Their Masters' Voice

About the Book

The recording industry’s notorious treatment of artists reveals an ever-present through line in music business history. Matt Stahl explores the origins and outcomes of the legal edifice behind record contracts, compensation frameworks, and other industry structures that overwhelmingly favored big business.

The 1852 court case involving opera singer Johanna Wagner and impresario Benjamin Lumley became the foundation for a contract system that made recording artists’ employment status a question for the courts, and not a fixed fact. Stahl shows how music entrepreneurs adapted legal tools, enforced singers’ contracts, and even became artists’ creditors, controlling their labor while denying them protections afforded employees. The situation parallels the system of sharecropping imposed on Black Americans before and during the Jim Crow era, as Stahl explains via accounts of twentieth-century Black singers’ struggles for royalties and pensions. Stahl details how non-neutral laws and courtroom decisions entwined the class, gender, and race relations of their times, shaping the modern recording business.

Surprising and revelatory, Their Masters’ Voice illuminates hidden connections between record contracts, industry power, and law.