The dark side of music business and reggae’s sufferation
This month, the #TheShowMustBePaused and #BlackOutTuesday initiatives, supported by the UK music industry, passed without any of the UK companies and organisations marking the third anniversary.
They had been launched following the Afriphobic murder of George Floyd in 2020, which saw expressions of solidarity, allyship and announcements of racial justice programmes to challenge racism, especially Afriphobia.
As convenor of the RE:IMI (Race Equality: In Music Industry) race-facing EDI advocacy strand of BBM/BMC ( BritishBlackMusic.com/Black Music Congress), I posted on Youtube a video titled George Floyd +3 Survey Remembering UK The Show Must Be Paused Adele Don’t You Remember Lick.
The video contained a collage of the pledges and right-on statements, to remind the music industry of what they said they’d do to address systemic racism and give African creatives and industryites a break.
It also supports the George Floyd +3 Survey, which aims to collate data of racial justice programmes inspired by the passing of Floyd across councils, museums, libraries, universities, and the music and publishing industries.
So what did George Floyd’s death bring to the music industry table?
Sony Music announced it was cancelling unrecouped balances of certain legacy acts who had not recouped their advances since 2000, and also will start paying them recording royalties from the beginning of 2021. This is good news particularly for the many Jamaican dancehall acts the company signed in the 1990s.
No doubt the many British and Jamaican reggae acts, which Island Records UK signed back in the day, would appreciate parent company Universal Music announcing a similar deal. Indeed the company is currently being sued in the US courts by a group of legacy acts, some of whom claim not to have received any royalties.
One of the reasons for such claims stem from the unique old school business practice in Jamaica, where invariably the producer paid one-off fees with no royalties for the acts, and in many cases also claimed the songwriting and music publishing rights.
BMG, which owns rights to many black music catalogues, including that of Trojan Records, was one of the first to respond to demands for change within a week of #BlackOutTuesday in 2020.
BMG CEO Hartwig Masuch launched a review of its historic record catalogues to investigate evidence of racial disadvantage. The launch was accompanied by a forthright statement by Masuch, who said: “Mindful of the music industry’s record of shameful treatment of black artists, we have begun a review of all historic record contracts. While BMG only began operations in 2008, we have acquired many older catalogues. If there are any inequities or anomalies, we will create a plan to address them.”
The early results showed that of the 33 labels acquired by BMG, there were 3,163 artistes of whom 1,010 (32 per cent) were African. Four of the 15 labels with African and non-African artistes showed “statistically significant differences between the royalties paid to black and non-black artists”, ranging from 1.1-3.4 per percentage points.
ROYALTY PAYMENTS
It is within this context that London-born Errol Michael Henry, a 30-year plus UK music industry veteran of Jamaican parentage, has been either renegotiating contracts or getting long-unpaid royalties for his predominantly British and Jamaican clients.
While Henry has been successful in reaching agreements with BMG for royalty payments for the likes of Dave Barker, who, as part of Dave & Ansel Collins, reached the top of the UK charts in 1971 with Double Barrel, he also seeks redress in the courts where necessary.
He’s behind a current case in the Supreme Court in New York against Universal Music, which, among other things, is seeking royalty payments for a veteran Jamaican artiste, who did not receive the royalties due to him for over 45 years ago.
Early this year, at the JaRIA Awards ceremony in Jamaica, where Horace Andy received the Icon Award, he told the audience that he had not received royalties for 40 years from his Byron ‘Striker’ Lee produced releases now controlled by BMG.
And last year, the likes of Etana and Bounty Killer took their former record companies to court for unpaid royalties.
Apart from non-payment of royalties, some well-respected major companies can be accused of acting like pirates, as they knowingly continue to sell reggae music that does not belong to them and to receive revenue that rightfully belong to Jamaican producers, artistes and songwriters.
“It’s a distasteful combination of hubris, dishonesty and greed, which has created a climate where blatant acts of theft, fraud and breach of contract, that’s where any such contracts exist, has resulted in vulnerable people being serially deprived of their legal entitlement,” says Henry.
It’s worth noting that this dark side of the music industry practice detrimentally affects creatives of all races, although Africans, particularly Jamaicans, are disproportionately impacted by acts of racially motivated theft.
-From 2020-21 we saw music companies and organisations starting to address some of the long standing disadvantages African creatives and industryites faced. In 2023, I’m not so sure whether that process will continue.
Which begs the question: did George Floyd’s death produce a moment, or a movement for addressing racial justice for Africans in the music industry? These are some of the questions the George Floyd +3 Survey aims to evidence. Find out more at https://linktr.ee/InTheMomentPublications.