As reported by Music Business Worldwide, Bill Werde, Director of the Bandier Music Business Program at Syracuse University, has published an op-ed arguing that 2026 is the year artists should finally pursue collective leverage — and that the generative AI era makes the cost of inaction higher than it has ever been.
The piece opens with a clear-eyed assessment of where the major labels stand. The big three have spent the past two years aggressively licensing AI music platforms, often taking equity stakes in exchange. Suno and Udio both secured major label deals by the end of 2025. Klay, Stability AI, and SoundLabs have each signed at least one major-label license. The strategy, Werde argues, is deliberate and historically informed: the labels learned from giving Apple all the leverage during the download era and are not repeating that mistake. They are securing equity positions before AI platforms become too large to negotiate with.
Artists, by contrast, are doing nothing comparable. Werde draws a direct parallel to the Spotify era. When Spotify launched, the majors negotiated equity stakes that eventually amounted to billions of dollars when those stakes were sold. By the time the dust settled, the majors kept roughly two-thirds of those proceeds. Warner retained about three-quarters of its proceeds while allocating $126 million to artist accounts, largely to pay down unrecouped balances. Sony paid out roughly $250 million to artists regardless of recoupment status, which Werde credits as the more equitable approach. UMG still holds a tranche of Spotify shares currently worth approximately $3 billion. “Artists need to get out of the mindset of scrapping for pennies, and into the mindset of collective leverage,” Werde writes. “Artists have it more than anyone else — if only they’d learn how to use it.”
The structural barriers to artist organization are real, and Werde is candid about them. US artists are legally classified as independent contractors, which generally prevents them from unionizing under the National Labor Relations Act. Beyond the legal constraint, the people advising artists have financial incentives misaligned with collective action. Managers paid on percentage tend to optimize for short-term cash. Entertainment attorneys often work for firms that represent the very labels and promoters artists would be organizing against. “No one wants to rock the boat,” Werde writes. “I’m not even sure a lot of artists fully understand they’re on a boat.”
His proposed workaround cites the 2011 NFL model, where players decertified their union to press an antitrust suit against league owners, with Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and Peyton Manning as lead plaintiffs. That lawsuit secured a collective bargaining agreement with significantly improved working conditions, comprehensive healthcare, a Legacy Fund exceeding $620 million for retirees, and higher salaries. Werde argues a similar approach could work for music. Individual leverage has already proven itself: Taylor Swift persuaded UMG to commit Spotify equity proceeds to artists regardless of recoupment status, and Chappell Roan’s departure from Wasserman preceded that company going up for sale. The question Werde poses is what becomes possible when that leverage is pooled.
The specific demands his sources raised span five areas: comprehensive healthcare for artists, who are not and should not be employees of labels but still deserve better coverage than currently exists; meaningfully increased streaming royalty rates for catalog artists who can no longer tour; a standardized non-recoupment forgiveness program across the industry; reverse morality clauses allowing artists to exit deals when label leadership engages in unethical or illegal conduct; and transparent night-to-night cost disclosures in the live space, where, as one manager put it, “there is virtually no transparency on what artists are being charged by promoters.” As Werde frames it, none of these demands would be economically devastating for large companies, but for mid-tier and emerging artists, they could be transformative.
The argument connects directly to a pattern that has defined the independent music economy for two decades. The Live Nation antitrust verdict demonstrated that state coalitions can force accountability on consolidated industry power when federal enforcement fails. The federal court ruling on worldwide copyright recapture gave songwriters new leverage over their catalogs. The pattern suggests that collective action, legal or otherwise, produces outcomes that individual negotiation rarely reaches. Werde’s core question for the AI era is whether artists will find their Brady, Brees, and Manning before the table stakes are already set without them.
