Music is a living common good. It is born everywhere: in bedrooms, studios, neighborhoods, clubs, free parties, conservatories, small and very large rooms. The music is hybrid, open, in perpetual transformation.
It is a popular art: plural, a thousand miles from reactionary fantasies. Music crosses geographic and personal spaces, social classes. Music is always ahead of its time. By composing new things towards the future, she brings out new sounds, new stories, new languages. Music allows us to live collectively in the same place; it is an immediate force of federation and commonality.
This call comes from a special number on musical creation, to be found on our store.
We are watching the 2027 presidential election with concern, we are deeply alarmed by the risk of the country’s official shift to the far right within a handful of months. We, artists and music workers, wish to take an active part in the resistance against the extreme right and all the reactionary forces and parties at work in this country. In the name of a desirable society, we refuse to allow representations based on exclusion, withdrawal and the hierarchy of lives The reactionary rights perfectly understand the role of culture.
Platforms shape access to works through their algorithms. Investment funds buy catalogs like financial assets.
They know that collective stories often precede laws. They seek to sort existences, discipline bodies, recover traditions, designate undesirables. Rap, traditional music, the nightlife, queer scenes already know it: music is a democratic battlefield.
On the same subject: Take the music back to the machines
The project of the far right is the risk of being brought into line: criminalization or repression of certain musical scenes, racist hierarchy of music deemed legitimate or illegitimate, end of cultural aid for those who question the national myth and make progressive speeches, incessant attacks against freedom decreation.
Increasing concentration
For several months, the world of culture has been mobilizing against the growing concentration of the cultural and media industries. In publishing, cinema, the free and independent press, we are warning about the consequences of a model where an ever-smaller number of actors control the means of production, distribution and prescription of works. The world of music is not spared from these phenomena.
Concentration has become a structuring reality, where a handful of groups occupy a dominant position. Certain media and cultural empires show how industrial concentration, austerity and reactionary narrative battles can feed each other.
On the same subject: Cinema: the standoff with Bolloré
Added to this are other issues weighing on artists and their audiences: platforms shape access to works through their algorithms. Investment funds buy up catalogs like financial assets. Large groups are strengthening their presence in festivals, venues and distribution circuits. Artificial intelligence is opening a new phase of capture of the value produced by artists This development not only threatens the economy of the sector. It weakens cultural pluralism itself.
Preserve cultural diversity
Music cannot be reduced to a commodity or a simple cultural product. It participates in democratic life, the circulation of knowledge, memories and visions of the world. As such, its access, production and dissemination are of general interest. This requires supporting independent labels, independent media, associative venues, cooperative festivals and all forms of sharing that make it possible to preserve cultural diversity.
This reflection also requires us to question the dogma of gigantism as the only horizon for music and the cultural sector. The music “industry” seems convinced that success must be measured by the size of festivals, attendance records and the capacity to fill stadiums.
On the same subject: “Better Live” : des tournées “Dolcissimo”
Does a democratic society need more a concert in a stadium or a hundred halls spread across the entire territory? We defend the idea of an ecological revolution in industrial musical entertainment. Not as a decline in creation, but as a reorientation of means. More places on a human scale. More territorial tours. Greater proximity between artists and audiences.
We don’t just want to denounce concentration; we want to organize deconcentration.
This transformation also involves facing the inequalities produced by our cultural policies, which continue to nourish the social, racial and territorial hierarchies inherited from colonial history and the mechanisms of domination which run through our institutions. We wish to weave bonds of solidarity to aim for a truly multidimensional culture, freed from the racist, sexist, classist, LGBTQIA+phobic, ableist dynamics favored by the current system.
Bringing forces together
The time is no longer for simple resistance. We need a common project: a culture based on cooperation rather than concentration, on proximity rather than gigantism, on commons rather than monopolies. We don’t just want to denounce concentration; we want to organize deconcentration. Taking music back from machines means opening up future cultures. Culture is not a market like any other, it is one of the conditions of a happy society. It must be free, plural, contradictory.
We, artists, technicians, music workers, wish to join in the fight against this ongoing reactionary spread. We, artists, technicians, music workers, wish to take part in the reflection and construction of desirable futures. Let’s get together. Let’s converge our strengths beyond our stages, our aesthetics and our sectors. Let’s connect music to other fields of culture, research, independent media and civil society. Let’s weigh in on the presidential campaign debate, and let’s build together the solidarity capable of opening up other possibilities.
To join the call, go here.
First signatories…
November UltraMédine, Bernard LavilliersBarbara Says, RenaudTryo, EbonyDanakil, French 79Théa, MathildeLisa Pariente, Flore BenguiguiAloïse Sauvage, Planète Boom BoomMC dances for the climate, Dominique AIAM, The Fatal PicardsThérèse, ThugEmily Loizeau, The Ogres of BarbackSandra Nkaké, Dup TeamFakear, IgorrrSilly Boy Blue, Nadège Beausson-DiagneChinese Man, La Rue KétanouTerrenoire, Mélissa LaveauxNoé Preszow, Gauvain SersMoriarty, AstéréotypieMNNQNS, Charlotte FeverMad Hatter, Lulu Van TrappBirds in Row, The Psychotic MonksBlack dog, GwendolineLeo SVR, CalyxThe New World Orchestra, Rosemary StandleyClarika, YomLo’jo, Seb MartelMathieu Boogaerts, Nautilis setOlivier Mellano, Anne PaceoTahiti 80, Ehla (Léa Luciani)Hélène Mourot, Orange BlossomHenri Texier, LouisahhhSuper Parquet, High ToneNevché, Pi Ja MaLeïla Martial / Compagnie La Barde, Good nighteklose, Coax CollectiveJeanneTo, Philippe ProhomLa Mal Coiffée, We Hate You Please DieValentin Ceccaldi, Bastien LallemantFrançois Breut, Yann Tiersen…
Le Point ÉphémèreThe Trans Musicales, Small BathGround Control, Le TrabendoArty Farty, The MunicipalityBaco Music, SteamSuper !, StereoluxLes Suds (à Arles), The Cardboard FactoryNo Format, At PomegranateMad Minute Music, MarsatacGreat Happiness, Radio FrogJazz Action Valence, Adone ProductionsLands of Sound, The Link ProductionsPalmer’s Rock, Mus’AzikBluebird Booking, The 106Tomboy lab, finalistsThe Antipode, La SireneFreestyle Swimming, SlowfestMusicalarue, Shower BathsPaloma, Canal BThe Aircraft, Radio Campus AmiensFestival Astropolis, TrempoCDN of Normandy Rouen, The Other ChannelIrfan le label, The Electric BeautyRadio Méga, OvastandL’Armada productions, The Big MixPickaxe! magazine, festival Eccaussysteme
Organisations…
AJC Jazz Croisé Association, DNA Collective (the Art of Telling Us), TechnopolCultures Futures, FAMDT (Federation of actresses and actors of traditional music and dances), Faithful (Federation of current music venues), Ferarock (Federation of current music associative radios), FNEIJMA (Federation of jazz and contemporary music schools), Futurs Composés-national network of musical creation, More Women on StageSafer, SNAM-CGT, SMA Current music unionZone Franche-the world music network.
