Albini was in a really good position to see the problems of the pre-digital industry, and he wrote about them well. And he's right that the problem of distribution and crappy old gatekeepers has been solved.
He's absolutely wrong to the extent that he thinks all the problems of music have been solved (or that he holds the opinion that "bands will make it up in t-shirt sales and mumblehandwave business models!").
And I doubt he's in a great position to see the current problems:
* He probably has a circle/network of people who solved the problems of attention and gaining patronizing fans earlier (sure, he probably does production for and has some acquaintances from now, but the primary circle that mediates his experience is probably older).
* I'm not sure the collusion between high profile services and labels is as easy to see (because it's partly an adversarial/opportunistic relationship to begin with). And streaming services tend to be better for older acts with a catalogue and established audiences (who benefited from recording revenue back when that could be a thing and aren't producing new recordings now).
He is wrong about jazz, too. It doesn't suck (same with Zappa, post-Mothers).
I try not to judge him too much on this, but it colors my opinion of his opinions a bit - what musician hates jazz? Then again, I am not a fan of Shellac or his other music, so I am probably missing something. In 10 years I might be telling people how wonderful Shellac is, and it might just click for me - that is the wonderful thing about art.
I wish that there was a world where musicians could make great music without having to tour and make money. Some music doesn't need to be structured to be played live.
I respect the hell out of some of Steve Albini's work, but to avoid ending up a bitter old industry fuck like the guy who wrote this article is the reason I quit the music business.
Also, FYI, there's a whole other music industry out there built around playing live shows, and almost none of these tired cliches and horror stories apply. There are different cliches and horror stories, but the bands are much more in control of their destinies and the career is (in a sense) more sustainable.
Jaron Lanier has a great contrarian view of this where he points out that he went on a research project to find musicians that became independently wealthy in the 'internet age' and that he basically couldn't find any. The most he could find were a handful of people that made enough to buy a house - and that was the top of the pyramid. All the stories he found turned out to be fabricated by trust fund kids or claims by musicians that had had their initial career boost in the 'old' system.
There's a clip on Youtube of him talking about it but I can't remember which one it is. Anyway the jist of his view is that in the long term much of it actually isn't sustainable.
I used to get the Baffler, and I read that Albin article years ago. The Internet didn't help, although there was one band in the first dot-com boom that tried to IPO. (Whatever happened to them?)
What happened next was that the technology got so cheap that anybody could record. Then came AutoTune, and anyone could sing. Then laptop bands. At one point Myspace had something over 10 million bands registered. A few of them probably didn't suck.
"Being in a band" just isn't a big deal any more. This is a return to the historical norm. Historically, most musicians ranked below bartenders socially. The "rock star" era existed only because, for a few decades, the economics of marketing, stamping out and distributing phonograph records in volume favored bulk sales of a modest number of titles. A limited number of radio stations also created a mass market. That's over.
The people behind AutoTune (http://www.antarestech.com) have a whole range of products now, including automatic sing-along and vocal tract models. It's quite possible that musicianship will go the way of calligraphy.
> What happened next was that the technology got so cheap that anybody could record.
Stanislaw Lem wrote about this in the '60's. He predicted that "cybernetics" and democracy would allow the number of creators to increase enormously, but posited that the number of actual "geniuses" was small, fixed, and already almost exhausted within the current artistic community. Therefore the signal (great art) would get lost in the noise (junk produced because it could be.)
There are issues with this view--it assumes that great art is an objectively real phenomenon rather than a contingent social creation, amongst other things--but a brief perusal of Amazon's e-book offerings makes it hard to argue that the rate of creation has vastly outpaced the quality of creation. I daresay the same has happened with regard to music.
The great unsolved problem of the new era is criticism. Critics (who may have simply been record company flacs) acted as gatekeepers who allowed only material of a certain quality through. It may not have been the "best" by some standards, but it usually met some basic threshold of technical quality, which is more than can be said for the current era.
I recall reading a claim that during the early rock era, labels where run by old guys that would basically do short runs of singles and see if they sold. If they did they would get hold of the band or solo artist that pitched the demo and make some more.
But then came a generational change, where new execs were hired that believed they knew what good music was. And so there was much more of a filter between hopeful bands and the masses.
Now the filer seems to have gone away, in a massive sense. Now anyone with a computer have theoretically global reach.
One thing that did happen during the Sixties was some music of an unusual or experimental nature did get recorded or did get released. Now look at who the executives were in those companies at those times. Not hip young guys. These were cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product that came and said, ‘I don’t know. Who knows what it is. Record it. Stick it out. If it sells, alright.’ We were better off with those guys than we are now with the supposedly hip young executives who are making the decisions of what people should see and hear in the marketplace. The young guys are more conservative and more dangerous to the art form than the old guys with the cigars ever were. [...]
Could well be my source. Was reading boingboing for a couple of years, until i got tired of having my feed reader throwing horrors at me at odd hours of the day...
> Anyway the jist of his view is that in the long term much of it actually isn't sustainable.
Define "sustainable"...No, you (probably) aren't going to become wealthy JUST creating/performing music. But saying that just because you're not wealthy means you do not have a sustainable way of life is incorrect at best. There are plenty of musicians who make a good living at music. They're not rolling in dough, but it's enough to live in a nice neighborhood and support a wife and children. To me, that's a textbook definition of "sustainable". Personally, if I can make enough money with my music to do that, I'll consider that a success.
From what I remember of the talk he was saying that when musicians had royalties at least there was some kind of income in the backdrop so musicians didn't have to literally 'sing for every supper'. He then paralleled that with other digital goods, to contrast to where current trends are taking us. All this was mentioned coupled with his view that having a real middle class en mass means having a strong formal economy yet much of the informal economy is how many musicians ( and other creatives ) make their money. He topped it off with saying that the informal economy is what the "third world" is trying to get away from and basically that if we don't come up with a better structure we are headed in the wrong direction. So it isn't about just making money. It's about having structure to maintain social order.
Basically the context of the talk was much broader and unless you see it for yourself my interpretation will not do it justice.
So.... why is it necessary to become "independently wealthy" for music as a career to be "sustainable"?
There seems to be a disconnect there. Also, maybe his work is out of date, because there are a lot of independent musicians who have achieved massive success outside of the traditional recording studio model in the internet age, largely through selling their own work and through touring.
It means you're a full-time professional musician. Not a part-time semi-professional musician with a day job to pay the bills, who is permanently distracted by Not Music.
>a lot of independent musicians who have achieved massive success outside of the traditional recording studio model in the internet age, largely through selling their own work and through touring.
No there aren't. There are very, very few professional musicians working that route, and hardly any of them have achieved 'massive success.' Most of the ones who did already had an old-style label-based career, or at least label+management backing.
Most of the really successful ones don't sell their own work and perform. They write and arrange songs for top performers, or they work as producers - which is what Albini does now, mostly - or they do work-for-hire movie and game soundtracks, or they write commercial music for ads, or they work as sound designers.
Being a famous name performer is a career that works for a tiny handful of (mostly) singers, who are primarily picked for sexiness and (sometimes) charisma, not for musical creativity.
>> 'there are a lot of independent musicians who have achieved massive success outside of the traditional recording studio model in the internet age, largely through selling their own work and through touring.'
Please cite some sources. The parent says there aren't and you say there are. I'm leaning towards believing the parent as I haven't seen many and I've seen some large indie bands post figures and they are barely making the average wage.
Why is the bar set at becoming independently wealthy? As far as I know, that term means wealthy enough to not require further earning of income. It's an incredibly high bar.
Agreed. I go into work day in and day out and the best I can reasonably hope for is that I will continue to do so for several more decades. For better or worse, most people have to work many hours a week for many weeks per year for many years in a continual process in order to make a living. Also, lots of "products" (as in the results of work) that I'd consider very worthwhile such as music, visual art, educated students, clean streets, well-prepared food, and general public health often require a lot of work for relatively little pay. In terms of ideals I might find this unfortunate but in terms of reality, economics will often have the last word.
Presumably because he's looking for cases at the far end of the bell curve. If the biggest standout successes you can find are merely "comfortable", it stands to reason that most everyone else isn't.
Coulton also had some first-mover advantage with his thing-a-week model which got press because of its originality (as opposed to the quality of his music).
Not to take away from the quality of his music, which is really good (I have a few on my playlists), but there were also plenty of other very good musicians that tried thing-a-week and didn't break through.
His thing a week experiment led to (I believe) a fairly stable touring career, a yearly cruise with a great lineup of musicians and entertainers, and some serious connections in the music industry. The geek press from the thing a week experiment obviously helped, but you don't get that far in pop rock music without some great pop songs, and Coulton's got those in spades.
"... went on a research project to find musicians that became independently wealthy in the 'internet age' and that he basically couldn't find any. ... in the long term much of it actually isn't sustainable. ..."
* Attention is scarce. There's lots of competition for it.
* Revenue sources are scarcer. People expect to pay less (or not pay) for recordings than they used to. Part of this is because the industry dropped the ball and let non-blessed outlets set expectations. But that by itself would be manageable -- under a pay-for-recording system with loose digital restrictions, people might be able to get a hold of free music, but they know the difference between being patrons and mooches, and some critical mass that likes what they hear will choose the former. Streaming services make this fuzzier, and buffet streaming services like Spotify could actually outright kill this: they aim not to replace radio but recording collections in general (and replace recording revenue with fractional stream plays that are orders of magnitude smaller). But they make users think they're participating patrons.
* Performance is a risk-heavy, often capital intensive, and non-scaleable way of getting revenue.
* Telling musicians to support themselves with T-shirts and tchochkes is another way of saying they should have a job besides making music (which is fine if you actually believe that, I suppose, but it's another way of saying you don't care if they spend more of their time refining their compositions/performances).
Check the story of Pomplamoose's recent tour for a counterpoint on just how sustainable a tour and live show is for a group of a certain level of popularity.
It's important to keep in mind that Pomplamoose made a conscious decision to hire 6 people to tour with with them and spend to put on a significant production. If they had instead chosen to tour as a duo with minimal production (not unreasonable considering they were playing to crowds of a few hundred outside their home base of SF), they would instead have made ~$20k each in a month. Not so bad.
"We could have played a duo show instead of hiring six people to tour with us. That would have saved us over $50,000, but it was important at this stage in Pomplamoose’s career to put on a wild and crazy rock show. We wanted to be invited back to every venue, and we wanted our fans to bring their friends next time. The loss was an investment in future tours."
So it seems they suspected that investing less in production would have meant lower ticket sales for that tour and in the future, which is a rational suspicion regardless of how accurate it would have ended up being. Plus, if they had stripped it down, they still couldn't tour twelve months out of the year so it still wouldn't have amounted to a decent yearly income.
At any rate, the point is that Pomplamoose is very well-known and even if they overshot by a few tens of thousands of dollars, it still shows that touring isn't exactly big bucks for even well-known indie bands.
I dunno, I still say this is exactly the kind of stupid business decision that a half decent manager could've talked them out of. They chose to go into debt to put on a crazy wild rock show thinking that future crowds will be big enough to make that investment worthwhile? Seems really far fetched, and very poorly thought out. Not to mention that they're going to have to now sustain that level of production next time around...
Success in the live music business comes by staying it long enough, there's no "moonshot".
I read that article when it came out. I've played all those same rooms that they played on that tour, so let me speak from experience on exactly what they did wrong.
Note the part where they don't have any management, which supposedly saves them money. Then note the part where they hire bunch of extra crew to "go all out for this tour" and 3 extra band members and then end up putting something like $20k on a credit card to make ends meet on the tour because of all the extra payroll.
This is where the cliche of musicians being terrible at business comes from and where not having a manager - ostensibly to save the 15% of gross - is the ultimate false economy. Anybody here who's in business could tell you that they's lose money on that tour with all that extra payroll.
Now look where they are. They have $20k sitting at credit card APRs to pay off before they can even think of breaking even with anything in the future.
The bands I know that are more successful in smaller rooms are so because they run the numbers beforehand. It's that simple.
"... There are different cliches and horror stories, but the bands are much more in control of their destinies and the career is (in a sense) more sustainable. ..."
Q Do the bands you mention maintain control of their masters? I'm seeing the cliche-bands being burnt again with their record companies either not keeping the master recordings or compromising them. A real problem if they want to re-release in high quality digital format.
Since the majority of their income comes from playing shows, and since it's no secret that "real" record labels have no idea what to do with any of these bands (since they're primarily live bands) there's almost no financial incentive for them to sign labels deals in the first place. Most of them start their own "label" and keep everything for themselves.
A smart banjo player I know summed up every record deal like this --
"It's a 90/10 split, all charges go to the 10".
Unless you play the style of music that labels know how to market to the point that you can actually turn a profit with that kind of deal, what's the point?
The Guardian article is a worthy read because it expands on what actually happened. I went straight to the '93 source.
What is interesting is the text isn't tainted by references to future technology. It's sort of an anthropological view of the state of music around the time of 'Nevermind' (DGC/Geffin Sep, '91).
> Producers and engineers who use meaningless words to make their clients think they know what’s going on. Words like “Punchy,” “Warm,” “Groove,” “Vibe,” “Feel.” Especially “Punchy” and “Warm.” Every time I hear those words, I want to throttle somebody.
Sounds like every single person on any online forum or community related to music, audio production, or audio hardware.
Bandcamp digital pay-what-you-what, live shows/festivals/events, and artwork bundles with album sales seem to be the model of most of my favorite dedicated musicians.
http://qz.com/202194/steve-albini-the-problem-with-music-has...
> ‘The Problem With Music’ has been solved by the internet (2014)