4 hours Ago By Dorothy Woodend
Paid in Full: The Battle for Black Music , a three-part documentary series from CBC and BBC, has its fair share of startling moments. But one of the most chin-dropping is the fact that even in 2024, musicians are still struggling to get paid. Announcements, Events & more from Tyee and select partners A Glimpse into the Vancouver Writers Fest’s Stunning Lineup Catch more than 120 authors over 85 events, including five by guest curator and bestselling author Kim Thúy.
A New, Innovative Exhibition Opens at the Chinese Canadian Museum Six Chinese Canadian artists were commissioned to interpret history from the Chung Collection at UBC. To wit: a fraction of a cent is paid to the artist for each play of their work on the ubiquitous music streaming platform Spotify. Daniel Ek is Spotify’s CEO, and his current net worth is an estimated $5.
7 billion. He continues to profit from artists who are paid literally pennies for their work. The series suggests that not a whole lot has changed since the heyday of the American recording industry in the 1920s and ’30s, when major record labels sent scouts into the southern United States to look for talent for what were termed “race records.
” It wasn’t unusual for roving scouts to ply musicians with alcohol, hustle them into a recording booth and push them to sign contracts that effectively took away their rights. During this period, Black artists were routinely denied the two types of royalties that all artists are entitled to: mechanical royalties and performance royalties. Mechanical royalties are derived each time a recording is played, while performance royalties apply any time a song is heard in a public forum, be it a bar, a concert or on the radio.
The American South was contending with a legacy of law-making that barred Black people from learning how to read and write. Many Black musicians at the heart of these major-label transactions couldn’t read the contracts they were asked to sign. But business pressed on.
An X in lieu of a signature was all that was required for a musician to sign on to a major label, vaulting them into a career that promised to alter the trajectory of their lives, but which ultimately delivered little in the way of the financial security they and their families — often coming from systemic poverty — needed and deserved. Paid in Full demonstrates how these transactions stood in for the widespread racial injustices on which the American music industry was built, and through which it continues to thrive. The result is a documentary series that traces how little has changed and what artists can do to fight back.
A legacy of unjust dealings Paid in Full features a remarkable collection of musicians, producers and media folk from both the U.S. and the U.
K., including Nile Rodgers, Ice-T, Snoop Dogg, Stormzy, Chaka Khan and others, who lay out the nefarious history of the music industry. It begins with Bessie Smith , the Empress of the Blues.
At the height of her fame in the mid-1920s and early ’30s, when she almost single-handedly saved Columbia Records from bankruptcy, Smith was paid on a flat fee basis, meaning that she made a few hundred dollars for performances that went on to make millions. Also, because Smith never had copyright to the songs she wrote, she never received royalties for her work. When her descendants challenged this in court in the 1970s, the judge sided with the recording label over Smith’s family.
But even by the mid-1990s, not much had shifted. When the Atlanta R&B group TLC broke records with their 1994 album CrazySexyCool , selling more than 7.7 million copies in the U.
S. and some 14 million internationally, the group was in massive debt to their record label. The industry practice of fronting money to groups, and then billing them for everything from travel to video production to distribution, meant TLC was millions of dollars in debt.
At the 1995 Grammy Awards, the women in the group admitted to the world that they were, in fact, flat broke. American rapper Ice-T notes that the music industry has always been an exploitative business. The perversity of this is that the music and musicians who created American culture, whether it was Little Richard, Chuck Berry or Bessie Smith, were robbed not only of money but also of their rights.
In poverty and desperation, musicians often signed away their publishing rights, only to realize that they not only had lost control of their work, but were not even recognized as its creators. In the case of famed singer and guitarist Chuck Berry, a bizarre variety of people were credited with co-writing his work in order to rake in royalties from publishing rights for songs. People named on the credits included those the artist had never met, like the landlord of the studio where the hit song “Maybellene” was recorded.
The children of music company executives were often given writing credits on songs to generate the longest possible extraction of profit from the work of an individual musician. The ramifications of this filter down through the generations, with the children and families of Black musicians being denied access to money for decades. To begin the work of atoning for these harms would go far beyond reparations , although that would be a good start.
The loss of generational wealth to the Black community continues to play out in the present day. Abuses of trust The historic, industry-wide financial exploitation of Black artists forms only one aspect of Paid in Full ; the series also investigates how record labels abused their authority and the bonds of trust label reps formed with artists. This took the form of radio DJs taking money from a record label in exchange for playing an artist’s record, also known as the illegal payola scheme .
It also lived in the actions of notorious managers like Joe Glaser, who kept two separate pairs of books in order to steal from his long-term client, the legendary vocalist and trumpet player Louis Armstrong. RELATED STORIES A Fissure in Our Honeymoon with Chappell Roan Economic exploitation was one aspect, but emotional abuse and trauma were worse for certain artists. The tragic end of jazz icon Billie Holiday’s life revealed another disturbing dimension of how industry players exerted control over the lives of Black artists, often at the expense of their mental health and wellness.
At the height of her powers as a performer, Holiday attracted the attention of Harry Anslinger , then director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who made it his personal vendetta to destroy her. Under his direction, the bureau supposedly targeted Holiday because of her song “Strange Fruit,” which was against Black lynchings. On Jan.
22, 1949, Holiday was charged with possession of narcotics and sentenced to a year in prison. Denied a cabaret card because of her addiction issues, Holiday was not allowed to perform in clubs and had no way to earn a living. In this period, she was paid a flat fee of $30 for six of her songs.
One commentator points out she was paid $5 per song for some of the most iconic performances ever recorded. That Anslinger placed Holiday and her husband under the observation of the bureau demonstrated how America’s racist drug war contributed to the singer’s early death . A fight for dignity It wasn’t until singer Sam Cooke demanded to maintain control over his career that things began to shift.
Before his death at the age of 33, Cooke had started to build a different kind of music industry that supported the work of Black artists. His pioneering work was carried on by producer Berry Gordy Jr. and Motown Records.
Motown made some demonstrable gains for Black musicians, despite the practice of grooming artists with fashion, style and manners that would appeal not just to Black audiences but to white audiences as well, to better facilitate crossover hits. In the same period, the Memphis-founded soul, R&B and funk label Stax Records aligned itself with the Black power movement of the 1960s. As an extension of its politics, the label organized a concert in 1972 to commemorate the anniversary of the Watts riots.
The concert, called Wattstax , featured performers like Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, Albert King and Richard Pryor. A 1973 documentary about the event was nominated as Best Documentary at the Golden Globes in 1974. The concert had a wide-ranging influence on surrounding communities.
As a very young Richard Pryor noted, “All of us have something to say, but some are never heard. Over seven years ago, the people of Watts stood together and demanded to be heard.” A Fissure in Our Honeymoon with Chappell Roan read more But unlike better-known concerts like Woodstock or the Monterey Pop Festival, Wattstax is not recognized as a seminal event for its time.
There are hopeful notes in Paid in Full . The series follows Nina Simone, among the first solo performers to champion the rights of artists to control their own work. Following her death in 2003, the legal battle over her songs dragged on for decades .
Simone’s example informed Prince’s epic battle to retain the rights over his music, a fight that includes the musician painting the word “slave” on his face and giving up his own name for a period of time. Things have gotten slightly better for Black artists in the U.K.
The series points to the career of British rapper Stormzy; he and his record label have been giving back to the community with a variety of philanthropic initiatives including university scholarships. Race is at the heart of the ongoing struggle depicted in Paid in Full . But it also paints a damning portrait of a system that places profit over everything else.
As the intertitle at the end of each episode notes, no major record label agreed to be interviewed for the series. But Black artists continue to develop and pursue different forms of resistance, be it Black-owned labels, contract transparency or finding new means of fighting back, getting paid and continuing to make the most extraordinary music on the planet. ‘Paid in Full: The Battle for Black Music’ airs on CBC Gem .
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