Anti-monopoly
Too few companies have too much power
Musicians’ goals, motivations, and career paths are diverse, but most need two basic things from the marketplace: access to audiences and income streams that are sustainable, fair, and transparent.
In a healthy marketplace, musicians can choose from broad array of potential partners in pursuit of the creative and career goals. Monopolies make this much more difficult, making it harder for musicians to reach audiences and. Rather than competing to best serve musicians and fans, monopolies can abuse their dominant position to unilaterally set terms and conditions, taking advantage of their gatekeeper role to limit choices suppress wages.
This is not a new problem. Over the past 30 years, musicians have experienced ownership consolidation in nearly every part of their business and in adjacent markets, both online and offline. In the face of these changes, musicians, composers and smaller music businesses have often felt unprotected. Indeed, rather than defending the interests of working musicians and music fans in ensuring an open and healthy marketplace characterized by fair competition, we’ve too often seen federal regulators fail to get involved.
Understanding the impacts
FMC’s research has found that ownership consolidation in commercial AM/FM broadcasting has resulted in less local content on the airwaves, less genre diversity, and more homogenous playlists; this has amounted to fewer chances for diverse artists to reach audiences and for diverse regional scenes to develop. Asset-stripping for the benefit of private equity investors has even driven numerous radio companies to bankruptcy, but industry lobbyists continue to push the FCC to eliminate existing caps on how many stations they can own in a single market.
Consolidation in labels, publishing, management firms, booking agencies, and live venues.. Livenation’s merger with Ticketmaster , two companies—Live Nation and AEG—constitute an effective duopoly in live event venues and promotion. Ownership consolidation in print and online media has impacted musicians as well, particularly independent musicians who have historically relied on coverage in such outlets to reach potential audiences.
The combination of media ownership consolidation and monopoly dynamics in ad-tech and social media has led to a crisis in music journalism; traditional newspapers and alternative newsweeklies have scaled back their music coverage. And increasingly, a handful of large technology companies have become unaccountable and unavoidable intermediaries that control the terms by which musicians can reach fans.
What We’re Doing
FMC’s working to ensure that musicians and their allies have an independent voice. Working in partnership with allies in the music sector, the broader arts and culture sector, civil rights groups, media reformers, and leaders in the growing antimonopoly movement, we’re . Through our media work, we help journalists understand how musicians and fans are impacted by monopoly dynamics And we’re creating educational resources to help musicians themselves navigate these complicated issues, and know how to take action.