MUSIC
ownership, of their masters. Meanwhile, a new generation of consumers and industry executives is scrutinizing the diversity in a business that remains significantly dominated at the senior executive level by white men. While the major label groups have responded to the movement for racial justice with pledges of money and resources, insiders question whether that is lip service in a period of great transition for the nature of artist-label contractual relationships.
“In 2020, Black people do not need the music industry; the music industry needs Black people,” says Isaac Hayes III, son of the late soul star, who was the first Black artist to win the original song Oscar (for 19 71’s “Theme From ‘Shaft’ ”).
The younger Hayes has had to navigate such tricky terrain managing his father’s estate. The bankruptcies of Stax and his dad’s Hot Buttered Soul label soured the family’s perception of the business. His father’s music made up 70% of Stax’s profits, money that was used to release a slew of less successful records that would eventually cause the Memphis company to go under, and its masters to wind up at Atlantic Records. “‘Y’all really screwed me,’ ” Hayes III says of his father’s view of what happened.
That experience is not uncommon among veteran artists.
“It takes a while for you to even realize, ‘They own my masters, and wait a minute, I’m not getting paid as much as somebody else,’ ” says Valerie Simpson, who, along with her late husband, Nick Ashford — the two went by Ashford & Simpson — was signed to a songwriting and production deal with Motown Records in the ’60s; they switched to Warner Bros. and later Capitol Records as performers in the ’70s and ’80s. Lack of ownership of their songs followed them.
Pharrell Williams recalls hearing the loaded words “master” and “slave” paired in such a manner as a teen, when learning the ropes of the music business from R&B star Teddy Riley in Virginia Beach. As his career took off, Williams spotted the terms woven into many of his contracts.
“The ownership of my intellectual property wasn’t mine, and I didn’t even realize the deal I was in or what it really meant,” he recalls of his pre-Sony agreements — whose unfavorable terms found Williams under-compensated despite a string of hit singles both on his own and with such stars as Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani.
Williams’ conversation with Stringer wouldn’t be the last time he confronted record company brass about the topic. Six months later, he participated in a “conversation” at Google Camp in Sicily in front of an invite-only crowd that in
Isaac Hayes III, son of late soul singer Isaac Hayes
In 2020, Black people do not need the music industry; the music industry needs Black people.
cluded Universal Music Group chairman Lucian Grainge, filmmaker George Lucas, producer Brian Grazer, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, Twitter chief Jack Dorsey and actor Charlize Theron. When he said the word “slave,” a gasp was heard in the room, according to an attendee. It was not unlike the reaction at a Sony executive leadership meeting held in March 2018 in New York City, where Williams spoke before some 20 label presidents, including the heads of Epic, RCA and Columbia.
“I understood once Pharrell mentioned the sensitivity of it, as did the rest of the group, and the changes were made immediately,” says Sylvia Rhone, chairwoman and CEO of Epic, home to Travis Scott and Camila Cabello. Sony general counsel and exec VP Julie Swidler affirms that action was taken promptly. “We never realized [the words] could be offensive, but if it bothers even one person, we’re taking it out,” she says of the directive from above concerning contracts going forward. “We put an action plan into effect very quickly.” And they’re also looking at past deals: “We have hundreds of thousands of contracts, some going back 100 years.”
Therein lies the crux of the language problem: its roots. “The history of enslavement has always haunted the music industry and always structured it,” says Josh Kun, chair in cross-cultural communication at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “If you go back to the first Black artist to ever make a commercial musical recording in [the 1890s] — George W. Johnson, was a former slave who began his life not owning his own body, being owned by a master, then [went on] to record a master that he did not own. This also gets at the long-standing belief and conviction of so many Black artists, throughout the 20th century and into this one, that they have been treated like slaves by the masters who they signed contracts with. That’s been true since the early 1900s, and it is certainly true now.”
Sony so far is the only one of the three majors to alter its contracts. Such wording presumably remains filed away at UMG (Kendrick
Lamar, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish) and Warner Music Group (Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Cardi B). (Variety reached out to both label groups for comment.)
As recently as the ninth edition of Donald Passman’s industry bible “All You Need to Know About the Music Business,” released in 2015, the veteran attorney wrote that a master is the “controlling entity from which all copies are made — the machines making the copies are slaves. master/slave; get it?” The passage was removed from the current edition, released in 2019. “In updating my book, I realized this long-used industry term was inappropriate in the 21st century,” Passman tells Variety. “I felt bad that I had previously been tone deaf to the issue and wish I had thought more seriously about it earlier.”
He’s not alone. Many Black artists don’t make the connection. Passman’s longtime client Ray Parker Jr. hadn’t until interviewed for this story. “It was said so much that I didn’t notice,” marvels Parker, who wrote and performed the 1984 No. 1 hit “Ghostbusters.” “It’s an underlying thing. It’s not only the racism above the ground. I never really thought about the masterand-the-slave thing, but that’s exactly what it’s called. It’s really dating you back a couple hundred years.”
While the verbiage of machines “slaving” for a “master” is common — and also debated — in tech and other fields, Williams connects the normalization of such language to the very founding of America: “Men who felt superior and that they were the civilizers of the planet, by way of colonizing, they set up every business and organization in this way. They built this country like a corporation.”
In essence: the definition of capitalism. Says USC’s Kun, who has titled his research project on musical reparations “The Big Payback”: “All industries under contemporary capitalism