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.”

  • trevor@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • EvilBit@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      23 hours ago

      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.

      • trevor@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        2·
        21 hours ago

        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.

        • EvilBit@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          6 hours ago

          But with that, I don’t believe there’s a hard ceiling on ethically gained money. There’s an ethical obligation not to retain that degree of wealth, but getting there isn’t inherently a moral sin in my mind.