Donald Cohen is the founder of The Fan Alliance, an organization dedicated to educating and organizing fans to take action toward a fair and sustainable ecosystem for musicians. Fan Alliance employs grassroots organizing strategies to build a network of engaged fans to advocate for new laws and industry practices protecting musicians.

He’s written articles on the challenges artists face in the age of music streaming and is a co-founder of the Rainey Day Fund providing assistance to BIPOC, LGBTQ+, disabled artists, and others who add to the rich fabric of roots and Americana music.

He’s also the founder and executive director of In the Public Interest, a national research and policy center that studies public goods and services.

Cohen has more than 40 years of experience in community, labor, and political organizing. We’re here to talk about the power of music fans.

me: Let’s just jump right into the topic of artificial intelligence, because that’s big on everybody’s minds. I interviewed Roger McGuinn for FolkWorks, and asked a question about songwriting. He responded, “I use ChatGPT.” I was shocked, but it does make sense. You bounce ideas off another person so you have the benefit of their data set. Now ChatGPT doesn’t have any emotions, but it does have a data set…

Donald Cohen (DC): Big one.

me: …and as long as you’re paying attention when choosing the parts it hands you, then it’s a tool.

DC: As it should be.

me: So where does that get to be problematic, in your mind?

DC: I think it’s probably true, in general. But for artists, there two issues: One is, and this could be actors or musicians or writers, is their work being used to train the large language models without their consent? That’s number one. It’s also: is their face or likeness or voice or being used without their consent? So that’s the key. Who’s in control and who gets to decide?

There’s a bill in Congress right now, the NO FAKES Act. I don’t remember what the latest version is, but essentially, the issue is consent and control.

Here’s the second issue: We did a panel last year at Americana Fest, and we had an artist on – Leyla McCalla, who’s a friend of mine – and she said, “Well, this doesn’t affect me.” And then we talked for a little while and she goes, “Wait a second. Now I get it.”

Because how many fake Haitian-American folk singers are going to be out there? Real music has a harder and harder time getting above the noise, which is already a problem.

me: Right. I read something about Spotify creating their own fake songs and flooding the market. They say they didn’t do that.

DC: Yeah, there’s a book. I haven’t read it yet. Liz Pelly: Mood Machine. And it’s gotten a lot of ink and a lot of people are talking about it. Ghosts – they’re called Ghost Artists.

So that’s the real issue is real music versus not real music. And then whose music?

me: Some people would argue – the people who want to make money and don’t want to create would argue – what difference does it make? If the audience chooses to listen to it or choose to buy it, then that’s on them, isn’t it? But I’m sensing some serious duplicity the audience does not want to participate in, because they’re listening in good faith that a real person put their heart out there.

DC: People want people. The relationship between a fan and an artist is not just a commercial relationship. They’re not just consumers. There is something deeper going on there that that’s entirely human.

me: Yes. I’ve just been thinking recently about how there’s a big dent in the social continuum because of the pandemic lockdown, because we understand ourselves by mirroring. When you live in a vacuum, you have only your own thoughts. You’re bouncing all your ideas off yourself, but you don’t truly understand yourself until you react with another person and either like or dislike what they’re sending back to you.

DC: Communication. It’s communication. It’s human connection. And one of the most important things that I believe that separates human beings from others is our ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes, others from other species.

me: That’s empathy.

DC: Exactly. Empathy comes from… I’m going to just put an article I wrote in the chat.

Music has the power to chip away at distrust. Storytelling in song spreads the basic element of empathy: an understanding of the real experiences of those we don’t know nor understand — to learn not just their story of pain and suffering, but also their humanity, their dignity, their strength. – Donald Cohen, Musicians and Artists are Essential Workers Too

DC: There’s something funny. I guess Randy Travis, the country artist, is that he can no longer sing and he’s using AI, but he’s using it to recreate his voice, and that’s fine.

me: That’s awesome! See, it’s a tool.

DC: And the question is: in whose hand is the tool?

Me: In this case, Randy Travis isn’t using that tool to represent other people’s ideas as his own. We are very precious with ideas. The whole academic field is founded on making sure you understand where you learned that thing.

DC: I mean, we can take this to a larger level. America’s sort of in a bad place right now. And our inability to just understand each other and be connected to each other is one of the roots.

me: Yes. There’s a lot of complaining about the Democratic Party being so compartmentalized that nobody’s bonding. People found clarity while they were alone. They founded online tribes who hyper-focus on the cause that means something to them. Really, all humans want to be heard. And that gets back to mirroring. You can’t be heard unless somebody hears it and then mirrors back to you and tells you they heard what you said. And that’s the thing that everybody, even the people we don’t like is clamoring for. And I just realized in the past few days how much of that is being rebuilt since lockdown. Because of internet-based tribes, I’m now associated with FolkWorks and FAR-West. There’s opportunity to grow as long as people understand not to put walls around your community.

So how do you crosspollinate? That’s kind of what The Fan Alliance is doing, I think.

DC: And to bring it back around to the fan/artist connection… let me just say my professional life has been as an organizer. The Fan Alliance is relatively new. I’ve been getting people together with unions and community groups and others (and elections at times) to try to do good in the world. And I’ve written a couple of books. That’s my day life, my professional life. I think that to your larger question of how do you break barriers, you’ve got to listen. You go in with respect, and you’ve got to talk to people.

me: You’ve got to let them know you’re listening.

DC: Try to understand people. I mean, that’s really at the micro level; we’ve got to do that at a mass level. People need to get into the habit of listening to one another, not screaming at one another, and not just listening to each other in our communities. I mean, everybody needs community, and that’s okay. You hang with the people you think like a little bit, there’s nothing wrong with that. But you want to be open.

The Fan Alliance is about creating the notion that we are fans and that fans have a responsibility to help protect the future of music. We get music for free now; we forget. We go to a concert, and since they’re big stars on stage, we think they must be rich. We forget that this is their job, it’s their career, and as their job, they need to be able to pay their rent or their mortgage or send their kids to school or go education. So we need to educate all of us about the notion, well, this is their job.

me: They’re whole people. They’re not just something that’s up on the stage.

DC: Well, they’re whole people and this is where they make their money. And it’s getting harder and harder for folks to do that, unless they’re touring all the time.

Tift Merritt – I don’t know if you know her music – said, “Listen, I’ve spent tens of thousand dollars making a record, and then I have to give it away for free.” So we need to educate that artists are workers, that they need living wages, that they need healthcare, that they need a secure retirement, just like school teachers and janitors and bus drivers and everybody else.

That’s the goal of The Fan Alliance.

An educated base can do things at one level as individuals: to do better, to buy more merch, to buy records, to be aware, like Fair Trade Coffee or whatever. But as important: if we had a movement, if we had tens of thousands or more of fans saying “We want change” then when we’re trying to pass a law in Congress to protect on AI, we can be a lobbying force. I don’t know if that all makes sense.

me: It does make sense. It’s hard to think with the current train wreck rolling through America, but that’s all the more reason for people at the consumer level to coalesce, so that when the legislative branch is ready to actually do work for us, we can say: “Here. Do this.”

DC: There’s power in numbers. Yeah, it is a movement. It can be.

And there are powerful forces that are causing music workers to make less and less. Right now, there’s the tech industry. There are broadcasters – you may know this – right now that on AM and FM radio, if an artist’s song is played and they didn’t write it, they don’t get royalties. A song, someone sings a Dolly Parton song in their own way, in their own arrangement, and it gets played on the radio dolly as the writer gets a royalty, but not the performer.

me: Oh, they don’t get any?

DC: No, no, no. It’s like US, North Korea, Iran, and a couple of other countries are the only countries that don’t give performance royalties. And one problem with that is that people aren’t making money, and second is that Europe does pay, but they don’t pay Americans when they play it on European radio because America doesn’t pay.

What’s a loophole in the law is that the broadcasters, the powerful broadcasters, have been preventing that loophole from being closed for many, many years. There’s a proposal in Congress now, it’s called, I think the American Music Fairness Act, which would close that loophole.

The broadcasters are very powerful. They’ve spent a lot of money in politics. So let’s say we had 10,000 fans in every state that said, “I understand this well enough to say no; we have more votes and we’re more powerful, and we need this change.” We’re the sleeping giant to protect the music industry and to protect artists, actually.

me: There needs to be an emotional component. And so the emotional component would be to help fans understand: If you love this artist, you need to help protect their interests, and here’s how you can.

DC: Exactly. Now to just take it to another level, you can go from “I love this artist. I want to protect artists” to that level of “I want to protect the future of music. I want to protect it all.”

me: “I want to protect the music of people I don’t know about yet.”

DC: There’s a national coalition called NIVA: National Independent Venue Association. Venues like McCabe’s or Birchmere all over the place are struggling. Independent venues all over the place are struggling because people aren’t going out as much. And the costs are going up. Live Nation is coming into towns and scooping up venues, and there are venues that are closing. They just can’t make it.

A really well-known one in New York, the Rockwood Music Hall, closed after many, many years. And so here’s the impact of that: it’s not just that business closing. If the independent venues can’t make it, then think about who the next emerging artist is. Where will they get their start. Do you know who Allison Russell is?

me: Yeah – I love Birds of Chicago.

DC: So I first saw them in a tiny place. It was called Genghis Cohen, no relation. It was actually a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles with a little venue in it. I saw Birds of Chicago there.

And it was just on a lark. I wasn’t sure how I heard of them, or maybe I saw on social media or something. And I go, holy moly. And I became a big fan, and I now know them. I know them pretty well. And this winter, Alison was on Broadway, but they played at small places around the country for years. And if they didn’t have those independent venues, then she would’ve never made it.

me: Right. There’s something that seems like it’s somewhat lost in America, the culture of having a venue that you go to, a club that you go to just to see whoever’s going to be there. When I was a band wife in Kalamazoo, Michigan, we had Club Soda. I saw indie acts I wouldn’t have known about otherwise, including Concrete Blonde.

DC: Exactly. You can do that with an independent venue that’s 20 bucks or 30 bucks for a ticket, and it’s closer to you. You don’t do that for a show that’s $80 or $90 or a hundred or more. And it’s where people you probably know, lots of artists I know, that’s where they’re going, and not just people in early part of their careers.

me: People don’t always realize that this band you suddenly discovered has been kicking around for 10 or 20 years supporting themselves, and It gets very expensive. Whatever your hobby is, the thing that you would do if you could fly fishing, whatever…

DC: Photography…

me: I’m told that’s probably the most expensive one.

DC: But just imagine: there’s millions of people, I believe, who love music and we’re just going along with the flow. We’re not thinking about it. And it’s not our fault. No. We love our artists. Music is free.

We love our artists. We just have to raise into consciousness that this is their job, hard job. We need to help. And it’s under threat because of AI, because of higher costs, because of streaming, because of a whole set of things. And we can play a role in turning that around.

That’s our goal.

Basically, what Fan Alliance does is a monthly email. It’s real simple. And that’s about educating. I don’t know if you know Mark Erelli. I wrote an introduction and reprinted his article. I’m really thinking each one (each blog post) is a piece of education.

Editor’s note: Mark Erelli is a singer/songwriter with a degree in evolutionary biology. Donald Cohen reprinted Mark’s essay, Deep Thoughts: Sonic Extinction, about losing the “middle class” of the music world, sacrificing music as a job for the sake of superstars.

me: Okay. Gotcha. Yeah, right now you just need people to sign up so you have numbers.

DC: Yeah. Sign the pledge. We’ll occasionally ask people to take action.

me: When you have an action, that information’s going to come by way of the newsletter, right?

DC: Absolutely. Yeah. Exactly. Right now, they’re trying to pass a few laws, and there’s a few things that are possible. It’s not just Congress; it’s state laws. For example: there are ticketing laws around “secondary sellers” like StubHub and Seat Geek. They sweep up tickets, and sell them for higher costs with huge fees. They even sell tickets that don’t exist yet. There’s a federal law, but there’s action at the state level also. We’re lobbying in Oregon, in Florida, and I think there’s one in California. We just signed on to an open letter to try to close that down. That practice hurts fans. It hurts artists because the money’s going somewhere else.

There’s a whole lot of policy issues we have to educate fans about in general, but first we have to get people connected. And then once they’re connected, they go, look, this is the fight.

me: America is learning how to gather and fight. Once we’re done with our current governmental nonsense, everybody who’s used to being a coalition is going to need something else to get on.

DC: Exactly.

me: Education is also changing the mind of the audience to be less myopic. To realize, “Oh, you’re the person who wrote the song I like, but wait, this is a whole person. And they do other things too.”

And this is what you should teach your children.

DC: That’s right.

me: In our economy, you should already be teaching your child to have two concurrent careers, minimum. And at least one of those careers should be what they’re passionate about. And it is absolutely okay for them to be passionate about music, passionate about art, and you should support them. There’s so much of our society broken down over just perceptions. It’s hurting us without people realizing. The Fan Alliance can help restructure public perception of the arts.

DC: When people sign up for the mailing list, people sign this pledge. We have several thousand quotes because people can write in why they signed, what music means to them, and it’s really powerful. We’re going to be using them. We’ve got an idea of how to use them.

Me: Good, that was my next question. You should just have a whole page of them.

DC: Well, there’s too many, but we’re actually going to actually do a map, a clickable map. Somebody’s working on it. The person who does our web, and she’s a genius and she’s figuring it out. You’ll click on the name and the quote will come up, or the location. In the next few months, we’ll have a beta version of it.

me: And listen, you’re doing something else in the first week of October, so you cannot participate in
FAR-West 2025.

DC: You Got Gold 2025. It’s the John Prine Week in Nashville. I’ve met Fiona, and a friend of mine is the executive director of the Hello In There Foundation, which is the family foundation. And I just decided to go this year.

me: I’m not mad about that.

Sign up, sign the pledge at thefanalliance.org. There is no fee to join, only a request for your commitment to support the artists you love, and the ones you don’t know about yet.

debora Ewing writes, paints, and screams at the stars because the world is still screwed up. She improves what she can with music collaboration, peer-review at Consilience Poetry Journal, or designing books for Igneus Press. Follow @DebsValidation on X and Instagram. Read her self-distractions at FolkWorks.org and JerryJazzMusician.com.