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The recording industry’s notorious treatment of artists reveals an ever-present through line in music business history. Matt Stahl explores the origins and outcomes of the legal edifice behind record contracts, compensation frameworks, and other industry structures that overwhelmingly favored big business.

The 1852 court case involving opera singer Johanna Wagner and impresario Benjamin Lumley became the foundation for a contract system that made recording artists’ employment status a question for the courts, and not a fixed fact. Stahl shows how music entrepreneurs adapted legal tools, enforced singers’ contracts, and even became artists’ creditors, controlling their labor while denying them protections afforded employees. The situation parallels the system of sharecropping imposed on Black Americans before and during the Jim Crow era, as Stahl explains via accounts of twentieth-century Black singers’ struggles for royalties and pensions. Stahl details how non-neutral laws and courtroom decisions entwined the class, gender, and race relations of their times, shaping the modern recording business.

Surprising and revelatory, Their Masters’ Voice illuminates hidden connections between record contracts, industry power, and law.

The widespread perception of singers and musicians as free individuals doing enjoyable and fulfilling work obscures the realities of their occupation. In Unfree Masters Matt Stahl examines recording artists' labor in the music industry as a form of creative work. He begins by considering the television show American Idol and the 2004 rockumentary Dig!, tracing the ways that popular music making is narrativized in contemporary America and showing how such narratives highlight musicians' negotiations of the limits of freedom and autonomy in creative cultural-industrial work. Turning to struggles between recording artists and record companies over laws that govern their working and contractual relationships, he reveals further tensions and contradictions in this form of work. Stahl argues that media narratives of music making, as well as contract and copyright disputes between musicians and music industry executives, contribute to American socioeconomic discourse and expose a foundational tension between democratic principles of individual autonomy and responsibility and the power of employers to control labor and appropriate its products. Stahl asserts that the labor issues that he discloses in music can stimulate insights about the political-economic and imaginative challenges currently facing working people of all kinds.