David Arditi, University of Texas at Arlington

When members of a reality TV show’s cast sign a contract to participate in a show, they typically do so more for the exposure than the pay – and in many cases they do not earn a dime.

Employers get away with what may appear to be a violation of basic labor laws because those contestants are classified as independent contractors, not employees. In the eyes of the law, they do not have the same protections most workers get with just about any other kind of job, such as the freedom to join unions.

It also means that the National Labor Relations Board does not have jurisdiction over them. This may soon change after the government agency filed a complaint against Delirium TV and Kinetic Content, the producers of “Love Is Blind.”

The NLRB complaint states that reality TV contestants are employees and therefore have the right to join a union. Former “Love Is Blind” contestants Renee Poche and Nicholas Thompson had filed a petition requesting this action. In addition to not being able to join a union, they couldn’t even discuss the terms of their contracts due to nondisclosure agreements.

As a sociologist who studies popular culture and labor, I have argued for years that reality TV stars and musicians should be classified as employees.

Reality TV participants, including many of the stars of those shows, are essentially the unpaid interns of the entertainment industry, even though it’s their stories, personalities and talent that attract and hook viewers.

Offering contestants paltry pay

Today’s economy is saturated with precarious employment practices where many corporations classify workers as independent contractors. From musicians to influencers, people work gig jobs where there is no guarantee of pay or employment.

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“Cupcake Wars,” “Love Is Blind” and other reality TV shows thrive thanks to a simple business model: They are cheap to produce. One reason for that is most participants are independent contractors who work for free or earn paltry pay under the guise of chasing their dreams or gaining exposure.

This arrangement might change after the new NLRB complaint. The NLRB was created during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal as an independent government agency tasked with protecting and regulating workers’ rights.

One of its key responsibilities is regulating unions and determining workers’ right to strike. It determines who can join a union and whether a strike is legal.

Providing a gold mine for networks

To conduct research for my book “Getting Signed: Record Contracts, Musicians, and Power in Society,” I interviewed contestants on “The Voice.”

Former contestants repeatedly told me that the television exposure did little to help their careers.

Prior to joining the show, many of the musicians were trying to scratch out a living through touring or performing. They put their developing careers on pause to chase their dreams.

However, the show’s contracts have stipulated that contestants cannot perform, sell their name, image and likeness, or record new music while on “The Voice.”

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Furthermore, viewers might not realize just how profitable these reality shows are.

Take “House Hunters.” The show follows a prospective homebuyer as they tour three homes. Homebuyers featured on the show have noted that they earn only US$500 for their work, and the episodes take three to five days and about 30 hours to film.

The show’s producers don’t pay the real estate agents to be on it.

The low pay for people on reality TV shows matches the low budget for these shows. A former participant wrote that episodes of “House Hunters” cost about $50,000 to shoot. Prime-time sitcoms, by comparison, have a budget of up to $3 million per episode.

Organizing unions within reality TV

That massive budget gap between reality TV and sitcoms is not simply due to an absence of star actors.

Many scripted television shows are based in Los Angeles, where camera crews, stunt doubles, costume artisans, makeup artists and hair stylists are unionized. But shows like “House Hunters,” which are filmed across the country, recruit crews from right-to-work states.

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Employees in those places cannot be compelled to join a union or pay union dues as a condition of employment. For these reasons, unions have far less power in these states than they do in places traditionally associated with show business, such as California and New York.

I think reality TV might become the next show business labor battle. If the NLRB forces “Love Is Blind” to treat its stars and other on-screen participants as employees, it could cascade.

Reality TV production companies could someday be required to pay all contestants wages and limit the hours they work. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the union known as SAG-AFTRA, could begin to recruit those workers as dues-paying members.

But it’s not certain that any of this will happen. There are many hearings, court cases and appeals in store before it becomes enforceable. And since President-elect Donald Trump will take office before the hearing is scheduled to occur, his appointees could change course.

Still, I think the NLRB’s action demonstrates that reality TV contestants are finally becoming recognized as workers who deserve to be treated better by their employers.

Some portions of this article first appeared in an article published on Sept. 21, 2023.

David Arditi, Professor of Sociology, University of Texas at Arlington

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Whitney Strub, Rutgers University – Newark

Playboy’s decision earlier this month to jettison the nude images in its print edition lays bare the magazine’s own naked truth: it was always really a lifestyle magazine, with nudes simply acting as window dressing.

If it seems counterintuitive for a quasi-smut mag to renounce its own seeming raison d’etre, it’s important to remember that the magazine, since its inception, always held itself at a distance from the world of pornography.

The aspiration of Hugh Hefner’s project was cultural legitimacy – not a globally recognized logo (today, more profitable than the magazine itself), nor the cultivation of a “girl next door” image.

The magazine – at least, how it presented itself – was simply too classy to be confused for porn.

For the most part, it worked.

As a historian, I’ve written about the postwar court battles over pornography and obscenity. And what’s most striking about Playboy’s story is how absent the magazine was from these legal wranglings.

An appeal to masculine taste

Look no further than Playboy’s debut issue, which featured Marilyn Monroe on the cover.

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Its famous opening manifesto announced: “If you’re a man between the ages of 18 and 80, Playboy is meant for you.” Their “articles, fiction, picture stories, cartoons, humor” would all be culled to “form a pleasure-primer styled to the masculine taste.”

Before Playboy, other magazines did feature nude photos, but they were seen as culturally lowbrow: tawdry publications for unsophisticated readers. Other magazines, most notably Esquire, would position scantily clad women next to articles on food, style and other central features of the developing consumer culture, but not quite as boldly as Hefner’s iconic centerfolds.

Still, Playboy treated its own nudity as playful and passé. While it did occupy the “centerfold,” it was packaged as simply another accoutrement of the modern man’s cultural repertoire, which included knowledge of proper cocktail proportions and the finer points of the Miles Davis discography.

The crusade against smut

Playboy’s debut came just one year before America’s moral panic over smut came to a head.

The House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials led the charge with a December 1952 report that highlighted “cheesecake” and “girlie” magazines, crime comics for children and, particularly, the burgeoning genre of lesbian pulp fiction novels, which – as the committee wrote in prose befitting its own targets – were “filled with sordid, filthy statements based upon sexual deviations and perversions.”

Yet even in the midst of this frenzied postwar moral righteousness, Playboy eased comfortably into the mainstream.

A few years later, when Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver launched his own anti-porn crusade, Playboy remained conspicuously absent from the hearings, which drew headlines like The New York Times’ “Smut Held Cause of Delinquency.”

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Possessing presidential aspirations (and finely attuned to the optics of media spectacle, having pioneered televised hearings in his earlier investigations of organized crime), Kefauver decided against subpoenaing Hefner.

Instead, he tacitly pandered to anti-Semitic sentiment by forcefully grilling a predominantly Jewish group of erotic distributors. The white-bread Hefner remained above the fray while smut peddlers like Abraham Rubin, Edward Mishkin and Samuel Roth reluctantly testified before Congress. (Roth would suffer the most, spending five years in federal prison for distributing material not substantially different from Hefner’s. His case also led to the 1957 Supreme Court precedent that still undergirds modern obscenity law.)

‘Skirting’ trouble

If Playboy emerged remarkably unscathed from these sexual-political skirmishes, Hefner nonetheless stayed perpetually cautious, calibrating the magazine to fit shifting contexts.

The pubic hair battles with Penthouse in the early 1970s – when Playboy started publishing more graphic images to compete in the expanding adult market – are most famous. But less remembered are earlier adjustments Hefner made to dissociate Playboy from cultural riffraff.

When Time covered the “horde of [Playboy] imitators yipping after pay dirt” in April 1957, it noted that new nude magazines like Caper, Nugget and Rogue were outpacing Playboy in “the smirk, the leer, and the female torso.”

Yet rather going skin-for-skin with its competitors, Playboy tried to distinguish itself through topnotch fiction and journalism (as well as science fiction, as PhD candidate Jordan Carroll notes in his recent study of the magazine).

According to Time, Playboy ultimately found that the most “effective censor was success”; in response to growing readership and ad revenue, the magazine “toned down its gags and dressed up its girls.”

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Indeed, in one striking 1962 letter sent to Hefner by a suburban Chicago chapter of the conservative Citizens for Decent Literature, the group happily informed him that that it had decided not to include Playboy among its list of 37 magazines that should be removed from local newsstands.

Later, in the 1970s, Playboy would attempt to compete with the more graphic pornography unleashed by the sexual revolution and the weakening of obscenity laws. More recently, it has reshaped its content to adhere to the strict regulations of social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, which forbid users from posting female (but not male) nipples.

Clearly, 2015 is not the first time Playboy has switched up its strategy to respond to market forces.

The bunny supplants the girl next door

If Hefner’s erotic vision was quaint enough to pass muster even with some conservatives in the early 1960s, today it’s as retrograde as Don Draper. As Washington Post columnist Mireille Miller-Young observes, today’s girl next door isn’t uniformly white, thin, heterosexual and presented with a smarmy editorial voice. Instead, she could be a queer woman of color. She might even be publishing her own porn.

While the magazine once walked a tightrope between smut and sophistication, branding always remained Playboy’s real strength.

Today, 40% of its revenue comes from China – where the magazine itself isn’t even sold. Instead, a recognizable bunny logo that appears on products ranging from cigarette lighters to coffee mugs is what persists.

With limitless free online nudity a click away, the cash flow resides in a licensed logo that represents an upwardly mobile, urban lifestyle – much like it always did.

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Whitney Strub, Associate Professor and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University – Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Jose Valentino Ruiz, University of Florida

On the sleeve notes of some of the most memorable and best-selling albums of all time, you’ll find the words “Produced and arranged by Quincy Jones.”

It was a hallmark of quality.

Jones, who died on Nov. 3, 2024, at the age of 91, transformed our understanding of musical arrangement. His work spanned decades and genres, from jazz and pop to hip-hop and film scoring. He worked with pop icons like Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, and also collaborated with lesser-known artists such as Lesley Gore and Tevin Campbell.

Each of his projects, collaborations and forays into new genres redefined what it meant to arrange music.

As a music business and entrepreneurship professor, I’ve studied and taught Jones’ techniques, which I hope can inspire the next generation of musicians.

A master musical architect

Musical arrangement might seem like an abstract concept.

Simply put, it’s the art of deciding how a song unfolds. While a composer writes the melody and harmony, an arranger shapes the experience, choosing which instruments play when, how textures build and where dynamics shift.

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Arrangement transforms a song from notes on paper into a fully realized piece of art that resonates with listeners. In essence, an arranger acts as a musical architect, designing the structure of a song to tell a compelling story.

Jones brought a visionary approach to arranging. He wasn’t merely filling in the gaps around a melody with a drum beat here and a horn section there; he was crafting a musical narrative that gave each instrument a purpose, guiding listeners through an emotional journey.

From his early work in the 1950s and 1960s with jazz greats like Count Basie and R&B star Ray Charles, to his blockbuster productions with Michael Jackson, Jones saw arrangement as a tool to guide listeners from one musical moment to the next.

Elevating voices

His work on “Sinatra at the Sands” is but one example.

Jones created lush, energetic big-band arrangements that perfectly complemented Sinatra’s smooth, warm voice. The choice of brass swells and the dynamic shifts amplified Sinatra’s charisma, turning the album into a lively, almost-cinematic experience. Unlike many arrangements, which often stay in the background, Jones’ took center stage, blending harmoniously with Sinatra’s vocals while adding depth and excitement to the entire performance.

In Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” Jones used orchestral swells and background vocals to bring out the soul in Charles’ voice, creating a richly emotional experience for listeners. By intelligently pairing Charles’ gospel-tinged vocals with a polished, orchestral arrangement, Jones captured the tension between sorrow and resilience – a demonstration of his ability to communicate complex emotions through arrangement.

Turning songs into stories

Jones’ skill at using arrangement as a storytelling device was exemplified by his collaboration with Jackson.

Albums like “Thriller” and “Off the Wall” showcased Jones’ knack for inventively layering sounds. On “Thriller,” Jones combined electronic and acoustic elements to create a multidimensional soundscape that set a new standard for production.

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His ability to incorporate textures, background vocals and unique instrument choices – such as horror actor Vincent Price’s iconic narration on the song “Thriller” – transformed pop music, setting the stage for future producers to experiment with storytelling in their own arrangements.

In Jackson’s “Bad,” Jones pushed the boundaries of genre by blending funk rhythms with pop structures, giving Jackson’s music a timeless appeal.

The title track’s arrangement has layers of rhythm and harmony that build a feeling of tension and power, enhancing Jackson’s message of confidence and defiance. Each instrument and background vocal in “Bad” serves a purpose, creating a sound that is bold, exciting and engaging.

Lessons for educators

For educators teaching music production and commercial music, Jones’ approach provides a gold mine of practical lessons.

First, his commitment to genre fusion teaches students the importance of versatility. Jones’ career demonstrates that blending jazz, pop, funk and even classical elements can create something innovative and accessible. Students can learn to break free from the constraints of single-genre production, seeing instead how various musical styles can work together to create fresh, engaging sounds.

Second, Jones’ emphasis on storytelling through arrangement offers students a framework for making music that resonates.

In my classes, I encourage students to ask themselves: How does each musical element support the emotional arc of the song? By studying Jones’ arrangements, students learn to think of themselves as storytellers, not just sound engineers. They can begin to see arrangement as an art form in itself – one that has the power to captivate audiences by drawing them into a musical journey.

Finally, Jones’ work shows the power of collaboration. His willingness to work across genres and with a variety of artists – each bringing unique perspectives – demonstrates the value of open-mindedness and adaptability.

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His life’s work serves as a reminder that music is more than just sound; it’s an experience shaped by careful, intentional decisions, with every sound and silence in a piece of music serving a purpose. https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/2iOfY6JjW9bevw3dQLwq6a?utm_source=generator

Jose Valentino Ruiz, Associate Professsor of Music Business and Entrepreneurship, University of Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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