FIMS Publications
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2021
Journal
Oxford Handbook of Music Law and Policy
First Page
1
Last Page
21
Abstract
This chapter focuses on contractual royalties in the U.S. recording industry. Developing Arewa’s (2019) research on entertainment industry contract accounting and Stahl’s (2015) research on record industry royalty reform, we aim to shed light on contractual accounting practices in the record industry and the structural asymmetries of power that characterize them. Central to our analysis is the crucial but until now unstudied role played by the Health and Retirement Funds (“AFTRA H&R Funds” or “H&R Funds”) of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (“AFTRA”) in the economic lives of U.S. recording singers. The activities of this benefits system include monitoring and auditing of singers’ compensation and royalty accounts. Archival and other sorts of evidence documenting these activities provide a new and unique window into otherwise obscure accounting and business practices. In part I, we discuss the life and death of Mary Wells, a highly visible and successful recording artist in the early years of Motown. We discuss how the Mary Wells case exemplifies key aspects of the relationships among record companies, unions, and performing artists. In part II, we discuss contractual accounting in light of the historical development of the cultural industries. In part III, we outline AFTRA’s relationship with its recording singer members, how singers’ recording contracts articulated individual and collective bargaining, and how singers’ healthcare and pension accounts expressed the asymmetries of record company royalty accounting. In part IV, we discuss the standard form and terms of recording contracts of the 1950s and 1960s and some of the manipulative accounting practices brought to light in the 1980s by “royalty reform” activists that were (and may still be) central to business practice. In part V, we briefly examine the Moore case, a major 1993-2002 lawsuit by aging singers against the H&R Funds, drawing on archival evidence as well as contemporaneous trade journal coverage. We conclude by returning to issues related to contractual accounting in the cultural industries. This chapter makes use of unique sources and types of data that have not been utilized in relevant scholarly literature and provides the first comprehensive examination of singers as union members.
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Notes
This is a version of a chapter forthcoming in Oxford Handbook of Music Law and Policy.