Music Workers Alliance (MWA) is an organization of working class musicians, DJs, and sound engineers. MWA's Streaming Justice campaign is collecting testimonials from music workers who have at least one item available on streaming platforms. Share your experience so we can build a narrative together to fight Big Tech streaming giants like YouTube and Spotify.

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Music workers are making virtually no money off of streaming. Spotify's infamous average $0.0038 starvation royalty rate fails to even pay production costs for the large majority of music workers. Meanwhile, ad-based and data-mining platforms like YouTube make billions of dollars a year while paying even less... or nothing at all. How can it be that there is so much money being made on streaming music, and so little of it gets into the pockets of music creators?

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Originally, the 1997-98 Digital Millennium Copyright Act called on all stakeholders to get together to agree on Standard Technical Measures (STM’s) that would prevent the looting of our work. But Big Tech was making billions in ad-based and data mining profit from our files, so Big Tech obstructed the process.  

24 years is enough. It’s time for Congress to step in and tell the US Copyright Office to bring the Tech corporations to the table and finish the job. The technology already exists. The need is greater than ever. Standardizing Technical Measures to protect our work online are the first step towards Streaming Justice! To end Spotify’s starvation wage and create basic economic fairness in the digital domain, we need Congress to act now!

It's on us – rank-and-file music workers – to show Congress that musicians/DJ’s are willing to speak our truth to Big Tech's corporate power.  

But first we need to tell the politicians in own voices what 22 years of having our work devalued online has meant. The questions below are just guidelines to get you started. Please speak/write your own truth: from your experience, and from your heart.