The disproportionately high rate of mental illness among musicians is well documented, as are pleas for enhanced services. But what’s conspicuously missing from this discourse is any concrete resource about accessing mental health or addiction-related services if you are, in fact, a professional musician. Such services would require the good-faith commitment of quite a bit of money from record labels—something that, until a few months ago, didn’t seem to exist in any formal capacity. An independent Canadian record label is changing that.
Toronto’s Royal Mountain Records—the Canadian label home of Mac DeMarco, Alvvays, U.S. Girls, and more—announced in February that they would be offering $1,500 to each individual musician on their roster for mental health and addiction-related services. (The money is a non-recoupable expense, meaning that the artists don’t pay it back.) It’s a humble sum, a fact that Royal Mountain founder Menno Versteeg is quick to admit, but perhaps as important as the material commitment is the precedent it suggests: that record labels, like other businesses, ought to be responsible for taking care of their workers.
“I don’t care if other industries pat me on the back, but I do care when artists say to me, ‘This is making my job, my career, so much easier,’” says Versteeg. He’s seated on a second-hand couch in the label’s Toronto headquarters, a two-floor apartment that used to be a makeshift Buddhist temple and now bears the scrappy decor and charming disarray of a gentle anarchist’s college house. It’s not as though Royal Mountain will be cracking the Fortune 500 anytime soon. This was the first year the six-person company could afford any kind of mental health fund, setting aside roughly $100,000 for the members of their 25 active bands.
“It comes out of our bottom line,” Versteeg says. “It’s money that would go to the owners or toward paving the driveway. It’s a lot but it’s still just a dent.” While usage of the funds is confidential, Versteeg says he’s already heard from Royal Mountain acts who plan on using it. “I’ll be invoicing, I’ve got some bills,” notes one, Brandon Williams of the post-punk band Chastity, with a chuckle.
The ideal endgame, in Versteeg’s mind, is eventually providing comprehensive health insurance for Royal Mountain artists. Few full-time musicians are able to sustain the kind of work that would provide them with health benefits, so many are simply left uninsured. Versteeg thinks that the first step in bridging this gap is reconceptualizing musicians’ roles as workers, as opposed to mere hobbyists. “This is a real job,” Versteeg stresses, “and it’s funny that we have an attitude otherwise in our own heads.”
Institutional abuses of creative labor throughout history are the rule rather than the exception, and the music industry has infamously thrived off of creatives while maintaining little, if any, responsibility for their well-being. Versteeg is intimately familiar with these poor working conditions. He’s been touring for the past 20 years, the last 12 of which have been with the Canadian indie rock band Hollerado. His experiences informed the fund’s creation. “Every clichéd touring experience, [including] struggles with addiction, we went through it,” he says, “and we could never afford any shit like therapy. It’s one thing to say, ‘I’m here and I care about you,’ but there’s something to be said about backing that up with resources besides just your time.”
If an independent record label can find money in their budget for mental health and addiction-related services, it prompts the question: Why can’t a major label, too? “Uh, capitalism,” responds Linnea Siggelkow of the Royal Mountain dream-rock group Ellis with a laugh. Siggelkow notes that other industries, like digital media, have seen a wave of worker-led unionizing in order to secure better working conditions. Yet musicians’ unions, like SAG-AFTRA and AFM, have failed to capitalize on this trend. “I have no idea why it’s such a foreign thing [in the music industry], especially for major labels,” she says. “It’s crazy that it’s taken this long for something to come up, and that it’s being looked at as so radical.”
Royal Mountain and Sub Pop artist Orville Peck echoes this sentiment: “It’s sad that we have to be so excited about this. We shouldn’t be as shocked by it as we are.” Like the other musicians interviewed for this story, Peck finds that there’s a lot of lip service paid to dealing with mental illness and addiction without much tangible support. “A lot of organizations want to say, ‘We need to talk about it, we want to get it out there,’ and it’s like the bare minimum of wokeness,” he adds.
Peck says that on his current income, money for therapy is scarce. “It’s not a financial possibility for my mental health to be a priority because I just don’t have the resources,” he adds. “I’m a gay cowboy who wears a mask. There’s already so much difficulty trying to survive as an artist these days.” But the fund has prompted Peck to reinventory his approach to anxiety—“not only to think about it, but to go and sort it out.”
Siggelkow was already medicated for anxiety and seeing a therapist, so the funding has lightened her existing load. “Part of the anxiety is the financial stress,” she adds. Though it may seem like common sense, recent studies show that uninsured individuals living on a low income are more likely to suffer from severe mental illness. That same data, based on the U.S.’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health, raised another issue tantamount to this particular story: alcohol dependence is by far the most common substance abuse disorder—and a terrible illness to battle when your workplace is also a bar.
Just 16 years old, “Stranger Things” actor Finn Wolfhard and his bandmates in Calpurnia already feel alienated by the industry’s reliance on substance use. “Music and touring life are associated with partying, and if you’re not up to speed, then it feels like you’re not included,” says the Royal Mountain signee. While Wolfhard doesn’t face the financial barriers that young bands seeking mental health services often do, his frustration with corporate awareness campaigns that don’t actually help fix the problem is palpable. “For those who can’t have that opportunity [to get help], it’s time that other people started stepping up,” he says.
“It is actually a high-risk lifestyle,” adds Chastity’s Williams of the touring grind. The singer started going to therapy when he was 15 years old and now hosts DIY shows to raise money for mental health nonprofits in Toronto’s Durham Region. He’s hoping to see more shows at safe, inclusive community spaces that accommodate those trying to stay sober. “It’s a wild, bad, old concept—artists playing in bars as often as we do,” he says with a groan. “We get to the venue, and before anyone’s talking about food to us, they’re letting us know the alcohol situation. Give me a break.”
Williams is focused on building out Royal Mountain’s approach into broader industry reform. “I’m happy that our label has stood up to represent us, but there’s a lot of big picture movement that needs to happen to make sure that everyone is looked after,” he says.
Change is slow coming, but other industry players are focused on solutions, too. Sweden’s Record Union just announced that they’ll be donating $30,000 to initiatives aimed at helping musicians who experience mental illness. Like Royal Mountain’s funding, the sum isn’t huge, but the message behind it is.
“At the end of the day,” says Siggelkow, “a small chunk of change can make a huge difference.”
