Roan spoke out against unfair labor practices within the music industry during her acceptance speech, saying:
“I told myself that if I ever won a Grammy and got to stand up here before the most powerful people in music, I would demand that labels in the industry profiting millions of dollars off of artists would offer a livable wage and health care, especially to developing artists. I got signed so young—I got signed as a minor. When I got dropped, I had zero job experience under my belt, and like most people, I had… quite a difficult time finding a job in the pandemic and [could not] afford insurance. It was devastating to feel so committed to my art and feel so betrayed by the system and dehumanized. If my label had prioritized it, I could have been provided care for a company I was giving everything to. Record labels need to treat their artists as valuable employees with a livable wage and health insurance and protection.”
Eh. There’s a difference between those that became rich exploiting other people’s labor (see: most of the owning class), and those that used their own labor (see: prolific artists and performers). On occasion, rich people are just normal, good people that came into money. Chappell Roan is one such occasion.
I wouldnt even be so sure that she is insanely rich. Literally had one very successful album so far, and we dont know the contracts for that, i.e. how nuch she actually got from the money it made.
She’s said to be “worth” ~6 mil. So we can estimate that at best she has <1 mil she owns in assets + liquid cash, so on a liquid cash level probably just well-earning, not rich?
I mean that’s still al ot of money, but considering how this “worth” is probably based on how much she is worth to a label, I doubt she herself owns that much.
True. Artists are exploited for their labor as well.
If after earning millions you are still part of the industry you are scum in for profit simple as that.
I think that’s highly reductive, but if you want to see it that way, fine. There are lots of people in that sort of income bracket that have good opinions that are worth listening to, and it’s good that they use their platform to advocate for various causes.
I 99% believe in “there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire” with the tiiiiiny asterisk for those who literally create such a cultural artistic phenomenon that they sell through to billionaire status on it alone. Unfortunately, two of the most prominent examples, Notch (Minecraft) and JK Rowling (Harry Potter, obvs) turned out to be total pieces of shit anyway.
Oh well.
Neither Notch nor Joan Roling (I am aware this is not her name, but if she decides others names for them I can decide hers for her) did it on their own. It is literally impossible to do so. Both of them 1) got insanely lucky, 2) got major investment behind them.
That major investment is were the billions actually came from. Its important to recognize “i recieved billions of dollars from shit fucks who got their billions the old fashions way, murder and exploitation, in order to promote my creation and make those billionaires even more wealth” is not the same as “the singular work of art that I produced generated a billion dollars of value for me without accepting tremendous amounts of blood money from the ruling class.”
It is not possible to become a billionaire without being guilty by association. You MUST participate in oppression because of the nature of capital.
I think this touches on the concept of labor aristocracy pretty well. But at the point where you’re a billionaire, even labor aristocrats would have needed to do some level of exploitation. At which point, they’re just doing the same thing the owning class does.
For instance, once you start doing shit like licensing IP (private property is theft; including “intellectual property”), creating fashion brands, perfume, and other forms of “passive income” (A.K.A. stealing from someone else) like that, you’re not really profiting off of your own labor anymore. You’re exploiting others.
I don’t think anyone from labor aristocracy can ever get to the point that they’re approaching billionaire status with clean hands (relative to how “clean” one can be under capitalism). But artists like Chappell Roan aren’t anywhere close to that, as someone else pointed out.
I agree with you overall, apart from one point. Push enough inflation and we’re all billionaires. The line itself is arbitrary. Large sums of money can be gained ethically and small sums can be gained unethically. The billionaire line I think serves as a rule of thumb that is only very rarely excepted, so the real crime is not being a billionaire per se, but the means by which one gained any amount of money. Focusing on billionaires just more concisely highlights several often overlooked exploitations.
Sure. For me, billionaire is basically just shorthand for someone with an amount of wealth that is impossible to attain without most of it coming from exploitation. If the unit or value of currency changed, the underlying meaning is still there.
I mean in that case Roan is 99.94% fine, right?