A Year of Music

If we’re going to be talking about famous rants about the record industry, of course, we have to include a link to Steve Albini’s famous essay, The Problem with Music. If you don’t know who Steve Albini is, start here to get a quick understanding of why Albini might be entitled to an opinion on the subject. His importance and influence can’t be overstated, for all his claims of being a mere “recordist”. In the pantheon of independent rock, he is a Zeus-class godlike entity.

The essay is from its very start endlessly quotable, filled with Albini’s pithy cynicism and irrepressible annoyance at the mendacity and greed of the “industry” side of the music industry. You really ought to just go read it right now, even if you’ve read it before. It’s a genuinely important document. It’s also surprisingly restrained and extraordinarily educational, serving, in its hyperbolic and polemical way as a highly condensed version of All You Need to Know About the Music Business for bands. Here’s the punch line:

The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 millon 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.

Have you ever played Guitar Hero? If so, you’ve seen the cheeky summary screen that comes up after you play a song, enumerating all the expenses (“damage to venue”, “top-shelf liquor”) that get in the way of actually making any money for a live performance, which in its way restates Albini’s argument by showing how much even a good performance yields relatively meager rewards. The saddest thing is that for all of the hip, knowing “attitude” exuded by those screens, they actually significantly understate how bad things are. I mean, Guitar Hero is just a game, they don’t want to depress players with the grim reality, and if they were realistic you’d never get to unlock the Grim Reaper because you’d always stay broke. It’s very easy to be a hugely successful band and lose money at it, even without hookers and blow and puking out the windows of the tour bus every night.

If I sound cynical about the major labels, and the recording industry in general, this essay is a good chunk of the reason why. In my ideal world, every new band would be forced to read through it several times, carefully, before they sign their first contract. A lot of them would still push themselves into the whirling blades, but that just means the rest of us can point and laugh when the inevitable happens.