Valuable labor versus corporate extraction

Technology is changing things, but not always the corporations themselves

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Ari here—welcome back to longtime readers, and welcome aboard to those of you who just joined the list!

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“Fighting the big companies”

I was 14 years old when I first saw George Clinton perform with Parliament Funkadelic. They played at a huge outdoor sports stadium in Seattle, Memorial Stadium, an anodyne venue that was totally transformed by the music, energy and crowd that gathers for P-Funk. I remember the energy, the carefree enthusiasm of a diverse, all-ages crowd, and I remember one of the guitarists in the band performed the entire show in some kind of diaper costume. It was weird, but good-weird. And it expanded my sense of what a concert could even be.

George Clinton, circa 1976. c/o Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Meeting George Clinton is not some automatic rite of passage in a newsroom (maybe it should be?) so I was so excited the first time I got to meet him when he came on The Beat. We like to mix up our panel conversations, so he was paired with Carole King, the legendary singer, and Harry Smith, a news veteran who has interviewed Presidents and traveled the world. 

Now, Clinton’s songs have not only played hundreds of millions of times around the world, but he is one of the most sampled artists of his era, with songs that formed the backbone of 1990s hip hop (the subgenre of “G-Funk,” or Gangster-Funk, is largely an homage to P-Funk and a few other funk bands). But Clinton doesn’t get virtually any revenue for that use of his work, his creations and onetime intellectual property. He mentioned that on the show, and Smith followed up like any reporter would:

SMITH: “Do you ever get a dime of that?”

CLINTON: “Myself? No. Lots of people do -- but you have to figure a way, because you don't have enough money to fight the big companies.”

It’s an ongoing, open scandal in the music business that artists get anything from a small slice to none of the proceeds from their own work. This cuts across genres. 

It’s something Prince spoke out about throughout his career, as he grew in success and sophistication, only to find he was legally locked into terrible, exploitative terms. The deals are so bad, they don’t just deny artists’ credit and profit from past work, but can often lock them into future obligations... which can span the prime years of their career. 

Here’s how Prince memorably encapsulated record labels:

“If they're going to be indeed a ‘delivery service’ then that's fine -- but even FedEx doesn't say that they own the thing that they ship.”

The same rules operate today. So even as digital streaming has changed that “delivery” of music, supplanting physical copies like CDs and vinyl, all the top music companies still run the same approach to artists. New delivery system, same results.

Past Justice and Future Reform

So that’s the lay of the land. It may seem like it impacts artists more than fans, but there are some musicians who are trying to change that equation. Prince spent his whole life as a musician trying to fight that system. More recently, Taylor Swift and Jay-Z have both challenged major labels and corporations, re-recording songs so they own the IP or launching their own streaming services to compete with Spotify and Apple Music. 

Recently, I talked with Russ, a very successful singer and rapper who made his name without signing with a record label (and giving his intellectual property to them). 

He’s a fascinating case, because he spent years beating his head against the wall, releasing music online, mostly for free, without any real monetary success. As he told me, he had released 11 mixtapes by June of 2015, and made $600 total. This is the sort of experience that would make someone jump at the first offer of any major money that they get, nevermind the IP. But here’s what Russ said: 

“I had such delusional confidence. I was, like, this is going to work, y'all are gonna wake up, just watch. There was not a doubt, not even a sliver of doubt in my mind that it was gonna work.” 

Even in the face of failure, he had confidence not only that his music would sell, but also that he didn’t need to go through the traditional system of shopping his stuff around to labels in order to get the backing of their marketing and resources. He believed in the possibility of organic growth. 

Now, of course this doesn’t work for every SoundCloud rapper out there. Not everyone, even among those with “delusional confidence,” makes songs that chart. But his organic success might be a stepping stone in breaking down the fortress that major labels (and now tech companies) have constructed over decades. I asked him whether being independent allowed him to become a better artist. He responded that “my success is a direct threat on record labels.” He might just be right. 

What do you think of how the music industry is set up? Does it remind you of other industries in this country? And do you think, outside of special cases like Russ, success can be found working outside the system? Or do you have to work within it?