Matt Stahl

Matt Stahl, associate professor of media and information studies, University of Western Ontario. Matt’s book Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work (Duke, 2013) won the IASPM book prize of that year. He is now researching “royalty reform”—a series of efforts by R&B artists of the 1950s and 60s and their supporters to win unpaid compensation and AFTRA/SAG-AFTRA pension and healthcare coverage, the genealogy of the recording contract through 19th century (and earlier) litigation and legislation, and the interacting materialities of law and music examined by way of the value theory of labor.