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The music industry has always been very good at selling the dream. The backstage pass. The first studio session. The tour invite. The feeling that you are finally close to the place you wanted to reach. For young people trying to enter music, those early opportunities can feel impossible to refuse, even when the conditions are unclear, unpaid, unsafe or built entirely on someone else’s power. Its a report about more than “bad experiences”…
Article en français.
A report by Youth Music now puts words, figures and testimonies behind what many young creatives have been saying for years: too much of the industry still treats harm as part of the price of entry.
The report is based on testimonies from young people aged 18 to 25, or up to 30 for d/Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent participants, and focuses especially on people facing marginalisation linked to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability or social class.
The headline figure is brutal: 72% of young people surveyed said they had felt unsafe in a music industry working environment. The report also found that 75% had considered giving up their ambitions because of unsafe or unfair conditions, while 90% had felt unable to speak up about harmful practices.
But the report is not only about individual bad behaviour. Its real strength is that it describes the structure that allows harm to keep happening.
Five conditions that keep harm in place
Youth Music identifies five recurring conditions: low or no pay, unsafe work environments, discrimination and harassment, informal and exploitative cultures, and barriers to reporting. Together, these conditions create a working culture where young people are expected to be grateful, flexible and silent.
The industry often calls this passion.
In reality, it is a system that relies on people being too young, too precarious or too afraid of losing an opportunity to ask for better.
Low pay is also a safety issue
Low pay is not a side issue and we wrote about it before. It is one of the ways unsafe situations become possible. When someone is desperate for any route into music, they are more likely to accept vague jobs, unpaid trials, last-minute changes, ticket-split gigs, late-night work, unsafe travel and meetings in places that would never be considered appropriate in another industry.
The report describes a culture of hidden hours, unclear fees, underpayment and pressure to accept poor conditions because “someone else will do it”. Young creatives spoke about being expected to work for free, waiting months or even a year to be paid, or taking on several roles at once without proper compensation.
This is where the romantic idea of “doing it for the love” becomes dangerous. Love does not pay rent. Exposure does not cover a train home at 2 AM. A “great opportunity” stops being great when the person accepting it cannot afford to say no.
The unsafe geography of music work
Unsafe work environments appear throughout the report with a level of detail the industry should find deeply uncomfortable. Young creatives describe lone working, soundproofed studios, late-night travel, inaccessible venues, poor health and safety, unsafe accommodation and meetings that blur the line between professional and personal.
One of the most striking sections concerns the everyday geography of music work: pubs, shisha lounges, apartments, studios, bars, backstage areas, tents, cheap hotels and informal spaces where power is rarely named but always present. These are places where young people are often told that discomfort is simply how the industry works.
The report makes clear how easily this becomes a safeguarding problem. A young person may be invited to a private studio, asked to continue a session at someone’s home, expected to travel alone after a late gig, or pressured to accept a one-on-one meeting with someone older and more powerful. In several testimonies, the young creative knew something was wrong but felt the opportunity might disappear if they left.
That sentence should haunt the industry: the opportunity might disappear if they left.
When access becomes a trap
This is how power works in music. Not always through open threats. Often through implication. Through access. Through the sense that this person knows people, this studio matters, this tour could change everything, this manager might be the one, this label meeting could open a door.
When the door is controlled by someone who does not respect boundaries, the dream becomes a trap.
The report also shows how discrimination and harassment are woven into the same conditions. Young creatives describe sexism, sexual harassment, ableism, tokenism, racism, misgendering and religious discrimination. They also describe how marginalised people are often used by organisations for image, diversity language or funding credibility, without being paid or protected properly.
Representation is not protection
That contradiction is everywhere in music. The industry wants young, diverse, queer, disabled, working-class and global-majority creatives when they make a programme look progressive. It wants their faces in the campaign, their language in the mission statement, their scene credibility on the line-up.
But when those same people need access, pay, safety, toilets, travel, contracts or protection from harassment, the support suddenly becomes complicated.
In other words, the industry loves representation when it is useful. It is much slower to build the conditions that allow represented people to stay.
No contracts, but plenty of NDAs
The report is also especially strong on NDAs and legal intimidation. Young creatives describe situations where contracts were absent, vague or unfair, while non-disclosure agreements appeared quickly when someone wanted to control what could be said.
In some cases, NDAs or threats of legal action were used around pay disputes, harassment, management relationships or exploitative working conditions.
That imbalance tells us a lot. Some parts of the industry seem unable to produce a basic contract before work begins, but strangely capable of producing paperwork when someone might speak publicly about harm.
Silence is still treated as professionalism
Barriers to reporting then complete the loop. The report notes that incidents in music remain heavily underreported, particularly for freelancers and young people who are on the wrong side of power imbalances. Young creatives describe missing reporting mechanisms, venues failing to act, organisations protecting themselves, and people being warned not to speak because “what happens in house, stays in house”.
The most alarming number may therefore not be 72%. It may be the 90% who felt unable to speak up.
An unsafe industry does not survive only because harmful people exist. It survives because silence is made to feel professional. It survives because young people learn that naming a problem might cost them more than enduring it. It survives because freelancers have no HR department, artists fear losing bookings, assistants fear losing references, and people at the start of their careers are told to grow a thicker skin instead of being given basic protection.
“Just the way it is” is not an answer
The report’s title, Just The Way It Is?, works because it captures the quiet violence of resignation. The idea that this is simply how music works. That everyone has a bad story. That unpaid labour, harassment, unsafe travel, bad contracts, stolen rights and late payments are not failures of the system, but initiation rituals.
They are not.
Youth Music’s recommendations are not radical. They are basic: fair and transparent pay, proper contracts, inclusive and accessible workplaces, risk assessments, clear codes of conduct, safer recruitment, working in professional spaces, reporting mechanisms that actually work, and stronger protections for freelancers and young adults.
The fact that these demands still need to be made says a lot.
Vibes are not a safeguarding policy
Music does not lack awareness campaigns. It lacks structures that make the right thing easier to do and the wrong thing harder to hide. It lacks consequences. It lacks boring, necessary systems. It lacks enough people willing to say that vibes are not a safeguarding policy.
This also matters culturally. When young people leave music because the conditions are too unsafe or unfair, the whole ecosystem loses. The people pushed out first are often those with the least financial cushion, the least industry protection and the most to risk by speaking up. Scenes become narrower. Safer people leave. The industry then pretends to be confused about why the same inequalities keep reproducing themselves.
Young creatives should not have to survive music first
Young creatives should not have to become experts in self-protection before they become artists, producers, engineers, journalists, managers, promoters or crew.
They should not have to carry alarms, hide parts of themselves, chase payments for months, negotiate access alone or learn through trauma which rooms are dangerous.
The burden cannot stay on the youngest and least protected people in the room.
If 72% of young people have felt unsafe working in music, the issue is not sensitivity. It is not a generational misunderstanding. It is an industry that has been allowed to confuse access with care, silence with professionalism, and exploitation with opportunity.
Young people should not have to survive music before they get to make it.