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Response to the Musicians’ Union’s ‘Position Statement on Sex Work’

By Esther

On 28 November 2024 the Musicians’ Union published a Position Statement on Sex Work [Editor: This has now been unpublished].

There is much wrong with the statement, but let’s start with their use of the “sex work” and “sex worker” terms. It is true that these now dominate public discourse – because of successful lobbying by the sex industry – but they obscure the brutal reality experienced by most women involved in the sex trade. A reality that does not match what would be considered “work” in any other context and cannot conform with employment law, equalities legislation or health and safety regulations and practices. The use of these terms conceals the power dynamics within the sex trade, sanitises its harmful nature and supports the profound inequality it augments and helps to perpetuate.

The music industry also has a well-documented history of sexual abuse and exploitation of young people by those with the power to determine the trajectory of their careers at all levels of the industry.

As a union seeking to improve pay and conditions in an industry where power dynamics greatly disadvantage individual musicians for the financial benefit of corporate interests that profit from their creative content, it is surprising that the Musicians’ Union has chosen to use terminology which conceals the dynamics and drivers of harm in another highly exploitative industry.

The statement only mentions the sexual exploitation of women and girls. Sexual exploitation of boys and young men also takes place in both the music industry and the sex industry, although the vast majority of those in the sex industry are female and most buyers or consumers are male.

The union published this statement, during the annual 16 Days of Activism to combat violence against women and girls, in response to press reports about musicians creating accounts on OnlyFans and posting “intimate content” to fund their tours.

Does the union not realise that young men who see women as commodified objects are more likely to be violent towards their partners? What is a platform that entices men to pay for women’s “intimate content” going to do, if not encourage men to see women as commodified objects? And is the union not aware that sex buyers are significantly more likely than other men to rape and engage in all forms of violence against women?

Choice and “consent”

If you restrict your recognition of sexual exploitation as a form of violence against women and girls to “women and girls who do not enter into sex work out of personal choice”, as the statement does, what does personal choice look like to you? How do you determine who is exercising it?

Lack of autonomy in their involvement in prostitution is a fact of life for most prostituted women, as is a lack of autonomous and free sexual self-determination during interactions with buyers.

What buyers pay for in the sex industry, whether in relation to prostitution, webcamming, or “intimate” content on websites like OnlyFans, is not mutually satisfying sexual intimacy. They pay to control sexual activity – paying a woman not to say “No”. 

This cannot be reconciled with the requirement that sexual activity must be based on free consent and undermines the principle of consent itself.

The burden of the consequences of austerity budgets since the banking crisis in 2008, ongoing cuts in public funding and increases in the cost of living has disproportionately fallen on women. This has greatly increased the numbers of women becoming involved in the sex industry, a development which further exacerbates the impact of inequality.

The sex industry is a buyer’s market, and this is as true of the porn industry as it is in other areas. Online porn companies have created a global consumer’s market where creators of pornography compete for clicks with filmed acts of torture and conflict-based physical and sexual violence shared widely on social media, and computer games that include depictions of sexualised violence.

If you are less well-known in the porn industry you are likely to find yourself having to take more risks and engage in more extreme activities to satisfy buyer demand and cross boundaries you had when you started, just to keep up with the competition and maintain the same level of income.

OnlyFans has made it much easier to enter the world of selling explicit content online, but it comes with significant risks. Journalists from the news agency Reuters have recently carried out a series of investigations into OnlyFans which have uncovered many deeply disturbing issues. (See links at the end of this article.)

The likelihood of making much money through OnlyFans is very slim unless, like established artists in the music industry, you are already a celebrity or “influencer” who can bring fans or followers from social media to OnlyFans, where they will be paying customers.

Well-known musicians who post “intimate content” on OnlyFans are likely to make sums of money that girls and young women who might be tempted to follow them onto the site have no realistic prospect of making – unless they respond to demands from subscribers for increasingly extreme content.  

Women without the protection of celebrity status are also likely to receive requests from subscribers to meet them in private for larger sums than they make by posting content, even though they risk losing their OnlyFans account if they comply with these requests.

This is not “empowerment”. It is leveraging celebrity, disguised as “freedom” and “choice”.

 What impact will a “choice” made by a well-known artist in the music industry to post “intimate content” on an OnlyFans account to try to cover increased costs of funding tours to support her career have on the safety of other women and children, including those in the music industry and fans who might see her as a role model?

Parallels between the two industries

The music industry’s marketing model involves posting videos on YouTube and songs on Spotify and other platforms, for a very low return for artists compared with the profits for the companies that own these platforms. Posting content is considered promotion for live performances, where it has been assumed that there would be higher returns for the artists.

A similar marketing model operates in parts of the sex industry. If you’re a well-known porn actress, men offer you very large sums to meet them in private and perform in character. Sex buyers sometimes fund your films and may take part in them.

Your “celebrity status” and consequent value to the buyer have partly come from online pornography available for free to the global public, which helps to promote the live performance. Global online pornography has contributed to, and helps to maintain, the extremely hierarchical nature of the sex industry.

In the music industry this marketing model is breaking down for several reasons, including increased costs connected with live performance and touring, and the loss of many smaller venues where musicians traditionally developed skills and fanbase. This has thrown the light back on the huge discrepancies between profits online music sites make compared with what they pay to musicians whose content they host.

There are similar discrepancies between the profits made by the owners of online porn sites and content creator sites such as OnlyFans. The owner of OnlyFans, Leonid Radvinsky, based in the USA, was paid a $472 million (£359 million) dividend last year. OnlyFans’ pre-tax profit was $658 million, and it paid $149 million in tax to the UK Treasury, or 23% of its profits.

In written evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee’s inquiry on prostitution in 2016, Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon, who was the Principal Investigator analysing the economic contribution of prostitution to the UK GDP for the Office of National Statistics (ONS), estimated the total gross annual income earned from prostitution to be £5.09 billion leading to a net income for those involved in prostitution, after costs, of £1.23 billion, or 24%.

The proportion of gross income received by women involved in prostitution is unlikely to have increased since 2016. 76% of their gross income is taken up in “costs” – mostly payments to pimps, brothel keepers and other third parties.

By comparison, the owner of OnlyFans received 77% of the company’s pre-tax profits last year as a personal dividend.

Is involvement in an industry with discrepancies equal to, or greater than those within the music industry “empowerment”?

What was the Musicians’ Union thinking?

What does the Musicians’ Union think the wider impact will be on support for careers in music and funding for music education if it is generally understood that, unless you are extremely wealthy, involvement in the sex industry, for an ever-diminishing return, is something you would need to consider to get ahead in the music industry and could be considered to have “chosen”?

Given this environment, why is the Musicians Union supporting involvement in the sex industry for young women in the music industry instead of organising stronger action against profiteering and the huge inequalities in the music industry?

Other issues in the music industry creating huge discrepancies include who holds the copyright on songs and recordings, and the income artists receive for their work. Tech companies being permitted to scrape online content to make higher profits for themselves from AI products without paying copyright fees to creators of the content further threatens the future livelihoods of musicians and songwriters.

Competition from AI-generated pornography is also likely to reduce future profits from the creation of explicit online content for the benefit of tech companies. The potential impact of “sex robots” may also affect the earnings of women involved in prostitution. The potential impact of these developments on human relationships more widely is concerning. 

The problem is neoliberal capitalism. The answer isn’t the sex industry.

Supporting women in the sex industry

Huge increases in demand from sex buyers or porn consumers does not increase what women who provide “services” to them across the sex industry earn. The income of women in the industry diminishes over time while the profits of those who recruit others, or profit from facilitating or enabling their involvement, increase, with much less risk.

This is why the interests of women involved in providing “services” directly to consumers in any part of the sex industry and those who recruit and profit from them are not aligned.

It’s also why using the terms “sex work” and “sex worker” disguise who is losing and who is gaining under permitted systems which do not address demand.

So called “sex worker unions” or “collectives” (like some mentioned in the statement) combine all these roles under the same umbrella and are in fact trade associations. They have never achieved increases in rates of pay for women involved in prostitution in the way that, for example, public sector, healthcare sector and railway unions have done for their members in recent years in the UK.

Instead, they organise to expand the industry and expand demand, which results in lower pay for those who provide “services”.

The Musician’s Union position statement includes references to organisations providing support but not to organisations supporting women to exit the sex industry if they want to. It is not promoting a “harm reduction” strategy if it excludes them.

Reuters investigation into OnlyFans

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