Dear Colleagues,

Even if you never again pay attention to what goes on at Local 802, please do so now. As active members of New York’s recording community, we urge you to join us in casting our votes for the Concerned Musicians of Local 802 in the December 5th union election. We are alarmed at the loss of what was once a thriving business in studio work for so many musicians. The union’s current administration is out of touch with the dramatic changes in our field. It is time for a change of leadership.

We are enthusiastic about the Concerned Musicians’ position paper on the recording industry, which is printed below. The informed, forward-looking treatise examines the current state of the recording field in historical context and proposes how to move forward with a broad vision and vital new initiatives. After an overview, the paper separately addresses the areas of film scoring, sound recording, jingles, television and video games.

Please take the time to study what is most important to you in this paper. We expect you will be as impressed as we are with the Concerned Musicians’ proposals to protect what we have, recover work we’ve lost and organize new areas of the business which to date have been ignored. These initiatives will not only bring us more work, but will secure and strengthen our pension and health benefits.

Concerned Musicians of Local 802 alone has kept an open door to the membership. Its public meetings and nominating process have resulted in a balanced slate of respected musicians and experienced union professionals. Many of us have attended and participated in that process.

Of particular concern to us is the future of 802’s Recording Department. For 15 years, the selfless and tireless contributions of department supervisor Jay Schaffner have been invaluable to us all. Jay single-handedly transformed the recording department from the shambles that preceded his tenure into a streamlined, responsive and proactive operation. Maintaining a national profile for Local 802, he is renowned as the national AFM’s foremost authority on union recording. We consider him an indispensable linchpin of our local recording scene. Local 802 without him is unthinkable.

Last January we were given a preview of a second term under David Lennon and the Members Party, when they conspired to remove Jay Schaffner from his job, his elected position on the Executive Board and his membership in the union. An unprecedented outcry from our recording community averted that attempt at dismantling our union to deflect responsibility and settle a grudge. But the incident left us convinced that the future security of our Recording Department – and by extension our business – hinges on the election of new leadership.

Please vote with us on December 5th for the entire Concerned Musicians of Local 802 slate. Polls will be open at the Local 802 building, 322 West 48th Street, from 10am till 8pm.

In Solidarity,

CONCERNED MUSICIANS of LOCAL 802 on RECORDING

The sound recording industry is thriving, but New York’s recording musicians are not. It is time to recognize and profit from the transformed recording business, rather than await a resurgence of the studio scene as we once knew it. With the leadership of Concerned Musicians of Local 802, our union can work to address this challenge on a large-scale and long-term basis.

Sweeping changes continue to reshape the recording field:

Technological developments have decentralized music-making, spawned new styles, shifted audience demographics, changed how people listen to music and devalued conventional musical knowledge;
Social developments arising from new technology have changed the who, what, when, where and why of listening to music;
Political developments – in particular the 1991 collapse of socialist countries – have opened up a worldwide market inundated with inexpensive state-subsidized musicians and entertainment workers;
Economic developments such as the worldwide consolidation of media corporations have widened competition from a national to an intercontinental scale.

Globalization means far more than customer service outsourced to another continent. It resonates in innumerable ways throughout the music industry. The technologically driven outsourcing of recording gets a lot of the blame for the decimation of our business in jingles, films, television and CD’s. No area of recording is unscathed. Most of our recording musicians have only a fraction of the work they did a few years ago.

FILM SCORING

As a whole, the film production business in New York is strong, but the number of scores recorded here is disproportionately low. Among the reasons is a deficiency in the “Made in NY” tax incentive program, which has succeeded in luring film shoots to the city. As enacted, the program rewards producers with substantial city and state tax rebates if they spend 75 percent of a film’s production budget in New York State. However, the budget for post-production – editing, scoring, mixing, etc. – does not qualify for the rebate program.

If post-production were included in the qualification standard, more films would be eligible and scoring in New York would be more advantageous. Among the priorities of Concerned Musicians of Local 802 will be to work aggressively in Albany for the inclusion of post-production in the “Made in NY” program. We have on our ticket an expert with a track record in getting legislation off the ground in Albany, Bill Dennison, Recording Vice-President. For the benefit of Local 802’s jazz musicians, Dennison got legislation enacted that allows sales tax from Jazz clubs to be contributed to performers’ AFM pension plan. He will bring the same relationships, skills and tenacity to the fight for government incentives directed at film scoring.

We also need to involve recording studios and other businesses servicing our industry in our effort to bring more film scoring to New York. This would best be accomplished through a partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. Despite numerous requests, current president David Lennon has failed to even schedule a meeting with the Mayor’s film commissioner, while forbidding any other union officers from contacting government officials. Coordinating this effort with the city would be a priority for a Concerned Musicians administration at Local 802.

Independent filmmaking is flourishing in New York. The current AFM film agreement established a special low-budget category for indie films, which has been insufficiently publicized by the Lennon administration. Concerned Musicians of Local 802 would launch an energetic campaign aimed at the independent film community and composers, familiarizing them with the new scales and the many benefits of scoring and filing in New York.

Our plan to restore our credibility as a primary voice at the national AFM, our blueprint for more effective public relations, and the presence on our slate of the country’s top supervisor and negotiator of recording contracts – Jay
Schaffner – puts the Concerned Musicians of Local 802 in a unique position to start shaping our union’s future.

THE RECORD BUSINESS

The job of getting more sessions filed with the union falls mainly to our Organizing Department. The problem is that we don’t have one.

Our organizing staff has been lost under the administration of David Lennon, and he has not moved to restaff the department. Concerned Musicians will. We need experienced organizers to expand our reach into independent record-making, which represents a growing proportion of the business yet remains predominantly nonunion. The Hip-Hop community, in particular, is releasing more product than any other sector of the business, but we are scarcely present there.

Another crucial staff position that remains vacant under David Lennon’s presidency is the recording department’s Business Representative. Filling this slot will allow us to do a better job enforcing our existing agreements.

The rank-and-file Recording Musicians Committee, along with the Recording Department, recently sponsored a seminar on “How to File a Recording Session Contract.” We need more such organizing strategies that focus on educating both member and nonmember musicians who have little or no contact with the union. Through these efforts we can bring union protection and benefits to more working musicians, and our local can in turn benefit from an expanded membership.

Finally, we must understand that most records are pieced together, often with instrumentalists working alone and in different locations, and often not adhering to traditional session structures. Dot-com talent brokers like e-session are generating work for some of our members by making recording musicians available to any employer, anywhere, for web-based overdubbing and digital delivery. Recording Department Supervisor Jay Schaffner, who is running for re-election to the Executive Board on the Concerned Musicians slate, has begun a dialogue with e-session to explore ways of bringing more of this work under contract.

TELEVISION

All three network TV morning shows file with Local 802 for every musician who performs on air. So do the three locally produced network shows with house bands and guest musicians – The Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and Saturday Night Live.
But in non-network programming, the AFM and many other unions have little presence. Musicians perform on syndicated cable programs such as Martha Stewart’s talk show, Emeril Live, various Fox programs and MSNBC without union representation. We plan to initiate an organizing partnership with other unions expressly to unionize locally produced cable television programming.

Under the leadership of Jay Schaffner, we recently succeeded at organizing the MTV Video Music Awards broadcast for the first time. Schaffner’s accomplishment affirms that with a motivated membership and savvy leadership, we can succeed in our most ambitious organizing efforts.

JINGLES

Historically, advertising music provided half of the scale wages for recording musicians in New York. The steady erosion of that work over two decades is clearly attributable to most music being programmed rather than played. But amid this steady decline there was a dramatic nosedive beginning in 2000, when SAG and AFTRA went on a six-month strike against the advertising industry. With singers, actors and voice-over artists on strike, advertisers and agencies developed nonunion means of production – and many sources of unfiled, bottom-dollar music buyouts. After the strike, many employers never came back to us, and we have never recovered.

Union work in advertising has also diminished because commercials are getting shorter runs on the air. Music houses that traditionally relied heavily on the revenue stream from residuals are less inclined to file dates when so many spots never run past their initial 13-week cycle.

With the full participation of our rank-and-file studio musicians, we must explore alternative pay structures to tap the markets we’ve lost, while we extol our unmatched talent pool and educate our members about the damage done by dark dates. Advertisers and agency decision-makers whom we’ve lost will not resume doing business with us unless we can motivate them. At the same time, we must rigorously protect and enforce our existing standards.

VIDEO GAMES

Video game music is big business. It is a prime example of new technology converging with the internet to create new job opportunities for musicians. Video game scores frequently use large live orchestras and acoustic instrumentalists working in a wide range of musical styles – from the large symphonic scores of the many “Lord of the Rings” games to the Hip-Hop of “Madden Football.”

What began with "Pong" and "Space Invaders" in the 1970's has grown into a $25 billion industry worldwide. It is expected to top $46 billion in the next four years, according to industry analysts. Licensed video games based on such blockbuster movies as “The Lord of the Rings,” the Harry Potter series and “The Matrix” draw huge audiences. The game “Halo 2” has been played by more than 240,000 people in just the last 24 hours – over the internet. Millions are on line everyday playing video games in real time. This phenomenon is fundamentally changing the way kids, teens and twenty-somethings socialize; they’re doing so increasingly around the internet and games.

Unfortunately, we have been stuck with a national agreement that has served only to repel work in this area. In roughly the last two years, more than 1,000 video games have been released, but only 10 were scored under an AFM union contract. We cannot continue to miss opportunities in new markets because of outmoded collective bargaining agreements.

Recently, Local 802’s Recording Musicians’ Committee, led by members of Concerned Musicians, developed, proposed and won adoption of a new national agreement for the scoring of game music – a creative, realistic agreement that should enable us to compete in the worldwide game market. An overwhelming majority of the AFM’s International Executive Board approved the agreement.. While we refuse to join the “race to the bottom” set off by the bargain-basement wages of Eastern Europe, we have put ourselves in the game game. Concerned Musicians of Local 802 stands behind this effort and our members who spearheaded it. Reasoned approaches combined with the quality of our work will attract jobs for our members.

FIGHTING FAKERY

Emulation of acoustic instruments to save money – whether by the so-called virtual orchestra machine or other sample-based equipment – degrades music and lowers employment. We will fight it at every turn. Primary objectives in this fight would be contractual prohibitions, economic disincentives, public education and a “truth in advertising” campaign to force promoters to indicate on tickets whether the music is live or uses artificial instrumentation. When employers hoping to save a buck turn technology against musicians and music, we will wage a fully informed fight against such exploitation.

STRATEGIES FOR GROWTH

When our membership grows and when more recording work gets filed, it benefits us all. That is why we must not ignore musicians creating music in nontraditional ways. Many younger recording musicians work without union representation and the many benefits of collective bargaining. As long as they continue to charge substandard wages and receive no benefits, they will continue to weaken our union. They are ripe for organizing. With a revitalized Organizing Department, we will work to increase our membership by welcoming musicians no matter what music they make or how they make it. Coaxing these young musicians to join Local 802 will help secure our and their future by building our health and pension funds, with the added benefit of increasing the union’s presence in new sectors of the entertainment business.

We endorse a proposal for an AFM committee to explore mergers with other unions. There are too many areas of production where everything is unionized except the music. Joining together with another union would increase our leverage in these and other settings.

Concerned Musicians of Local 802
P.O. Box 606 Times Square Station
New York, NY 10108

http://www.concernedmusicians.org
info@concernedmusicians.org