On August 5, Blackground Records announced that two of the three albums Aaliyah made during her lifetime will arrive on streaming services in the coming months. This will finally free a catalog that has been suspended in purgatory for nearly two decades. Even after most of the industry migrated to streaming, Aaliyah’s uncle and Blackground founder Barry Hankerson, who owns the majority of her masters, has stubbornly kept most of the late R&B visionary’s music off streaming. But the forthcoming release of Aaliyah’s best work, to a generation that has largely consumed her artistry via YouTube rips and inspired reworkings, is soured by a murky push and pull between Hankerson and Aaliyah’s estate. After the streaming news was announced, the estate offered a cryptic statement that they had “battled behind the scenes, enduring shadowy tactics of deception with unauthorized projects targeted to tarnish,” with a lawyer further clarifying that they had not been made aware of the streaming plans and wanted a “full account of [Blackground’s] earnings.”

There is also the uncomfortable awareness in 2021 of the lasting impact of Hankerson’s shadier business dealings, from lawsuits filed by artists like Toni Braxton and JoJo, to the stark reminder that he was the person who introduced R. Kelly to Aaliyah when she was a teenager. Blackground has also moved forward with a posthumous album of unreleased Aaliyah material, a version of which was teased in 2012 by Drake and Noah ‘40’ Shebib, then canceled in 2014 after a public backlash. Now reportedly featuring the likes of Future and Chris Brown, the project feels like a devious cash grab, a disturbing reanimation of an icon taken too soon. What should be a simple joy—the ability to listen to Aaliyah’s music easily—is instead marred by a crowd of producers, managers, lawyers, and artists all vying for a piece of what’s theirs: the opportunity to capitalize on Aaliyah the brand.

The reality that behind every young, female pop star exists a team eager to exploit that stardom by any means necessary has not exactly been obscure throughout pop history. The shadow of the svengali producer and manager, long solidified in the work of men like Phil Spector, Porter Wagoner, and Kim Fowley, lingers in the edges of the modern industry. Many artists do not own their masters, and estates often fight for control of an artist’s posthumous output. But 2021 feels like a breaking point for a public understanding of industry control that stretches far beyond singular producer-artist dynamics or bad contracts. As high-profile artists like Britney Spears and estates like Aaliyah’s battle for control and fight off their respective leeches, they illustrate the ways in which a musician can be dehumanized to function as a kind of corporation, one through which a staff of bad actors can rotate, or be sold off in parts to the highest bidder. Fans no longer navigate an imagined one-to-one relationship with their beloved artists, but are forced to face the fact that an ecosystem of greed often exists behind them, the tensions bleeding out from behind the scenes.

As Aaliyah’s family fights over control of her legacy, her former Y2K peer Britney Spears is also battling for control of her own, while locked in a conservatorship she has called abusive. Enacted in 2008, the conservatorship was advertised to the public as a temporary agreement between Spears and her father Jamie for the betterment of the singer’s mental and professional health, despite the fact that Spears initially requested her father not act as conservator. But it wasn’t until this year that the extent of the agreement’s tight grip over the pop star’s life became clear to the public. After an exhausting decade of staying silent about disturbing details, Spears demanded her freedom in a June court hearing, revealing she had been given lithium and forced to keep an IUD inside of her. “All I want is to own my money, and for this to end, and for my boyfriend to be able to fucking drive me in his car,” she said. (After immense public pressure, Jamie Spears indicated on Thursday that he will step aside, but the conservatorship will remain intact.)

Why has Spears’ conservatorship continued this way, while the artist at the center has withered? Because it’s made too much money, for too many people, to let Spears’ humanity override and eliminate its structure. Her conservatorship pays the people who should be fighting for its end, like her court-appointed lawyer, as well as the people she’s actively fighting to be removed from it, like her father. A recent New Yorker investigation found that Jamie’s lawyers had billed nearly $900,000 covering four months of crisis PR, hired with Spears’ money, to battle Spears’ claims. After a dizzying cycle of platinum albums, Vegas residencies, and global tours, the understanding that she is the person who made all of this wealth possible has been buried by the mountain of employees on her conservatorship’s payroll. “I am Britney Spears!” her father reportedly often screamed early in the agreement, like a CEO commandeering a company’s vision.

As lawyers, producers, estate managers, publicists, and family members tug at the corners of a pop star’s brand, fans also realize their place in the corporate ladder: as consumers whose adoration can line the pockets of those who’ve mistreated their favorites. “We knew money that Britney Spears the brand was receiving was not going to Britney Spears the person,” one member of the #FreeBritney movement told Vice regarding his decision to not stream Spears’ music. He urged fellow fans, “Do not consume the music. Do not consume the product.” A similar demand has circulated among Taylor Swift fans: Many have held out on streaming Swift’s original albums, following her highly publicized fight over her master recordings, which were sold without her knowledge to music executive and A-list manager Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings LLC in 2019.

Because Swift signed away her masters when she joined Big Machine Records as a teenager, the only way she says she could have recouped them was to take a deal that would have required her to stay and release new material through the label. But Swift opted against this, knowing founder Scott Borchetta would sell Big Machine, “thereby selling me and my future.” Not only did the label and Swift’s masters end up in the hands of Ithaca Holdings, Braun turned around in 2020 and sold those masters to a private equity firm, which will continue to make money from Swift’s album sales and streaming. That is, unless Swifties opt for the singer’s eerily similar, still in-progress re-recordings of her first six albums, an undertaking so intense in scope that it almost feels like performance art. But as extreme as Swift’s push to re-record may seem, it’s a clear attempt to rightly recenter herself in a body of music that has been shuffled through mergers and acquisitions, handled by parties who would prefer the albums stay a malleable product rather than an extension and expression of a living, breathing artist.

“You deserve to own the art you make,” Swift wrote in a 2019 Tumblr post, while Spears today asks to finally “own her money.” Aaliyah’s family does not own the artist’s work, of which the world was given so little in her short life, and warns the public against individuals who have “emerged from the shadows to leech off of Aaliyah’s life’s work.” In the eyes of the men who own these artists’ work, the artistry and individualism of these women, and whatever ownership of the work they or their families think that affords them, is irrelevant. These figures have long relied on a listening public that’s just happy to have the songs at their disposal, no matter if the person who made it doesn’t benefit from their listening. But the more noise artists and estates make about the reality of who owns and controls their work, the more fans are forced to confront how dispiritingly rare it is for an artist to truly own their music, and how quickly one’s legacy can be manipulated for profit.

Originally published on 08/12/21