Haim fired its agent after finding out men got paid 10 times more for the same gig
It’s bad enough knowing that your male colleagues are probably making more money than you for doing the exact same work. But if you’re a successful pop-rock band, and you’ve got an agent whose entire job is getting you gigs and negotiating your pay for them, and you’re still making a fraction of what the guys are getting? That’s baffling.
That’s the scenario laid out by sibling trio Haim in a new interview with Grazia magazine (via the BBC), in which Este, Danielle and Alana Haim reveal that they fired their agent after finding out that they were paid one-tenth of what male artists were earning at an unnamed music festival. “We had been told that our fee was very low because you played at the festival in the hope you’d get played on the radio,” Danielle said. “We didn’t think twice about it, but we later found out that [a male artist] was getting paid 10 times more than us. And because of that we fired our agent.” Alana adds, “It’s scary out there and [messed] up not even to be paid half the same amount. But to be paid a tenth of that amount of money? It was insane.”
Considering agents generally get paid a percentage of what they secure for their clients, meaning this unnamed agent was so sexist and/or bad at their job that they were screwing themselves over, too, we don’t blame them.