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.

I’ll keep this brief, because I don’t want this blog to be about my day job, but Rhapsody America (a joint venture between my employers, Real; MTV Networks, a division of Viacom; and Verizon Wireless, a division of, uh, Verizon) and Yahoo! announced this morning that Yahoo! would be discontinuing its subscription music service and moving its users to Rhapsody. The timing of the announcement is a little weird, coming as it does in the middle of the gigantic foofaraw over Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo!, but I think Rhapsody is the best of the subscription music services (naturally), and I think consolidation of the subscription music space is probably necessary. This article from the LA Times lays out why in a concise and easy to understand way. Subscription music services are a good idea but an incredibly tough one to sell to the public at large.

Following up on my note about last.fm offering free / ad-supported streaming of full tracks, everyone should read this missive from Rogue Amoeba, the authors of Audio Hijack Pro and Radioshift, two very useful tools for internet music fans. It’s difficult to concisely describe the very delicate balance of competing forces that makes legal on-demand streaming possible. I honestly think Rhapsody and Napster owe their continued viability at least partially to a need by the major labels to not look like they’ve been chumped by Apple (the iTunes Music Store looms very large when it comes to music and the internet). I really like last.fm and I’d like them to succeed, but what they’re doing is increasing the volatility of an already fluid situation.

I used to have a very strong belief that every American child should be handed a copy of Minor Threat’s Complete Discography upon reaching 15 or 16 years of age. 20 years later, I see no reason to change that belief. “Screaming at a Wall” still slices through bullshit with ease. The only punk tracks that come close to it in clarity and righteousness are Bad Brains’ “PMA” and Flux of Pink Indians’ “They Lie We Die”.

Oh, and the rest of Minor Threat’s catalog.