Jazz composer Maria Schneider: ‘David Bowie cracked me – maybe not in a good way’
Maria Schneider is one of the world’s most distinguished composers for jazz orchestra, a key collaborator for David Bowie and a seven-time Grammy winner – but it’s likely that you won’t have heard her work, and never will. This is entirely by design.
Back in the early 2000s, it was illegal filesharing that angered Schneider. These days, the 63-year-old is confronting streaming platforms. “It’s a threat to democracy, to ideas, to creativity,” she says of business models driven by data exchange.
Having testified to the US Congress in 2014 about the “endless whack-amole game” of removing her music from filesharing sites, Schneider has pursued lawsuits, including a threeyear battle to get YouTube to let small copyright holders access YouTube’s content ID system to spot videos that infringe copyright (that suit was dismissed in June 2023 just before it went to trial).
So it’s no surprise that the Maria Schneider Orchestra’s 30th birthday retrospective, Decades, like all her music, isn’t available to stream. It’s not even in record shops. The triple LP is available exclusively through the crowdfunding platform ArtistShare, the basket into which she put all her eggs more than two decades ago.
The composer, conductor and pianist began her advocacy as a reaction to the beginnings of a “free buffet” of musical content offered by sites such as Napster and Limewire. “A lot of people early on were like: ‘All musicians should give their music away for free,’” she says. “Excuse me? If you only knew the financial investment, the time, the heartache, the everything that goes into making music.”
Schneider has been making these points for two decades, but her anger is undimmed. Speaking on video from her home in New York, in front of an imposing bookshelf featuring some of her Grammys, she speaks in tumbling sentences, her voice breaking on occasion as an argument reaches its peak.
In a retaliation against filesharing, the record producer Brian Camelio began ArtistShare in 2000, with Schneider as its first artist. As well as better cuts for artists and more transparency about who was consuming which music, fans pre-ordering music in advance would gain insights into the musicians’ creative process.
For Schneider, this meant composition, an act that is solitary and at times torturous. “When you don’t have the ideas, there’s nothing worse,” she says. “It feels like the end of the Earth.” One night, she received a call from her father, who had been following her updates and was concerned. “Who wants to buy from someone who says they feel like they don’t know how to write?” he asked.
But she cleared the hurdles and in 2005, Concert in the Garden became the first crowdfunded album, and first internet-only release, to win a Grammy. ArtistShare never quite caught on, though, and will seem outmoded to many. “Now we’re in a situation where you’re invisible as a musician unless you give it away for free,” Schneider says. Today, she is one of a tiny cohort of musicians (including Joanna Newsom) still staying off streaming sites, having traded wider visibility for a shot at making a fair living solely through her art.
She says that everyone else is in the service of companies “who knew that music and movies were the things that glued people to the screen. So they used us as bait for gathering data” – which they then used to target us with advertising. Spotify, a particular target of her ire, is “not a music publishing company, but a big data company”. She