Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work by Matt Stahl (review)

For three centuries, says Carol Pateman, contract doctrine has proclaimed that subjection to a master – a boss, a husband – is freedom. (214) Author Matt Stahl, an assistant professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, sets out to unmask the philosophical, economic, and political relations of domination hidden behind the liberal ideological conceptions of juridical equals in contract law in his Unfree Masters. If voluntarism implies there is no coercion, and thus no politics, it is important to discredit this premise in a global popular music culture where there are enormous reserve armies of musical talent prepared to sign away their rights at the roulette wheel for stardom.

Stahl starts from the useful assumption that the relationship between “art” and “commerce” so prevalent in cultural industry theory today is less important than focusing on the employee and employer relationship. (232) Today’s recording artists under contract to a recording company, concert promoter, or management company are patently masters in some areas and servants in others – but what becomes important to labour scholars is under what conditions and why. First, he scopes how the employment contract between musician and recording label is a bargain. The relative market strength of the parties at any given contract at any given time will determine who gets to control the production process and how much they will own in copyright royalties of the final production. A musician can claim more autonomy by direct links to fans, and do pretty well what they like, so long as their products keep selling. Second, if there is a relative seller’s market, or cracks in oligopoly control, worker autonomy increases. But tied to that market power are phenomenal structural inefficiencies. Only about twenty per cent of artists actually recoup their advances or loans from their record company, and five per cent are profitable. (8) To mitigate such risk, the music industry has consolidated into tight oligopolies involving outsourcing and smaller creative companies, reframing both the employer-employee relationship and the share in the right to intellectual property. As a consequence even megastars rarely win more than twenty per cent of their royalties (with industry norms between six and nine percent of retail). (121)

Stahl analyses the “struggle” of the musical artist aristocracy, established big names like Sheryl Crow (net worth estimated at $40 million), Don Henly of the Eagles ($200 million), and Courtney Love ($150 million), who foght the Recording Industry Association of America’s (riaa) effort to exempt them from a California Labour Code provision which sunsets any employee contract after seven years. Against a backdrop of declining profits and global reorganization, record companies wanted to increase control over their worker assets by enforcing exclusivity, open transferability or assignment powers, and duration based not on number of years, but number of albums delivered. In a staggering complicity with the political system, the recording majors were able to persuade the California Assembly to “carve out” or exempt musicians from the legislative protection with no prior consultation. Immediately, artists, groups, and lawyers rallied to reverse the riaa’s seven-year carve out. They started by making the case most artists are not wealthy and contract boilerplate releases the company from any obligation to produce or promote a record, but allows it to request album after album anyway in the “pay or play” clause. Employers can set a very low – $6,000 a year (131) – minimum to prevent employees from working for anyone else. Repeal failed. The “take it or leave it” regime of the standard contract for the initial contract stayed.

Stahl shares the reader’s distaste for arguments the top one per cent of stars made over rent-seeking from a base of such unacknowledged privilege. But they render visible, even sensational, tensions that while more salient in everyday ordinary work, are harder to see. Courtney Love’s argument she was a chattel trafficked without care among a series of corporate moguls in takeovers strikes resonance. Stahl’s...