The band Haim just revealed that they fired an agent after finding out that they were paid ten times less than a male counterpart for a music festival performance. The group recently spoke out about this gender disparity which took place in 2017.
The women explained that they didn’t initially mind the pay since they were interested in the exposure, but then they found out that they could have gotten a lot more for their appearance fee. Danielle Haim explained as follows.
“We had been told that our fee was very low because you played at the festival in the hope you’d get played on the radio. We didn’t think twice about it, but we later found out that someone was getting paid 10 times more than us. And because of that we fired our agent.”
She also added that it can be hard to keep track of because “It’s so hard to check: everything’s so secretive about how much people are getting paid, and that’s bullsh**.”
The Haim sisters did not mention which festival this took place at or who the male counterparts were. Just this year a bunch of festivals made a step forward in pledging for gender-equal lineups, which is a huge step in the right direction. But just making the lineup numbers even does not necessarily have anything to do with the type of compensation that people are getting for being there. The wage gap has been discussed more openely as of late within the acting sphere, but not a lot of musicians discuss it. There seems to be quite a way to go before things naturally become an even playing field.
Haim is currently on tour in Europe for the LP Something to Tell You, which they released in 2017.
