Pop music chain table develops tool for matching gages by career stage

Photo: Austin Neill

The Pop Music Chain Table is looking at the fair remuneration of musicians performing at venues and festivals. Topics to be discussed are transparency in the budgeting of costs and revenues of venues, festivals and live acts. Live acts are independent musicians as well as (session) musicians hired by a main artist. Chain table participants Rita Zipora, board member of BAM! Pop Authors and electro-songwriter, and Martijn Munk, artist manager at Day Four Management, talk more about the process of developing the career stage tool:

The gap between commitment and earnings of pop musicians

At ESNS 2023, after a year of mutual consultation, the Pop Music Chain Table presented an analysis of the income gap between current gages and an appropriate and fair fee (fair pay) for pop musicians. This took place in the panel Faire Gages in de Popsector with fair PACCT program manager Noud van de Rhee, Pien Feith of Friendly Fire B.V., Rita Zipora of BAM! Pop Authors, Jolanda Beyer of Patronaat and Will Maas on behalf of Kunstenbond, led by moderator Oscar Kocken.

Conclusion of the analysis: €7.8 million more is needed per year for fair pay. The analysis and accompanying report, The gap between commitment and income of pop musicians, were conducted by consulting firm Berenschot. At the time, State Secretary Gunay Uslu received the report at the conclusion of the panel.

Career stage tool under development

Determining appropriate fees for each career stage of an artist requires criteria that “scale” pop musicians according to their level of advancement, from amateur to established professional. The Pop Music Chain Table has developed a tool for this purpose. On the basis of eleven objective criteria, the stage of an artist/act is determined. This tool, together with the size of an act and the type of show, forms the basis of the minimum fee table. After the final steps to optimize the tool, we can start putting it into practice.

“we have been able to develop a tool that is representative of the talent development chain in pop music”

Over the past six months, one of the things the chain table has been working on is testing and optimizing a test tool to use to determine an artist’s career stage. For this purpose, we have extensively tested among as diverse a group of pop music professionals as possible who have enough data on an artist to be able to test the tool. Think of bookers, managers, record companies, and of course performing artists and musicians themselves.

In total, the tool was tested on about fifty cases. Most of these artists received a correct stage classification. For the artists where this did not happen, this was often due to a difference in genres, years of inactivity of an artist (for example, during a reunion) or a phase definition that was too vague. With various adjustments, for example in wording of presentation and question, as well as adjustments in the proportions of the tool, we were able to develop a tool that is representative of the talent development chain in pop music.

As the tool moves toward its final phase, we are focusing on the last major task to achieve fair pay in the live circuit for pop musicians: funding. We hope to provide an update on this soon.

Practices/Education