In 2024, more than 80 artists, musicians, and panelists withdrew from the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin to protest the event's continued collaboration with and sponsorship by the U.S. Army and defense contractors, such as RTX (Raytheon), Collins Aerospace, and BAE Systems. The protest grew to include over 100 participants withdrawing from the nine-day festival, and subsequently organizing counter-programming which featured alternative shows, political demonstrations, and picketed protests that condemned SXSW's complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Among the artists who boycotted that year was Ibrahim Batshon, founder of digital production company BeatStars, which brought over 345,000 people to SXSW the previous year. In his social media post explaining his decision to pull out of the festival, Batshon cited the involvement of Raytheon and BAE Systems, saying, "Both of these companies manufacture and provide weapons to the terrorist state of Israel, [that] is currently conducting an internationally condemned genocide against an occupied and besieged population of Palestinians."
At the time, at least 31,184 Palestinians had been killed in Israel's post Al-Aqsa flood genocidal aggression in Gaza, with a vast majority of them being women and children, according to local authorities. Now, at the time of this writing, UNRWA reports that over 72,344 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023—a death toll that has more than doubled since the massive wave of protest at SXSW over two years ago. Critics, for years, have pointed out that this number, in actuality, is probably much higher, given the bodies that haven't been found, the massive control Israel's repressive apparatus has over Western media, and the propaganda deployed to justify the settler state's "defense."
The massive boycott was organized by the Austin for Palestine Coalition, with additional support from United Musicians and Allied Workers, a national labor organization that formed during the coronavirus pandemic shutdown in 2020. Together, their unified declaration was simple: "Warmongers have no place at SXSW!"
"For years, [SXSW] was becoming a weapons tech conference in many ways," explains Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, UMAW co-founding member and guitarist/vocalist in Providence, R.I., punk outfit Downtown Boys (Sub Pop Records). "We saw Austin for Palestine Coalition's campaign launch of War Mongers out of SXSW and very quickly connected UMAW's Fair Pay campaign to theirs."
SXSW announced publicly in June 2024—with the editors at Pitchfork cheekily and inaccurately saying "several" bands pulled out of the prior festival, rather than over 80—that it cut ties with the U.S. Army and weapon manufacturers. The festival wrote on its website, "After careful consideration, we are revising our sponsorship model. As a result, the US Army and companies that engage in weapons manufacturing will not be sponsors of SXSW 2025."
Organizers, including UMAW, returned to Austin in 2025 with a win under their belt. They continued to put on counter-programming events during the festival, to raise awareness of the genocide in Palestine, the increasingly corrosive corporatization in the music industry, and the ongoing Fair Pay at SXSW campaign, which UMAW has been running for years (During their alternative shows, UMAW pays artists $750 per performance, which they say should be the standardized rate for performing at a festival at SXSW's scale. The festival, according to UMAW, still pays artists $200 or, in some cases, nothing).
"In 2025, we kept up the Fair Pay campaign again, still talking about the defense industry and Palestine," recalls DeFrancesco in an interview with Scalawag. "Then we found out that SXSW was violating what they had promised to do: to cut ties with the weapons industry and the U.S. military. They'd begun working in an official capacity with a startup incubator called Capital Factory in Austin that works directly with the U.S. military and AI, tech, and weapons companies. They're also working with targets on the BDS list, including Amazon, Google, Spotify, and others. They're breaking the terms of what they promised to do, and were just on the cusp of it and trying to ride this edge… Most artists don't want to be connected with this. We called them out again, demanding that they adopt clear rules and policies, and not just some vague statement to the press to get the boycott to quiet down."
UMAW Artists Organize for Artists
Just as the show went on for artists, so it did for SXSW and its ties to Israel and U.S. weapons manufacturers. Last December, the BDS Movement issued a statement saying that while the festival dropped its weapons industry and U.S. military sponsors following the successful No Warmongers at SXSW campaign in 2024, the festival held an edition in London that "programmed speakers representing deeply complicit companies like Palantir, and targets of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement like Barclays." The statement goes on to point out that Palantir provides military technology "enabling Israel's genocide in Gaza," while Barclays "finances weapons manufacturers arming the genocide."
Speakers from Barclays and Palantir were reportedly dropped from SXSW London's programming, but were then quickly replaced by former UK Prime Minister and accused war criminal Tony Blair as a speaker on short notice (It's also worth noting that Blair now sits on President Donald Trump's "Board of Peace" that will serve as the "redevelopment arm" of the U.S. occupation and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Gaza). Further, SXSW in Austin hosted a panel with the CIA at SXSW 2025. At the time of the BDS Movement's statement, the festival had just announced a new 2026 panel featuring reps from AI surveillance and biometrics company RealSense Inc., a spin-off from the Israeli branch of Intel, which has been on the BDS priority boycott list since 2024. Other SXSW 2026 panelists included reps from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—all tech companies that the BDS movement identified as "pressure targets" over their involvement with the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Incidentally—and perhaps not-so-coincidentally—these are also a few of the biggest corporate overlords that have overtaken the music industry and independent music culture today.
"Without any meaningful ethical policy on programming and partnerships, SXSW has again faced artists with the prospect that they will be sharing a line-up with war criminals and genocide-enablers," reads the BDS statement demanding that the festival finally put an end to its complicity in every way, from its ethically questionable to its downright genocidal standards. UMAW, Austin for Palestine Coalition, and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) returned to SXSW this year with even more robust counter-programming against the genocide in Gaza, complete with panels, protests, and live showcases where artists were paid the fair pay rate set by organizers in the Fair Pay at SXSW campaign.
The Austin for Palestine Coalition also emerged with its Cancel Capital Factory campaign, honing in on the hyperlocalized hub's connections to U.S. imperialism and the genocide in Gaza. In a social media post, organizers on the Cancel Capital Factory campaign detailed the connections between Capital Factory, SXSW, and Heven Aerotech, an Israeli startup that "builds hydrogen-powered drones for the Department of Defense and the Israeli Occupation Forces."
"Last December, Texas Venture Partners, an Austin-based venture capital firm that has close ties to the Israeli military, Capital Factory, and the Department of Defense, invested $100 million into Heven Aerotech—allowing them to expand their manufacturing base in the U.S.," reads the campaign's statement on a March 9 Instagram post, three days before the beginning of SXSW 2026. "After appearing at a SXSW event in 2024 hosted by the DoD office at Capital Factory, Heven Aerotech was one of the few companies given clearance by the Pentagon to develop military drones in the U.S. … They also widely advertise the use of their drones for the Israeli military and the U.S. border, bringing Israeli drone warfare from Gaza to Texas."
The Music Industry Is a Crucial Terrain of Anti-Imperial Struggle
Author's note: For all intents and purposes of this writing, "music industry" will refer to major labels as well as independent music ecosystems. "Workers" refers to working musicians and all "allied workers," which include journalists, sound techs, engineers, curators, independent venue owners, independent record labels, managers, publicists, and more.
What's happening at SXSW—caused by the festival's inability to stay away from collaborating with genocidal war profiteers—is just one example of many major issues plaguing the music industry and its workers today. While prominent festivals like SXSW are an important organizing front to protest against as long as they continue to associate with the military industrial complex, festival dissent only represents and targets a fraction of the issue. In today's music world, collaboration between the music industry and war profiteering is escalating, and it is decimating the working class: media consolidation, interactive streaming services run by Big Tech, venue and ticketing monopolization, unfair or no pay at all for streaming, and artist exploitation using AI.
UMAW released an official website called "Spotify Unwrapped" as a parody of the popular "Spotify Wrapped" feature that curates a personalized annual round-up of consumers' listening activity. The parody site instead showcases the numbers that expose the reality of artist exploitation, pay disparities, and profiteering by the platform. While Spotify CEO David Ek has become richer than any musician in history—with a net worth of $7.3 billion, which is more than Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Jay-Z's net worths combined—his company took legal action against UMAW's site, forcing it to shut down. The fight for fair pay from Spotify continues, through UMAW's Justice for Spotify campaign, coupled with the Living Wage for Musicians Act, which seeks to establish a fair pay system on the ground level for all interactive streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Google, and YouTube. The fight to end war profiteering and war mongering also continues, with Palestine at the center of the frontlines for organizers in UMAW and allied liberation efforts.
The BDS Movement added Spotify—whose CEO, Daniel Ek, came under fire last year for investing $700 million into AI military warfare manufacturers after years of denying artists fair pay, famously paying out just 0.003 cents per stream, oftentimes to labels rather than artists themselves—to the official consumer boycott list in February. The official statement detailed Spotify's transgressions, including airing racist recruitment ads for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as recruitment ads for an Israeli prison service.
"Spotify's complicity in Israeli apartheid goes much deeper than the typical lifecycle of these unethical and potentially illegal ads," reads the statement. The company launched in the Israeli market with a multi-year deal with Partner Communications Company Ltd, an Israeli telecommunications company listed in the United Nations' database of businesses involved in illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Any such deal violates the 2024 International Court of Justice ruling that Israel's entire presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, is illegal and amounts to apartheid. Failure of corporations to comply with international law may also constitute criminal complicity, according to leading legal experts.
The SXSW story highlights two adages we've seen throughout human history. One, that warmongers and their enablers are going to continue to wage wars, by any means, whether The People consent or not. Two, that collective labor organizing works.
But what happens outside the festival circuit? What collective power is being built to address the system that repeatedly places artists and musicians in the crosshairs of imperialism, settler colonialism, and fascism?
One organization, UMAW, stands out amongst labor organizing efforts across the U.S., stacking incredible wins that could actually yield major material gains for working-class people. The organization was formed during a Zoom meeting in 2020 while artists were out of work, reckoning with the fallouts they were all facing due to the coronavirus pandemic. A chief concern at the time was whether or not artists would be able to receive unemployment benefits, since these benefits have historically been kept away from gig workers, freelancers, and independent contractors. UMAW's Musicians United for Unemployment Benefits campaign that year, built alongside other allies, secured access to those unemployment benefits. Their efforts also contributed to the expansion of the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) under the CARES Act, providing continual relief for music professionals who aren't considered traditional laborers in the eyes of the law.
Since then, UMAW has been involved in a series of notable wins: the construction of the Living Wage for Musicians Act, which is currently sponsored by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and was reintroduced to to Congress last September; broader coalition-building with a refined sense of intersectionality, with the world's largest streaming service, Spotify, now on the official consumer boycott BDS list, drawing a clear line between the digital streaming platform and the ongoing genocide; and the historic jury trial decision in the antitrust suit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, wherein a jury found that two corporations acted as an unlawful monopoly (While UMAW isn't directly involved in the lawsuit, members provided testimony).
UMAW has six active campaigns and a growing membership, with around 2,000 dues-paying members and over 70,000 engaged members in the network. The organization's active campaigns are Fair Pay at SXSW, No Warmongers at SXSW, Justice for Spotify, the Living Wage for Musicians Act, #MyMerch (which protests the exploitative practice of venues and festivals taking cuts from artists' merch sales), and Office Hours, a coast-to-coast educational series with a rotating roster of industry guest speakers and joint project with the Rising Artist Foundation.
While UMAW's activity and array of successes are genuinely impressive, it's not totally explained just in the frequency and visibility of it campaigns; it's rare for current activism to rise above performative levels to actual material change, such as securing unemployment resources for previously denied classes of laborers, a bill on the Congress floor, and public denouncement of defense tech companies from the biggest festival household name in the U.S. What's really driving UMAW's success is the political ethos that serves as the underbelly of its organizing praxis. Independent musician, publisher, and author Damon Krukowski, of the duo Damon & Naomi and slowcore/dream-pop pioneers Galaxie 500, has been organizing with UMAW since day one.
"We were stuck, we were broke, we were out of work," remembers Krukowski in an interview with Scalawag about the very first days of UMAW organizing. "We didn't know what to do. We got together to talk, and we've been meeting weekly on Zoom ever since. It never stopped. Everyone brought their different experiences to the table, and it took off because none of us had anywhere else to turn to discuss the issues, much less think about the solutions to the problems we're facing. And we're facing collective problems."
Having been an independent musician since the 1980s, Krukowski has a clear view of what it was like for working musicians then versus what it's like now—and how the escalations of late-stage capitalism have widened disparities between working class musicians, access to the industry, and actually making a living (Krukowski has covered issues in the industry for years, such as in his own column at Pitchfork from 2012 to 2019, and in his personal blog today). Although Krukowski and others didn't have a ton, if any, direct labor organizing experience, they were very familiar with the effects late-stage capitalism had on artists; these effects, they've found, are evergreen across many working-class industries. For Krukowski, the connective tissue between working-class people, no matter what industry they're in, is what breathes life into collective organizing. And through that collective struggle, organizers have leaned into a more traditional Marxist view when it comes to their identities as workers; an identity they didn't ask for, but one they are leveraging as much as possible for collective action that can result in material change.
"The consolidation in the industry has created a classical labor situation on the 'factory floor,'" Krukowski continues in an interview with Scalawag. "The independent music world I came up in was so decentralized. Every night, you worked for a different person. Every venue was independent, labels were independent, stores were independent, and radio stations were community and college. Now, that's just not true, because—through the consolidation of capital—we're essentially all working for the same corporate overload. We're working for Spotify with our recorded music, primarily; in live music, we're pretty much all working for AEG and Live Nation, whether you want to be or not. We're now in a classic labor situation with classic employers. That was always the organizing prerequisite in classic Marxist terms: industrial organization, consolidation, workers on the factory floor."
A national organization, UMAW is continuing to organize its base through the formation of more local chapters, international coalitions, and continued relationship-building and collaboration with aligned collective liberation movement work across the U.S. Each year seems to bring about more and more connections between working class musicians, music industry workers, and the plights of working class people all over, standing continuously on the right side of history (in addition to organizing against the genocide in Gaza, UMAW has consistently demanded the abolition of ICE and opposes the U.S. war in Iran and Venezuela) while connecting the dots between them, changing the way people think of organizing and how we are all connected.
"People don't want to divide these issues," explains DeFranceso. "They understand that it's connected, that we're not making money, and that the money we're not making is going to people like [Spotify CEO] Eck, which is then going to some military companies to build drones. Artists don't want this. They don't want to participate in the system, and they're very activated and agitated to get organized and mobilize around this now."
If the plights within the music industry and successes of UMAW, along with other allied organizations, reminds us of those two old adages, its continued work and more wins are set to prove another caveat: not only does collective organizing work, but organizing that is rooted in abolition, anti-imperialism, and decolonization, making no room for compromise, is by far the most effective in yielding tangible results.