A Year of Music

For another dose of record-label schadenfreude, check out this rant (check here if it’s been taken down – Victory’s lawyers have been chasing it all over the internet) by former Victory Records vice president Ramsey Dean. It’s an entertaining but unwieldy mishmash of legally actionable character assassination, insider’s memoir, hilariously hyperbolic tone, pompous word choices, and completely irrelevant Apocalypse Now quotations. I would quote some of the best bits, but I don’t want to get stupid (and lawyers) all over my blog.

If you have the patience to wade through Dean’s sludgy prose, his grandiloquent claims that Victory’s travails are in some way comparable to Joseph Conrad’s dark nights of the soul are pretty funny. Tony Brummel is no Colonel Kurtz. I think there are probably hundreds of dudes (and of course they’re all dudes) in the business who are functionally indistinguishable from Brummel; huge egos, bigotry and self-delusion are practically the defining traits of label heads. It may even be that the industry would grind to a halt without people like Brummel: Hawthorne Heights have very little to show for their time with Victory, but their CDs ended up in the hands of way more kids than the band’s quality merited.

Being nice doesn’t always help: Touch & Go Records, famous for being a humane label, with their “handshake contracts” and band-friendly accounting (as well as releasing most of Steve Albini’s records), ended up getting sued by the Butthole Surfers (who ought to have known better – they won the lawsuit but lost the war, in that a lot of people, like me, ended up convinced that they were egomaniacal dicks with a vastly overinflated sense of their worth in the wake of the lawsuit).

I have no opinion on the truth of Dean’s claims, except to say that bands should probably stop signing contracts with Victory (Thursday actually came back after leaving for Island) and fans of hardcore and emo should stop buying their records (which is tricky, because sometimes they do release some truly transcendental albums, like Refused’s Shape of Punk to Come – probably the best punk record of the last 10 years – not to mention records by Darkest Hour, Earth Crisis, Between the Buried and Me, and Integrity). On the whole, I’d just take the whole thing as a case study of how epically messed up the industry really is, from a not entirely reliable insider’s perspective, with more than a few grim laughs thrown in.

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.

I’m a bit intemperate when it comes to the music business, but that’s only because I’m by nature fairly pessimistic when it comes to capitalism and market-based economics, and (probably excessively) jaundiced about the possibility that the intersection of capital and culture will produce anything worth caring about. Which is a highfalutin way of saying that the majors crank out huge piles of crap, I expect them to do so, and I don’t really care because I don’t listen to much major-label music anyway. So it’s nice to come across things like this blown-out rant in the Guardian’s weekend magazine.

A quote, just to give you the flavor of the writing:

Imagine the outcry if people working in a factory were told that the cost of the products they were making would be deducted from their wages, which anyway would only be paid if the company managed to sell the products. Or that they would have to work for the company for a minimum of 10 years and, at the company’s discretion, could be transferred to any other company at any time.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal investigated the industry and concluded that ‘for all the 21st-century glitz that surrounds it, the popular music business is distinctly medieval in character: the last form of indentured servitude.’

I don’t actually agree with the hyperbolic rhetoric on display here, as entertaining and schadenfreude-y as it is to read. For one thing, the analogy cited above is far from accurate, inasmuch as you’d have to take into account the factory-workers getting a huge chunk of cash dumped on them up-front. Advances are the best and the worst thing about major-label contracts; if you’re savvy and know what you’re getting yourself into, it’s possible to use that to your advantage. Whether any band smart enough to have that savvy would benefit from a major-label deal – especially today – is another matter.