Haim, everyone’s favorite group of musical sisters, are a pretty big deal. They’re Grammy-nominated artists, they’re signed to JAY-Z’s label Roc Nation and they’ve toured with Taylor Swift, Rihanna and Florence + the Machine.
So you’d think that people would respect them enough to give them equal pay, right? Wrong, apparently.
In an interview with Grazia, Haim recalled their performance at a music festival last year. They were on the same lineup as a yet-unnamed male artist, and later found out that they had gotten one tenth of the money he did for their performance.
I’m going to say that again so you understand just how ridiculous this is: They were paid 10 percent of what he was paid for performing on the same stage at the same festival.
“We had been told that our fee was very low because you played at the festival in the hope that you’d get played on the radio,” Danielle, the middle sister, told Grazia. “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.”
Gender pay gap is certainly not a new thing, or even a thing that will be going away any time soon, unfortunately. But the music industry’s gender pay gap is particularly awful: Music Business Worldwide reports that there’s a more than 30 percent disparity in major music labels, and according to Parade, it’s up to 49 percent at some labels. It’s wise that the Haim sisters fired their agent to avoid this situation again, but unfortunately, Danielle said, it could very well happen again. “It’s so hard to check: everything’s so secretive about how much people are getting paid,” she added, “and that’s bullshit.”
Alana, the youngest Haim sister, continued, “It’s scary out there and it’s fucked up. It’s fucked up not even to be paid half the same amount. But to be paid a tenth of that amount of money? It was insane.”
Insane is absolutely the right word for it. Here’s hoping that in the future, the Haim sisters get the respect they so deserve.