Selling Musical Labor

• In Event: On Sale: Labor, Commodities, and Value(s) in the Music Industries

Abstract

For centuries, Western music makers have struggled to manage their vulnerability to competition, new technologies, and disadvantageous regulation, with the aim of cultivating economic security and social mobility, stability in the markets for their labor (Loft 1950; Salmen 1983, Kraft 1996). Today, popular music makers resort to an increasingly bewildering range of tactics to sell their labor, to sell their music, to monetize their “brands,” to make a living (Stahl and Meier 2012, Meier 2013). At the same time, new modes of making musical livings remain strongly inflected with discourses of freedom and autonomy, and in trade publications and online and other forums much is made of the performers who have had success outside the “traditional” (record company) channels.

This paper foregrounds this twinning of freedom and vulnerability in occupations and narratives of music-making in order to help explain and historicize the increasingly byzantine forms that popular musical occupations are taking in the era of digitalization. Examining historical accounts of performing musicians’ and recording artists’ efforts toward occupational stability and recent documentaries about hitherto uncelebrated “behind the scenes” musicians and backup singers (The Wrecking Crew and Twenty Feet from Stardom), this paper outlines persistent themes and paradoxes regarding occupational popular music-makers’ relations with music corporations, more casual buyers of musical labor power, audiences, the state, and each other.

Matt Stahl is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, where he is also a member of that faculty’s Digital Labour Research Group. He is the author of Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work (Duke University Press, 2013). His research on creative cultural labor and its representation in mass media has appeared in Popular Music, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, Television and New Media, the Journal for Cultural Research as well as in other journals and edited volumes.

Author

• Matt Stahl, U of Western Ontario