Review: Getting Signed: Record Contracts, Musicians, and Power in Society, by David Arditi

Abstract

Book Review| June 01 2023 Review: Getting Signed: Record Contracts, Musicians, and Power in Society, by David Arditi David Arditi. Getting Signed: Record Contracts, Musicians, and Power in Society. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, 2020. 256 pages. Jabari Evans Jabari Evans University of South Carolina Jabari Evans is an assistant professor of race and media at the University of South Carolina in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication (SJMC) and visiting professor at the Institute for Rebooting Social Media within the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University's Law School. His research focuses on the digital subcultures that urban youth and young adults of color develop and inhabit to understand their social environments and identity development and to pursue their professional aspirations in creative and cultural industries. As a recording artist and musician, he has enjoyed a 20-year career in hip-hop, collaborated with multiple Grammy-award winning artists, and served on the board of governors for the Chicago chapter of The Recording Academy. Email: JE27@mailbox.sc.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Email: JE27@mailbox.sc.edu Journal of Popular Music Studies (2023) 35 (2): 116–118. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.116 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jabari Evans; Review: Getting Signed: Record Contracts, Musicians, and Power in Society, by David Arditi. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2023; 35 (2): 116–118. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.116 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search In Getting Signed: Record Contracts, Musicians and Power in Society, sociologist David Arditi disproves many misconceptions about signing recording contracts as a marker of success by demystifying various myths about record deals’ social, economic, and legal implications. He accomplishes this by weaving the voices and biographies of artists he interviewed or observed with his own insider perspective as a working musician. Arditi methodically historicizes the record deal as an ideological construct before emphasizing that music production, marketing and distribution’s digital turn only served to deepen the precarity of “being signed” within the recording industry. According to him, “Record contracts are ideology because they represent success at the same time that they limit the vast majority of signees’ capacity to earn a living. Record contracts are ideology in action; they do not convince people of an ordered world, but rather they create the order—they make the social relations of production... You do not currently have access to this content.