Capitalism is not a bug in the music industry it is the feature---the constant theft of black creative genius and black work in the music industry is not solely caused by gratuitous violence but is externalized through the means of production and a white desire to continuously accumulate.

Unfair compensation and sampling In 1979, Eddie Johns, then 28 years old, released an album, More Spell on You, with a punchy disco title track produced and recorded in Paris. Daft Punk will go on to sample it 30 years later. The duo chopped the track’s horn sections into short samples and rearranged those snippets into a new hook for the track One More Time. That song became Daft Punk’s biggest hit to date and its first million-selling single.[7] The song helped the duo transition from its status as a respected club music act into one of the most popular electronic groups in the world. Pitchfork called One More Time the fifth-best song of the 2000s,[8] and Rolling Stone called Discovery one of the 500 best albums of all time, in any genre.[9] Eddie Johns told his side of the story in a 2021 interview with the LA times. Johns was neither compensated for his work, nor listed as a songwriter in the credits of One More Time. A stroke left him unable to work, forcing him into homelessness for more than a decade. The article further states that: “The rights to More Spell on You — first released in France on the label Président — were acquired by a French label and publishing company, GM Musipro, that reissues vintage French rock and pop. It’s where Daft Punk pays its royalties for permission to sample More Spell on You. The firm’s founder, Georges Mary, confirmed via phone and email that his company does receive those payments from Daft Punk but did not specify an amount.”[10] This exemplifies how the music industry operates: two French white men fail to credit a Black singer who is heavily sampled on their hit track, and pay royalties to the French label which owns the rights of the record, most likely thanks to a predatory contract signed by Johns. This story echoes the experience of many Black artists which did not receive their dues, often under the excuse that reaching out to the songwriters was difficult or impossible. Consider for instance U.K artist A Guy Called Gerald's legal battle with Rham Records: he had to launch a crowdfunding campaign to help finance a legal fight over unpaid royalties, Gerald was never paid royalties for his 1988 hit single Voodoo Ray or his 1989 album Hot Lemonade by the label.[11] Rham Record went as far as stating that they have repeatedly attempted to contact Gerald and his team to pay the royalties and neither him or his team answered them. In reality, the label was repeatedly told to stop exploiting the song. In the spring of 1993, at the age of 57, Sam Moore (of soul and R&B duo Sam & Dave) wrote to his union’s health and retirement plan to inquire about the status of his pension account. Moore learned he was entitled to a single payment of US$2,285, and a monthly payment of US$67, for up to five years. These figures, the H&R Funds told Moore, were based on his earnings since the early 1960s: around US$66,000. With the help of a pension expert, Moore and his wife (who was also his manager) estimated these decades of earnings added up to more like US$3 million. They believed his pension should have been around US$9,000 per month.[12] Unfair compensation: “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” Earlier, we discussed how Eddie Johns had to struggle with homelessness while his Daft Punk-sampled song was a million dollar hit, with royalties paid to a French production company instead of him, using the excuse that they were not able to get a hold of him. Excuses that we saw were also used for British musician A Guy Called Gerald. The use of the same excuse in those two very different contexts regarding black artists highlights the systemic nature of black dispossession in dance music. In the case of Sam Moore, it was about wrong estimates for his pension funds. Music scholars have noted that Black artists, as a class of performers, routinely found their works appropriated and exploited by publishers and managers. What if Eddie Johns was in an author’s right organization? Such organizations (for Johns, France’s SACEM)[13] task themselves with ensuring fair compensation in exchange for a yearly paid membership fee. Had Johns joined SACEM, he might have received payments and this is where the issue lies. Entertainment lawyer Kevin J. Greene states in Thieves in the Temple: “Because the creators of these works were legally unsophisticated and often illiterate, copyright formalities such as registration put them at a severe disadvantage. Grafted onto the legal requirements of copyright law were predatory music industry practices that required sharing of copyright ownership and credit.” Credit : By Staselnik - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0[14] However, this point of view does not account for the recording industry’s racial capitalism. The cultural landscape and music seem to reflect the dynamic of dispossession that black people and other minoritized people encounter in society. There is a long history of whitewashing and dispossession of black and queer music - at the intersection of both dynamics sit world famous artists, from Elvis with blues/rock'n'roll to Madonna with Vogue. The music industry is an American invention, created on the back of the US' Black population. With a system resembling the process of extractivism, natural resources are being replaced by the labor of Black musicians. Exploitation of Black artists is a deliberate product of an industry shaped almost entirely by white people. In this context, it is likely that an organization such as SACEM would have still failed Eddie Johns. In other words, unfair compensation is not a bug, it’s a feature.