Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Despite their incalculable musical contributions and the continuing profitability of their hit recordings, R&B singers of the 1960s often have reached and passed retirement age in conditions of profound economic insecurity. This tragic irony is well known, but the long-standing institutional practices that have essentially ensured this typical outcome have remained obscure. At the center of the problem is individual royalty income associated with the sale and licensing of recordings. Record companies’ royalty accounting processes are notoriously complex and secret, and companies have strong incentives to overreport expenses and underreport earnings in their maintenance of individual artist royalty accounts. Hitherto unstudied documents from the archive of the National Office of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) shed light on the accounting practices of the major and indie record companies to whom artists like Mary Wells, Ruth Brown, and Sam Moore were signed. After 1959, singers recording for signatory companies were included in the employer-sponsored AFTRA Health and Retirement Funds. As a fiduciary, the Funds were obligated to monitor and enforce employer contributions based on singers’ annual earnings, including contractual royalty payments. Newly discovered archival evidence helps explain how the Funds’ lax enforcement led to healthcare ineligibility and chronically underfunded pensions for many R&B performers. The interaction of companies’ nefarious contractual royalty accounting practices and the AFTRA Funds’ at-best inconsistent monitoring and enforcement of companies’ obligations hindered singers’ prospects for financial stability and comfortable retirement after long careers and the contribution of enduring recordings to contemporary culture.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.080 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.004 |
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".