Why the Music Industry Must Remove the Racist Term ‘Master Recording’ From Its Vocabulary — Now (Guest Column)

variety.com:

Dina LaPolt Guest ColumnistDuring the spring and summer of 2020, as protests across the country illuminated the systematic injustices Black Americans have faced and continue to face, the music industry was one of many that was called out to take accountability and action for its treatment of a group of people that is largely responsible for its many decades of profitability.

While the industry’s unfair treatment of Black Americans is longstanding and deep-seated, one seemingly simple course of action is to cease all usage of the term “master recording,” which may sound innocuous but, as detailed in Variety’s expansive August 2020 interview with Pharrell Williams, derives from the words “master and slave.” For those not aware, the terms have long been used to distinguish between a source recording (the “master”) and the subsequent copies made (the “slaves”), which has led to a pervasive use of both terms in many industry contracts.

Although these charged words have been normalized to indicate a dominant/ subservient relationship, it does not negate the weight that they carry, especially in context of the music industry.For as long as the music business has existed, Black performers often have been in a subordinate position to label executives, the majority of whom are white, even though their music is the vital resource upon which this industry is founded.

Digging deeper, when you consider that most of these performers do not have control or ownership of the underlying copyrights to their music, parallels can easily be drawn to how slaves did not have autonomy over their lives since they themselves were the property.