Tactical destabilization for economic justice: the first phase of the 1984–2004 rhythm & blues royalty reform movement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines an early (1980s) phase in a two-decade effort towards ‘royalty reform’ in the US recording industry, whereby ageing African American rhythm & blues performers sought to redress systematic underpayment of record royalties. The record companies to which these performers had signed in the 1940s and 1950s had contractually obligated themselves to provide biannual statements of royalty accounts, and to pay artists record royalties, once initial costs had been recouped. Yet this is rarely how things turned out, and many performers found themselves broke and vulnerable as they reached retirement age, even though many of their records had remained in print and selling for decades. Drawing conceptually on critical race theory and social science scholarship, and empirically on primary source and archival documents, the article outlines the 1950s recording industry's ‘racialized political economy’ and offers an account of singer Ruth Brown and attorney Howell Begle's innovative and successful effort to narrate a counter-history of fraudulent accounting practices and casual racism that helped pressure companies like Warner Communications, MCA and Capitol/EMI into forgiving old production debts, renegotiating 40-year-old contracts, and paying millions of dollars in restitution through the formation and funding of the Rhythm & Blues Foundation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".