Primitive Accumulation, the Social Common, and the Contractual Lockdown of Recording Industry ‘Talent’ at the Threshold of Digitalization

Matt Stahl, The University of Western Ontario

Presented at the International Communication Association's 61st Annual Conference, Communication @ the Center held in Boston, Massachusetts

Conference program available at https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ica/ica11/index.php?click_key=1&cmd=Multi+Search+Search+Load+Publication&publication_id=484557&PHPSESSID=e81d7bvhran9oj80ic6rhk1k06

Abstract

Contemporary transformations in labour relations and contracting norms in the digitalized entertainment industries impel analysis of change and continuity in the legal institutions that determine the political content of the employment relation. This paper lays out twenty years’ of tensions between recording artists and record companies over the content of the employment contracts that oblige the former to the latter. Since the advent of peer-to-peer file-sharing, these tensions have shifted from public arenas, and a focus on determinative laws, to private arenas and the scope of new, “360 degree” contracts. This paper draws on recent reconsiderations of “primitive accumulation” as the discovery and transcendence by capital of barriers to its expansion. It proposes that labour legislation helps protect a “social common” threatened by new norms, arguing that what appears under digitalization to be a major break in labour relations and contracting norms actually conceals consequential political-economic continuities.