Every soul fan eventually gets asked to pick a side, and the Motown vs Stax argument has been running in record shops and pub back rooms since the late 1960s. It is a better question than it looks. Both labels were founded by outsiders with almost no capital, both built their sound around a resident band, and both changed the way the world heard Black American music. Yet put “My Girl” next to “Green Onions” and you hear two completely different philosophies of how a record should be made.
This is our attempt to set out what actually separated Detroit from Memphis: the rooms, the players, the business models and the records. We have a side, and we will declare it at the end, but the honest answer is that a serious collection needs both.
Two labels, two cities, two starting points
Berry Gordy Jr. launched Tamla Records on 12 January 1959 with an $800 loan from his family’s savings co-operative. He wanted to call it Tammy, but the name was taken. Later that year he bought a former photography studio at 2648 West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, hung a sign reading Hitsville U.S.A. over the door and turned the ground floor into a studio. Motown was incorporated in April 1960, and Gordy ran it like the car plants where he had once worked: material went in one end, finished hits came out the other.
Stax began in 1957 as Satellite Records, started by Jim Stewart, a bank clerk who played country fiddle. His sister Estelle Axton re-mortgaged her house to invest, and the label name eventually combined their surnames when a Californian company complained about “Satellite” in 1961. By then the operation had moved into the old Capitol Theatre at 926 East McLemore Avenue in South Memphis, with a record shop in the former candy counter. The full background is in our Stax Records story, but the key point is that Stax grew out of a neighbourhood, not a plan.
Motown vs Stax in the studio: the rooms and the players
Hitsville and the Funk Brothers
Motown’s Studio A, nicknamed the Snakepit, was cramped and run almost around the clock. The players who filled it, later known as the Funk Brothers, included James Jamerson and Bob Babbitt on bass, Benny Benjamin, Uriel Jones and Richard “Pistol” Allen on drums, Earl Van Dyke and Joe Hunter on keyboards, and Robert White, Eddie Willis and Joe Messina on guitar. Jamerson is the one to listen for. His bass lines on records such as “Bernadette” and “What’s Going On” move like a second vocal, and they are the reason so many Motown sides still sound busy and alive on a good system.
The Motown arrangement was layered: tambourine on the backbeat, two drummers or several guitars doubled up, strings and horns overdubbed, and a mix that pushed the top end so it would cut through a transistor radio. It was polished by design.
McLemore Avenue and the M.G.’s
Stax had one band in one room. Booker T. & the M.G.’s, with Booker T. Jones on organ, Steve Cropper on guitar, Al Jackson Jr. on drums and Lewie Steinberg (later Donald “Duck” Dunn) on bass, played on almost everything the label cut from 1962 to the end of the decade. They were racially mixed at a time when Memphis was not, and they worked out arrangements in the room rather than from charts. Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love, the Memphis Horns, joined the payroll as salaried players in 1967, though they had been on Stax sessions well before that.
The theatre itself mattered. Stewart never levelled the old cinema’s sloping floor, and the room’s odd reflections gave Stax records their thick, slightly boxy low end. Listen to Otis Blue, cut largely in a single day in 1965, and you can almost hear the walls.
How the records actually sound different
Strip it back and the contrast is about where the weight sits.
- Tempo and feel. Motown leaned on a driving four-to-the-floor pulse built for dancing; Stax sat further behind the beat, with Al Jackson’s famously late snare giving songs a lazy, rolling swing.
- Arrangement. Motown stacked parts; Stax left space. A typical Stax side is organ, guitar, bass, drums, two horns and a voice.
- Vocals. Gordy wanted singers who were smooth and crossover-ready, groomed at the label’s own artist development department. Stax recorded singers such as Otis Redding, Sam & Dave and Carla Thomas with the grit left in.
- Songwriting. Motown had Holland-Dozier-Holland, Smokey Robinson and Norman Whitfield writing to a formula that was refined every week. Stax had Isaac Hayes and David Porter, who wrote for specific voices and often finished songs at the session.
That last point is why so many Stax records feel like performances while so many Motown records feel like productions. Neither is a criticism.
Business models: the factory and the family
Motown’s Friday morning quality control meetings are legendary. Gordy held a veto, and a new single was only released if it beat the week’s best-selling pop records in the room. The results speak for themselves: 79 Motown records reached the Billboard Hot 100 top ten between 1960 and 1969. Gordy kept publishing, management and production under one roof, which made him enormously powerful and, eventually, made Holland-Dozier-Holland walk out over royalties in 1967.
Stax was looser and far less businesslike. Its national distribution ran through Atlantic, and the contract Stewart signed in 1965 without reading it properly gave Atlantic the rights to the Stax masters. When Atlantic was sold to Warner and Stewart declined to renew, Stax discovered in 1968 that it no longer owned its own back catalogue. Coming months after Otis Redding’s death in December 1967, it was a body blow. If you have read our piece on the Muscle Shoals sound, you will recognise the pattern: Southern studios made the music, and Northern companies often ended up owning it.
The 1970s: Los Angeles and Wattstax
The two stories diverge sharply after 1968. Motown announced its move to Los Angeles in June 1972, chasing film and television, and handed artists such as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder the creative control that produced their greatest albums. Gordy finally sold the company to MCA and Boston Ventures in 1988 for $61 million.
Stax, now run by Al Bell, reinvented itself. Isaac Hayes’s Hot Buttered Soul (1969) and the Shaft soundtrack (1971) were huge, and the Wattstax concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on 20 August 1972 was a statement of Black pride that Motown, still chasing the mainstream, would never have staged. But debt caught up with the label, and it was forced into involuntary bankruptcy on 19 December 1975. The Stax Museum of American Soul Music opened on the original McLemore Avenue site in 2003.
Which should you collect first?
For a newcomer building a shelf, Motown is the easier entry point. Its singles are everywhere, UK Tamla Motown pressings turn up cheaply, and the compilations are reliable. Stax rewards more digging. Original Volt and Stax 45s from the mid-1960s, particularly in decent condition, have climbed steadily, and the albums are where the label’s depth shows. Look for Otis Redding, Sam & Dave’s Hold On, I’m Comin’, Booker T. & the M.G.’s instrumentals and the early Rufus and Carla Thomas sides.
If you want to go further south and slower still, our history of Hi Records picks up where Stax left off in Memphis, and the Chicago soul guide covers the city that sat stylistically between the two.
So which side are we on in the Motown vs Stax debate? On balance, Stax. Motown made more perfect records, but Stax made more records that sound like people in a room, and that is what we come back to at two in the morning. For a fuller account of the label’s history, the Stax Records entry on Wikipedia is well sourced.
Motown vs Stax: your questions answered
What is the main difference between Motown and Stax?
Motown built a polished, layered pop-soul sound for the widest possible audience, using a large pool of session players and strict quality control. Stax recorded a rawer, sparser Southern soul with one house band in a converted cinema, leaving more room for the singer and the groove.
Did Stax and Motown artists ever work together?
Not in any formal sense; they were competitors with separate rosters. The connection runs through covers instead: Stax artists recorded Motown songs and vice versa, and both companies sent package tours to Britain in the mid-1960s, including the Stax/Volt Revue of 1967.
Why did Stax lose its early catalogue?
Its distribution contract with Atlantic gave Atlantic ownership of the masters. When the deal ended in 1968, the recordings stayed with Atlantic, which is why classic 1960s Stax material has been reissued on Atlantic and its successors rather than by later incarnations of Stax.