Chappell Roan calls out the music industry

Chappell Roan's rise to fame wasn’t a quick one, she started releasing covers to YouTube as a teenager. At 16-year-old she uploaded an original song called ‘Die Young’, which got her signed to Atlantic Records and there, she created her stage name “Chappell Roan”, which is in honour of her grandfather, Dennis Chappell. However, in 2020 she was dropped by Atlantic Records during the covid pandemic due to creative clashes over her song Pink Pony Club.

 She was picked up by a label associated with Island Records and she released her debut album ‘The rise and fall of a Midwest Princess’ in 2023, gaining world-wide attention with it currently having over 3 billion streams! Roan has also released a new single called ‘Good luck Babe’ which reached the top 100 billboard, coming in at NO. 77. 

Most notably, when Chappell Roan won best new artist at this year’s Grammy Awards, she used her acceptance speech to call out record labels and the industry profiting millions of dollars, talking about how they need to offer health insurance and a liveable wage to artist and especially to developing artist, saying “Labels, we got you, but do you got us?”. 

In her speech she is highlighting a growing disquiet amongst smaller and emerging artists about the poor financial state of the music industry for all but the top 1% of artists and the major record labels.

This is a huge topic, so in part 2 of this blog we will investigate this further, particularly for female artists.