Record Contracts: Recording Artists, Work, and Exploitation

Record contracts are a tool within the broader music industry, which establish the social relations of production in the recording industry. Music industry studies textbooks often highlight the details industry workers and musicians can expect to see in a contract. However, these texts remain silent on the underlying power relations embedded in these contracts. While celebrity artists from Prince to Taylor Swift have laid out the problems of record contracts, their power continues unabated. The purpose of this chapter is to establish an alternative view of record contracts that demonstrate their position as a tool to exploit musicians. This chapter begins by exploring copyright to demonstrate the role of intellectual property in the commodification of culture. Second, I explain why recording artists are in fact workers who are exploited by record labels. Third, I discuss how advances and recoupment work to exploit recording artists. Then, I present the ideology of getting signed as the major social construction that convinces musicians to sign record contracts. In the conclusion, I show that as time progresses, things in the recording industry get worse as major labels adopt 360 record deals.