Nearly 20 years later, BLM and BMAC have provoked renewed industrial self-scrutiny. In December 2020, BMG Rights Management (the successor to the multinational Sony/BMG) completed a review of its recording contracts for racial discrimination. BMG found “significant” racial disparities in royalty payouts to Black and racialized artists in four of its labels.

The BMG findings were not surprising. Commentators have long noted pervasive adverse contractual terms for African American recording artists.

Systematic exploitation and appropriation of African American musicians reflects patterns of relationships established during and after slavery. Slave plantations were business enterprises that accounted for their most valuable assets — slaves — in ways that continue to shape business practice today.

Historian Caitlin Rosenthal writes that “slaveholders (and those who bought their products) built an innovative, global, profit-hungry labor regime that contributed to the emergence of the modern economy.” Slaveholders “benefited from their control over enslaved people.”

Tom Wiggins was born into slavery, but his blindness meant that wasn’t able to work. He became one of the most popular pianists and composers of his time. (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)

Slaveholders adjusted the value of enslaved people in their accounting records up and down based upon various factors, including age, reproduction, health and disobedience. Slaves experienced systematic and socially sanctioned control, violence and oppression. The control, deprivation, violence and lack of opportunities did not end with slavery.

African-American musical forms had a vibrancy and appeal that gave former slaves and their descendants slivers of opportunities within the shadows of pervasive oppression. Well into the 20th century, entertainment was among the few socially sanctioned avenues of employment for African Americans within contexts of pervasive formal and informal modes of social control.

Such social control was evident in widespread segregation, including through Jim Crow laws (the phrase “Jim Crow” appears to come from a minstrel song), the black codes and other practices that limited opportunities and facilitated forced labor, some of which continue to the present day.

As journalist Douglas A. Blackmon notes, by 1900:

“the South’s judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites… this quasi-slavery of the twentieth century was rooted in the nascent industrial slavery that had begun to flourish in the last years before the Civil War.”

The regime of dispossession and control that was an essential element of slaveholder treatment of enslaved African Americans continued into the recording era. Since the dawn of the recording industry, industry representatives have denied many Black artists compensation commensurate to that given to other artists.

From an economic perspective, former slaves, who were once owned as assets, and their descendants, have often been denied control over their creations. This lack of control has extended to the right to own varied things, including tangible property such as land, and intangible property, such as royalties from record sales.