It’s not a good ending to otherwise a pretty solid week and here I am penning down our first ever Vanadian Avenue editorial piece. Over the last few months, a lot has been said and written about the state of our music business and we all agree that a lot of things must change. From the underrepresentation of female artists at summer festivals to Brexit red tape or Spotify paying British artists just £ 0.003 per stream. However, none of those things, although shocking, prompted me to sit down and rant. This honour goes to the Rolling Stone UK, who as I have learnt today, is somehow failing to pay their freelance journalist. Some of them have been waiting for their payments for months.
Should I be even surprised? It’s common knowledge that freelancers everywhere are at the bottom of the food and pay chain and have to fight for what they are owed. No, this is not surprising to me in the slightest, things have been bad in the publishing/journalistic world for as long as I can remember. What really angered me (and others), is that they have enough money to organize a star-studded award ceremony, yet they somehow fail to make payments for their commissioned content. I can only imagine how desperate people must feel to finally be pushed so far that they are going public with their plight. I have seen many of their tweets today; they are anxious, they feel humiliated, fear being blacklisted yet they are bravely coming out. The stories are painful to read, some journalists are owed thousands of pounds. Just before Christmas and in the middle of the biggest cost of living crisis, this feels particularly wrong.
Not many people know but we come from a journalistic background, having worked for several cultural magazines in Poland in the early 2000’s as journalists and editorial team members. Things were not rosy back then either: we earned little, worked long hours and few had working contracts that guaranteed a safety net. Most of us worked on zero-hour contracts or were self-employed – yet we always received our pay. Even when Bauer decided to close one of the magazines and merge two others, all staff members were duly paid for every printed word they wrote. This was essential to maintaining a good public opinion about the corporation and keeping the readership. Social media was very young then but our bosses knew that word could spread fast and the market was highly competitive: staff could go somewhere else and the readers would have followed them. Things have changed drastically since then. Magazine editors and publishers don’t really seem bothered now by the fact that their journalists, many of them very experienced and esteemed writers, receive no money for their work. They are happy to print the articles on glossy paper and spread it across the digital sphere yet they don’t find it important to pay their creators.
I’m heartbroken to see this. Rolling Stone was one of the magazines that shaped me as a journalist. As teenagers, we were saving for months to be able to buy a single issue of the American edition and then we treasured it for years. I still owe some issues dating back to 1996! English language magazines were uncommon in Poland at that time, they had to be ordered from abroad, they were very expensive. Rolling Stone was a musical bible, it was our window into the world of popular music, we would memorize everything including charts!
When the British edition started in 2021, I was really ecstatic. I had high hopes that they would be instrumental in helping unsigned and emerging artists. I never thought I would see their journalists publicly stating they are not being compensated for their work just two years later.
The organization of Rolling Stones UK Awards surely was more expensive than paying all the outstanding invoices to the staff. Paying people for their hard work may not be as glamorous as a red carpet event but is the right thing to do.
After we posted online for the magazine to respond to the writers open calls, asking for their money, the person running Rolling Stone UK Twitter page proceed to block us.
Shame on you Rolling Stone, this is highly unprofessional.
How did we end up in a place where not paying for commissioned and agreed articles became the norm? How can the magazine justify spending a lot of money on parties, introduce acts to Hall of Fame when they can’t even pay their own staff? Music industry is one of the harshest industries to work to, nearly 1 musician in 3 suffers from bad mental health, especially in the indie/rock genres. Nearly 60% of them is thinking of quitting. So are the editors, PR people, writers, journalists, social media people – they all earn next to nothing for long hours, many of them in unsociable hours. Nobody should be treated like this.
And, for the dessert, this nugget of wisdom for the artists that attended the awards:
Dear ladies and gents of rock and roll, esteemed members of the Hall of Fame, use your platform and speak about it.
You have thousands of followers on your accounts. Here’s your chance to prove you have a bit of courage to call out the ills of the world. Help those who are not famous but who helped earlier in your career, to get where you are.
Without journalists and writers many careers would never happen.
Without journalists, there would be no magazines.
Please remember about that.
Rita Dabrowicz
Indieterria 