Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction: Popular Music and (Creative) Labor  1

Part I: Representation  31

1. American Idol and Narratives of Meritocracy  36

2. Rockumentary and the New Model Worker  64

Part II: Regulation  101

3. Carving Out Recording Artists from California's Seven-Year Rule  105

4. Freedom, Unfreedom, and the Rhetoric of the Recording Contract  143

5. Recordings Artists, Work for Hire, Employment, and Appropriation  182

Conclusion: "I'm Free!"  226

Notes  235

Bibliography  269

Index  283

Winner, 2013 International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) First Book Award

“Here is a book that does several things at once. It explains the current status of recording artists, both as subordinated employees and as free entrepreneurs who license rights to intellectual property, namely their music compositions and recordings. It also shows how, from the standpoint of labour politics, these cultural workers are not so different from other workers in a neoliberal political economy: competing individually while dreaming of autonomy, and contractually tied to a record company that snaps up their creative output for exploitation and keeps them indebted while offering little security.”—Hillegonda Rietveld, Times Higher Education Supplement

“What Stahl’s fascinating study shows then, in sum, is that the creative labour of recording artists is like regular work in being conditioned by the inequality of the employment relation and by the spurious freedom of contract.”—Reviews in Cultural Theory

Winner, 2013 International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) First Book Award

“Here is a book that does several things at once. It explains the current status of recording artists, both as subordinated employees and as free entrepreneurs who license rights to intellectual property, namely their music compositions and recordings. It also shows how, from the standpoint of labour politics, these cultural workers are not so different from other workers in a neoliberal political economy: competing individually while dreaming of autonomy, and contractually tied to a record company that snaps up their creative output for exploitation and keeps them indebted while offering little security.”—Hillegonda Rietveld, Times Higher Education Supplement

“What Stahl’s fascinating study shows then, in sum, is that the creative labour of recording artists is like regular work in being conditioned by the inequality of the employment relation and by the spurious freedom of contract.”—Reviews in Cultural Theory

"What makes Unfree Masters so significant is the fact that public struggles between musicians and the recording industry play out in less visible ways across all fields of employment. This is not simply a work of popular music studies. It is a major critique of the dominant relations between labor and capital in a postindustrial economy."—Barry Shank, coeditor of The Popular Music Studies Reader

"Unfree Masters is an informative, intellectually engaging book. What really impressed me is how much I learned about copyright law, recording contracts, and music industry labor practices—subjects I thought I already knew a great deal about."—Kembrew McLeod, coauthor of Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling

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