What All Of Us Creators Could Learn From Chappell Roan's Grammy Acceptance Speech

I’m going to start this piece by saying that I don’t really know who Chappell Roan is, or at least I didn’t until very recently. On a car journey a couple of weeks ago, my 12-year-old daughter played her songs to me and sang along to all the lyrics and I liked them, but that is as much as I know. Or knew, until that is last night’s Grammy award ceremony.

But on Sunday night, this 26-year-old woman in a big colourful frock and theatrical make-up stood up and made an acceptance speech which instantly put her on my radar.

Minutes earlier she had won the Grammy for Best New Artist and her speech began with her explaining a promise that she had made to herself:

“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 liveable wage and health care, especially developing artists,” she said.

She went on to explain that she was signed to a record label (Atlantic Records) at a very young age, around 15 or 16. That record label had dropped her in 2020.

‘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.”

She ended her speech by saying: “Labels, we got you. But do you got us?”

I was amazed that this girl, at the height of her fame and with that, so much to lose, would have the integrity to use her platform to call out the unfairness of an industry that is, right now, gifting her everything.

But you see, what better time to do it? If she had spoken about this in 2020 when she was dropped, well then she would have just been dismissed as a bitter woman and we could have all got on and not paid any attention. But a woman artist telling it like it is, demanding better working conditions when she has so much to lose, come on, that takes some guts.

I realised in that moment that this was definitely an artist I wanted my daughter listening to. But couldn’t the rest of us learn something from this 26 year old? And don’t the points that she is raising apply to other creative industries, including book publishing for one?

I wrote last week about how those of us in the book industry should have got behind Bloomsbury when they attempted to stand up to Amazon recently.

The Time To Turn Away From Amazon is Long Overdue

And I’ve written before about how much writers actually earn (clue, you might be shocked to hear how we make a living — answer, desperately):

How Much Do Writers Actually Earn?

Earlier today I did a Substack live about Chappell Roan’s acceptance speech and in it I talked about all of these things and I mentioned how the reason I stopped working full-time as a freelance journalist for newspapers was because often I would come up with an idea for a feature, it would get commissioned and the photographer and make-up artist would come and shoot me. I provided them with a day’s work, the equivalent of probably £1000 to them, and I would file my copy to my editor to brief. Yet, through no fault of my own it would sit on the list and the editor would get sick of it and end up spiking it (which means not using it) and I was the one in the chain who didn’t get paid because payment for me – the writer, the one who came up with the idea that gave everyone else an income – was on publication.

Today the newspaper industry is dying, there are huge redundancies and we are witnessing the last days of print media, and not just because they spiked my piece, but perhaps they’ve driven others like me out of the industry.

I also mentioned in my live, as I have done in some of my other pieces, how when one of my books sells, I get around 44p towards paying off the advance, yet when I was selling books in my little pop-up bookshop for a while, I got £3.50 as a retailer. There are other people of course who also take a share of that RRP of what, around £10, the distributor, the printer, the publisher, and yet it’s the creator of the work who gets paid the least.

Give or take a few years, I am almost double Chappell Roan’s age and I can’t remember another female artist who has used a platform like that to highlight these injustices in how we treat creators (if you can think of someone remind me in the comments – surely I can count on Madonna?).

Although Prince of course famously appeared with SLAVE inked across his face, but by then he was already in dispute with his record label, ditto George Micheal and his wrangle with Sony. But Chappell Roan is riding high, and she risked it all to speak out. That takes some guts.

So my questions is when are the rest of us going to follow where this young woman has not feared to tread? When are we going to stand up to the big machine that is creaming all the profits of our hard work and not compensating us properly? When are those who enjoy and love our work going to vote with their feet and shop ethically in a way that helps artists survive?

I walked away from writing a book I desperately wanted to last year because I couldn’t afford to pay my bills while I did it. When I explained this to the agent who had been brokering the deal she described that as ‘suboptimal’. It hadn’t even occured to her (or indeed the publisher) that I might need to feed my child and keep a roof over my head while I wrote.

I remember Meena Kandasamy, brilliant activist and author, once confessing that she had received a £500 advance for her brilliant memoir, When I Hit You (this book went on to be shortlisted for the Woman’s Prize). It is not unusual for publishers to expect, or at least ask, writers to pen books which take months and months and months to write for a few thousand pounds.

This is insulting to our craft. Is there a disparity between female writers and male ones? Undeniably. White writers and those of colour? Undoubtedly. But we’re all meant to be so grateful to be making a living from a creative life that we daren’t call it out, and so it just continues.

But we’re not making a living. Chappell Roan didn’t have any healthcare, I batch cook and freeze portions so no food goes to waste, as I’m sure a lot of you do to make money go further these days.

And soon we will be choked out of our professions entirely. And what then? What when these huge behemoths have bled us dry, who will create for them then?

After Chappell Roan was first chewed up and spat out by the music industry she did not give up, she went back to her bedroom, and she started writing again. The result was her 2023 breakout album, The Rise and Fall of the Midwest Princess. And so, for her at least, her devotion to the craft paid off, but for many, many others it won’t have done, it will have left them in debt. And so for Chappell Roan to have used her platform to demand record labels take care of the women (and men) who will come after her is admirable.

Will she suffer now as a result as someone on my Substack live today suggested? We will have to see. I hope not. I hope that what we are witnessing is the very beginnings of a sea change. But, one voice will not do. Other writers, musicians and artists need to talk about this, we need to shame industries into paying us fairly and not taking advantage of our talent. I want to see more people writing about this here on Substack.

We are not lucky to be here, they are lucky to have us. No-one will know your worth unless you do, and last night Chappell Roan reminded us all of that.

• And here is a final plea from me, if you want to help this writer in particular keep writing, the best way to do that is by becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack. And you can do that right here, it will also mean you can come along and join me at my dining table for my monthly meet up tonight. Upgrade here: