Of Americas, Guilty In Murder Of Singer

June 29, 2016 Linda Cooper and James Hodge, www.ncronline.org , , , ,
By Linda Cooper and James Hodge for National Catholic Reporter - Nearly 43 years after the assassination of a famed Chilean folksinger, a Florida jury has found a former Chilean lieutenant liable for his grisly murder in the days after a U.S.-backed coup brought dictatorAugusto Pinochet to power. A six-member Orlando jury found Pedro Pablo Barrientos Nuñez liable Monday (June 27) for the torture and murder of Victor Jara, rejecting the main defense argument that Barrientos never stepped foot in Chile Stadium where the folksinger was held with 5,000 others immediately after the coup.
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