The disproportionately high rate of mental illness among musicians is well documented, as are pleas for enhanced services. But what’s conspicuously missing from this discourse is any concrete resource about accessing mental health or addiction-related services if you are, in fact, a professional musician. Such services would require the good-faith commitment of quite a bit of money from record labels—something that, until a few months ago, didn’t seem to exist in any formal capacity. An independent Canadian record label is changing that.

Toronto’s Royal Mountain Records—the Canadian label home of Mac DeMarco, Alvvays, U.S. Girls, and more—announced in February that they would be offering $1,500 to each individual musician on their roster for mental health and addiction-related services. (The money is a non-recoupable expense, meaning that the artists don’t pay it back.) It’s a humble sum, a fact that Royal Mountain founder Menno Versteeg is quick to admit, but perhaps as important as the material commitment is the precedent it suggests: that record labels, like other businesses, ought to be responsible for taking care of their workers.

“I don’t care if other industries pat me on the back, but I do care when artists say to me, ‘This is making my job, my career, so much easier,’” says Versteeg. He’s seated on a second-hand couch in the label’s Toronto headquarters, a two-floor apartment that used to be a makeshift Buddhist temple and now bears the scrappy decor and charming disarray of a gentle anarchist’s college house. It’s not as though Royal Mountain will be cracking the Fortune 500 anytime soon. This was the first year the six-person company could afford any kind of mental health fund, setting aside roughly $100,000 for the members of their 25 active bands.

“It comes out of our bottom line,” Versteeg says. “It’s money that would go to the owners or toward paving the driveway. It’s a lot but it’s still just a dent.” While usage of the funds is confidential, Versteeg says he’s already heard from Royal Mountain acts who plan on using it. “I’ll be invoicing, I’ve got some bills,” notes one, Brandon Williams of the post-punk band Chastity, with a chuckle.

The ideal endgame, in Versteeg’s mind, is eventually providing comprehensive health insurance for Royal Mountain artists. Few full-time musicians are able to sustain the kind of work that would provide them with health benefits, so many are simply left uninsured. Versteeg thinks that the first step in bridging this gap is reconceptualizing musicians’ roles as workers, as opposed to mere hobbyists. “This is a real job,” Versteeg stresses, “and it’s funny that we have an attitude otherwise in our own heads.”

Institutional abuses of creative labor throughout history are the rule rather than the exception, and the music industry has infamously thrived off of creatives while maintaining little, if any, responsibility for their well-being. Versteeg is intimately familiar with these poor working conditions. He’s been touring for the past 20 years, the last 12 of which have been with the Canadian indie rock band Hollerado. His experiences informed the fund’s creation. “Every clichéd touring experience, [including] struggles with addiction, we went through it,” he says, “and we could never afford any shit like therapy. It’s one thing to say, ‘I’m here and I care about you,’ but there’s something to be said about backing that up with resources besides just your time.”

If an independent record label can find money in their budget for mental health and addiction-related services, it prompts the question: Why can’t a major label, too? “Uh, capitalism,” responds Linnea Siggelkow of the Royal Mountain dream-rock group Ellis with a laugh. Siggelkow notes that other industries, like digital media, have seen a wave of worker-led unionizing in order to secure better working conditions. Yet musicians’ unions, like SAG-AFTRA and AFM, have failed to capitalize on this trend. “I have no idea why it’s such a foreign thing [in the music industry], especially for major labels,” she says. “It’s crazy that it’s taken this long for something to come up, and that it’s being looked at as so radical.”