Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, Internet's busiest music nerd. I hope you're doing well. I mean, there's not a whole lot of reasons to do well right now, but I still wish for it. Anyway, the Grammys, the 67th annual Grammys. They just happened. I talked about them. And honestly, it was a very eventful Grammys Awards show.

For me, one of the most significant and hopefully impactful moments that happened this past Grammys, insofar as the music industry is concerned, is the speech that Chappell Roan gave when she won Best New Artist. Now, I imagine many of you watching this video have seen the clip, but if you're out of the know, Chappell essentially spent the time nodded to her thank you speech to a very underappreciated issue in the music industry today, and that is the lack of health care coverage extended by labels to artists that are on their rosters. Most Specifically the major labels who are actually able to afford that thing for the artist they sign.

Now, Chappell advocated for labels to protect and support their artists by getting them health insurance, by using her own personal experience and story coming up in the music industry, being dropped by her label and not really knowing what to do at that point, given the lack of coverage she had for any medical issues at the time, which obviously, if something major or life-changing had come up during that time period, this would have prevented her from making the music and becoming the star that she is right now.

"Record labels need to treat their artist as valuable employees with a livable wage and health insurance and protection. Labels, we got you, but you got us?"

Also, I want to quickly note in response to all of this, there was this very dumb and tone-deaf Hollywood Reporter piece talking about Chappell's speech, and she very ingeniously responded to the criticisms against her, bringing up the health care stuff by actually pledging some money toward health care needs for artists in the industry. Which honestly, I think is a great way to respond to such a ridiculous shooting down of a very much needed change for artists and essentially shows that she has the ability to put her money where her mouth is and actually cares about this issue.

While her story is obviously valid and important, I thought here in this article, I would extend some of these issues out more broadly to the greater music industry and give you guys, hopefully, a picture of some of the struggles that artists are facing and why health insurance for artists on labels is a significant step forward that needs to be made in the music industry.

First off, I want to make note of the standing ovation that Chappell got in response to making these comments by everyone who was on the floor at the Grammy Awards. Because across the music industry, right now, specifically, there is not really a whole lot of collective consciousness in terms of musicians banding together as a union or as a class or as a working group, because right now in the entertainment industry, industry, musicians aren't really unionized on the same level that actors and writers are, for example.

I'm sure a lot of you guys recall in recent memory, the SAG after strikes and everything like that and the various legs of the entertainment industry, that that impacted so significantly. There's currently no collective for the musician class right now in order to be able to force the music industry's hand in paying them more, by providing something like health insurance.

As a result, musicians are essentially treated like gig workers or independent contractors who have no other associations with the label outside of the album or project they have to deliver to the label and whatever advance they may get for that music, and hopefully, also a cut of residuals and streaming. This is unfortunate because I feel like musicians, more than any other sector of the entertainment industry, really do need that healthcare support for several different reasons, and I think a lot of the biggest ones have to do with touring and performing.

I mean, take into consideration right now that a lot of our healthcare insurance industry functions in a series of national networks. Whether or not you can actually get access to care that will actually be covered by your insurance company will depend on whether or not that doctor, that hospital, or whatever it is, is actually in your network of covered providers.

With that, take to account the fact that a lot of musicians, in order to make the bulk of profit they're going to get off of a record or an album cycle, they're going to be out touring across the country, across the world for months at a time. And any number of health-related issues can crop up during these performances, during travel, during tour dates.

If something does come up, you are absolutely positively fucked in terms of most likely having to pay for whatever health coverage you need, totally out of pocket, or just not being able to get access to the care that you need right there in that moment. Then that results in the cancelation of the tour, the performance, leading to the musician, the label, really everybody losing out on thousands, if not millions of dollars.

This is just a general issue facing all artists in our current healthcare dichotomy. When it comes to specific issues, there are even more nefarious obstacles in the way of artists right now. For example, during the COVID pandemic, there were a lot of insurance companies, companies that insure specifically big tours and will help cover the costs of said tour if there is a major cancelation or something. There's coverage out there in the music sphere verifying that some of these policies weren't even covering if COVID was caught during a series of performances, leading to an artist having to cancel their tour.

Again, not only as an artist who is touring and performing on a regular basis, all sorts of health-related issues can come up. Maybe you've caught something, maybe you've got something wrong with your voice, maybe it's some other physical ailment or chronic issue. But despite that, we are currently still in an age of the music industry where there is no support, there is no help, and there is no effort by the labels to support the artists on their rosters in that way, even if the back catalog of a lot of these signees are still making these labels millions of dollars every year.

Also, take into account how many artists and records and top-selling songs are out there right now that address and dive deep into issues of substance abuse and mental health. Do artists have any support on that front from labels or the healthcare industry if they're dealing with any of that stuff? No.

I'm just trying to make it clear that with no support and no access to healthcare, there are about a million and one ways that a career can just completely end, or a tour canceled, or even an album shelved. As a result, right now, artists are either bearing the brunt of all of that risk or they are recording, producing, and performing their works in as cheap or as efficient a way as possible in order to mitigate those risks, which ends up screwing over the experience of the listener.

Because as a music fan, you obviously want to hear your favorite artist make the best possible albums, do the best possible performances that that artist can achieve and pull off. But unfortunately, you're not going to get that if the artist in question is one health issue away from a whiffed album cycle or a canceled performance.

Now, I would like to say that I don't feel like labels are just sitting there and idly not providing health insurance just because the idea isn't occurring to them and there's oblivious to this need. Because if labels and streaming platforms can keep artists in a position where they're living album cycle to album cycle paycheck to paycheck, worried that one single flop or mistake or issue can destroy their entire career. Of course, they're going to be willing to do anything and everything to make sure that any performance or any project they are releasing is going to be maximizing label profits, music industry profits, so that they can ensure whatever storms may come their way, they can weather them because the labels, the industry, nobody is going to be willing to weather those storms for them.

Now, obviously, this is something that needs to change. And in order to change it, musicians and music fans, too, are going to need to get behind musicians and support them in some banded-together effort into demanding this of the music industry and of the labels, along with better streaming royalties and pay as well. Until that happens, musicians are just going to be trapped on this ongoing hamster wheel until they eventually get sick or something bad comes up.

Look, I know there are a lot of people who may be reading this quite cynically right now and thinking like, 'What does any of this matter? Who cares? Why should I give a shit about whether or not Taylor Swift has health insurance?' First off, Taylor Swift most likely already has her own health insurance that she's paying for out of pocket. I think she's fine. But the fact of the matter is the Taylor Swifts of the music industry make up for a very, very, very, very, very tiny minuscule percentage of the overall music industry.

The vast majority of musicians that a policy change that this would be helpful for are much more obscure and are operating at some like, lower or middle tier of fame and success. It's those artists who we haven't quite heard of yet that we need to make sure that we're enacting these policies for to ensure that their line of work is not literally killing them, but also to help guarantee that their creative works that we may see as fans, the benefits of down the road, are not completely prevented and or destroyed by virtue of something happening to them that is completely outside of their control.

Because I'm sure one thing that everybody watching this video can relate to is that everyone has or knows someone who has some health issue at one point, be it short-term or long-term. Health issues have a way of just coming up. They're pretty much an inevitability at some point. Regular people get them, famous musicians get them, not so famous musicians get them. So why not guarantee this thing that, frankly, is essential and put musicians in a place where they are more likely to succeed personally and artistically at what they do.

Again, I think this speech, I think this commentary from Chappell was essential and significant. I do quickly want to give a shout out to the United Musicians and Allied Workers, an organization that has been working for quite a while now to unionize musicians behind issues such as this. I also hope that we as music fans can get behind any efforts that come out of this to make such a change happen in the music industry today.

I'm going to leave it there. You guys can let me know what you think about all of this in the comments, of course.

Anthony Fantano. Musicians. Healthcare. Forever.