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by robin2
4562 days ago
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For a different take, read Steve Albini's "The Problem with Music" (http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17) in which he does a financial breakdown of what he considered a representative scenario (back whenever it was written): "The band [...] has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month." Edit: In light of tptacek's third paragraph, perhaps it's more like a variation on the same take. |
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Also, I like Big Black a lot, and even listen to Shellac every once in awhile, and while he'd probably piss all over these selections as boring college rawk, Surfer Rosa and Rid Of Me are two of my favorite albums, in large part because of what he did to both those bands in recording them.
However: I think Albini is extremely biased in his take on the music industry.
First, he's a punk artist and a purist and not inclined to look favorably on mainstream music of any sort (I especially highly recommend the longrunning thread on his forum where his users tried to sell him on hip hop; it features capsule reviews of something like 100 different famous hip hop tracks. Spoiler: Albini wins, hip-hop loses.).
Second, he got screwed over by label management multiple times, most notably during the production of In Utero, where he was scapegoated for Nirvana's own artistic decisions and (unfounded, as it turns out) concerns that the band couldn't possibly live up to the hype from Nevermind. He does. not. like. the kinds of people who work for labels.
Third, he worked almost exclusively with the kinds of musicians who do not end up making a living creating music. This was especially true when he wrote "The Problem With Music". Albini's take on the music scene makes perfect sense if you assume that, with the possible exception of a small collection of engineers and other support professionals, nobody is going to make any money producing music. Albini's favorite band, The Jesus Lizard, is/was headed up by someone who had to leave music to become a lawyer.
But I look at things like the Mega scam, or, for that matter, Youtube and Facebook, and see giant corporations who had no hand whatsoever in creating music of any sort, who couldn't give a rotten god damn about music, and who nevertheless manage to extract tens of millions of dollars from the efforts of people who dedicate big parts of their life creating it.
I find myself unwilling to accept the idea that "it's all the labels fault" and "well people should just sell t-shirts" (and, as it turns out but isn't popular to say, sleep in the back of a dirty van) as a defense for tech companies trying to exploit music.
If you want to start a music startup on the Internet, do at least what the labels did: fund a couple acts and wait for one of them to break out and become a huge success.