As we pause this month to celebrate the United States’ 250th birthday on July 4, 2026, and Canada’s 159th birthday on July 1, 2026, it is important to reflect on the fact that music came first. Before Europeans arrived on our continent, the music of Native Americans was heard on these lands. Each wave of settlers brought their own music and traditions as did enslaved African Americans.

Paid performances slowly evolved. The first known ticketed music event in colonial America happened in Boston four decades before the founding of our nation. In Canada, the earliest known ticketed concert dates back to a singer in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1783.

By 1776, there were plenty of musicians struggling to make a living from their talents. Many of these early musicians relied on funding from churches, military service, teaching, or sheet music publishing.

The New York Philharmonic (then, Philharmonic Society) became the first professional symphony orchestra in North America in 1842. Following the Civil War, during the 1870s and 1880s, many symphony orchestras were established, especially in northern US cities. The first professional symphony orchestras in Canada began a little later, in Toronto and Montreal, in the early 1900s.

In the late 19th century, popular entertainment also grew. Vaudeville shows and Tin Pan Alley popularized songwriting and piano playing. Canada had its own thriving vaudeville circuits.

As the number of workers earning a living through performing music grew, they came together in solidarity to strive for better wages and working conditions.

Among the first musician unions were the National League of Musicians, founded in the US in 1886; Toronto Orchestra Association (1887); Association des corps de musique de la province de Québec (1887); and the Musicians’ Protective Union of Montreal (1898).

The AFM was founded in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1896, creating an egalitarian organization, welcoming all musicians. Its first standing resolution was “that any musician who receives pay for his musical services, shall be considered a professional musician.”

It was a natural progression for the AFM to include musicians to the north. Within its first year, the Federation reached out to unions in Montreal and Toronto inviting them to join. The AFM demonstrated its commitment to international representation in 1900 by officially changing its name to the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada.

“At last, the musicians of America and Canada have an organization which bids well in the future to comprise in its fold all musicians of this continent,” declared AFM President Joseph Weber at the 1902 AFM Convention.

The musicians of the United States and Canada recognized that their challenges—fair pay, displacement by technology, and the exploitation of talent—were universal. Joining together was a radical act of solidarity at a time when other unions struggled with nationalist tensions.

130 years later, we gathered for our 103rd AFM Convention in Ottawa, Ontario, and celebrated that history under the theme “Two Countries, One Union.” We reflected on the impact of the history of advocacy that unites musicians on both sides of the border.

Together, we are a powerhouse of advocacy for professional musicians throughout North America.

One of the AFM’s primary missions has always been to not just ensure musicians are paid for the work they perform, but that their creations are protected and not exploited by others. As technologies evolve, the AFM has had to adopt new priorities into its agreements and lobby for government protections.

This was as true 100 years ago as it is today with the latest challenge of artificial intelligence.

The advent of recording and radio forever changed the landscape of musician employment. During the 1920s, the AFM decried the use of canned music and forbid orchestra leaders from “advertising” their orchestras free of charge on the radio. About 22,000 theater musicians lost their jobs when “talkies” entered the scene in 1927.

At the time, Weber admitted there was no value in fighting it. “Nothing will destroy the usefulness of an organization surer than to set its face against progress, no matter how unfavorable we may at present [see the] same to our interests,” he said.

The AFM achieved higher scales for recording work than for live work, negotiating the first industry-wide agreements in the labor movement. However, fewer than 200 new recording jobs were created.

Legendary labor leader James Petrillo took the helm of the AFM in 1940 and took a stronger stance, calling two strikes against the record companies in 1942 and 1947. In 1944 he created a system where the industry contributed royalties from record sales into a fund to employ musicians for admission-free, live performances. That fund, now the Music Performance Trust Fund (MPTF), was the largest employer of live musicians in the world by 1947.

In the 1960s the AFM organized its political lobbying efforts, creating the TEMPO political action committee.

Throughout the 1990s, technological advances continued to reduce the cost of music production and distribution. Once a tightly controlled industry, monopolized by a few large companies, music production became affordable to ordinary musicians.

In this century, regulating streaming, and now artificial intelligence, have been technological priorities for the Federation. Leadership in both Canada and the US have been at the forefront of the digital revolution working to secure agreements to protect musicians in the age of streaming and artificial intelligence. These challenges will continue to require the combined leverage of both nations to protect working musicians.

As we celebrate 130 years of shared struggle and success as a union, and our nations’ birthdays, we honor the Canadian and US pioneers who saw a border not as a barrier, but as a bridge.

When we stand together, our unity creates a resonance that is not merely unbreakable, but a force to be reckoned with.