Courtney Love does the math (2000)
salon.com
salon.com
They view creative people the way a miner views a resource in the ground: as something to be strip mined and then discarded. I've encountered raw contempt... in a sense they are jealous of the ability of creative people to be creative, and this fuels their desire to co-opt it and take some of that glory for themselves.
But, part of the reason there's so much of this is that creative types are often horrible businesspeople and have no desire to learn. Instead, there is this myth that you get "discovered" and then someone else does the business for you.
Reality: you get "discovered" by a predator. If you don't want to be prey, you have to do it yourself.
Edit: this doesn't mean you have to be a 100% indy do-everything-yourself self-publisher or bootstrapper. But going into things with your eyes open, reading the fine print, and thinking like a businessperson is part of doing it yourself. Businesspeople do go into business with other people and other businesses, but they don't think "wow! I'm getting discovered, now I'm set!" They think "hmm... what's the value proposition here?" and they run spreadsheets and they look for hidden places where they might lose value or not get enough value for their money. Then they push back, and negotiate. Think like this or you get screwed.
Oh, and if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.
While admirable, that's not exactly the definition of "creativity" in my books, especially not in the programming sense.
In fact, I would speculate that somewhere out there, there are .net DBA code monkeys doing more creative things to keep an aging insurance database infrastructure from collapsing than Zuckerberg did for facebook.
the key difference is freedom/autonomy.
Creativity is not art.
Maybe the insurance database programmer is the coder equivalent of a session musician?
and completely crazy.
I think with Courtney (who I have a mutual friend with), she's been isolated just enough to let the crazy foster and the smarts carry her through.
I admire her, not without caveats.
Second, I wasn't surprised because she was a women, or a musician, or because she was part of the grunge scene. I know there are lots of smart women, and lots of smart women in music. I wasn't saying anything about a correlation between gender and intelligence or professions and intelligence. I was suprised because she's Courtney Love, and most of what I've read and seen of her prior to this makes her seem like an idiot. And this article seemed well-thought out, thus surprising me.
Dexter Holland from Offspring (molecular biology, but dropped out with a masters)
Greg Gaffin from Bad Religion (zoology, 2007)
Brian May from Queen (astrophysics)
James Lilja from Offspring (medical degree, not PhD)
Sterling Morrison from the Velvet Underground (medieval literature, 80s)
Accomplished pilot, small business owner and inventor (several patents on LBS stuff from early 90s).
I'm convinced that she knows the record label situation well but it was probably after having the same conversation many times with many other folks in the industry. Still, none of that is necessarily a bad thing nor does it make this a poor piece of writing (regardless of any editors).
(I still find it really satisfying when I google for something I know is true and find myself as the #1 advocate of it on Google -- in this case the search "steve albini courtney love plagiarism")
My belief was that Courtney Love had been influenced by the Albini document (which might have originated as a speech that Courney Love heard) but she brings enough in the way of sufficient new ideas to the table that it doesn't really matter that she doesn't cite her source.
[1] I dated a girl who Coutney Love might as well be her role model... a total disaster, the girl read piles of books, had tons of great ideas, learned math for fun, etc etc etc.
1. Related: Michael Jackson calls head of Sony, his record distributor, a devil. What a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt6zVypo72E
2. Love’s thesis: Through lobbying and collusion, the big labels (she calls them distributors) essentially own artists, which she calls “slaves” and “sharecroppers.” Following, an excerpt from the Sponsorships section.
> When I agreed to allow a large cola company to promote a live show, I couldn't have been more miserable. They screwed up every single thing imaginable. The venue was empty but sold out. There were thousands of people outside who wanted to be there, trying to get tickets. And there were the empty seats the company had purchased for a lump sum and failed to market because they were clueless about music.
> It was really dumb. You had to buy the cola. You had to dial a number. You had to press a bunch of buttons. You had to do all this crap that nobody wanted to do. Why not just bring a can to the [venue] door?
> … They were a condescending bunch of little guys. They treated me like I was an ungrateful little bitch who should be groveling for the experience to play for their damn soda.
> I ended up playing without my shirt on and ordering a six-pack of the rival cola onstage. Also lots of unwholesome cursing and nudity occurred. This way I knew that no matter how tempting the cash was, they'd never do business with me again.
> If you want some little obedient slave content provider, then fine. But I think most musicians don't want to be responsible for your clean-cut, wholesome, all-American, sugar corrosive cancer-causing, all white people, no women allowed sodapop images.
> Nor, on the converse, do we want to be responsible for your vice-inducing, liver-rotting, child-labor-law-violating, all white people, no-women-allowed booze images.
And that may be the least interesting part of the screed.
(including a terribly pithy remark from yours truly - who was I 583 days ago??)
If it costs $500,000 to produce a record, like she says it does, that would create limited room for a great number of bands and artist to record. The market size ($s of world wide discretionary income) can only support a certain level of production.
Figuring out how to lowering that number would be far more productive than trying to create the next huge app which helps starving artists with terrible recording quality get their music heard or some other distribution method.
(She also fails to add in concert revenue which may be lucrative for artists)
The world Courtney Love is from is the old world, where you needed a specialist to do all these different jobs. You needed to pay a producer, engineers, buy studio time (sometimes these are packaged but the more well known the pricier, and acts like Hole use well known outfits), this is what drives costs up. Not to mention marketting, distribution, etc.
In today's world a poor musician who wants to record and distribute his or her music can, and the best of them will be able to demand a price, or merchandise.
Also, a big part of recording is having a producer/engineer, who knows how to capture the essence of a performance in a recording. If you've watched American Idol's last season you could see how high profile musicians and producers zero in on strengths and weaknesses of a performance.
I think one thing the Love piece really pointed out is that there is a lot more to getting your music out there than recording. The distribution system is about to be solved but all the other problems, the really big problems, still exist.
The hardware, everything I mentioned and one or several mics (or a guitar amp), is still only about $3k to get started. SM58s (great for guitar cabs and ok for rock vocals) are used all over the place, they cost $99. An introductory condenser, like an SM81 (acoustic guitar, drum overheads, most acoustic instruments, some vocals), is about $300. If your voice is what you want to showcase, spend $1000 on a Nuemann TLM103 (my college roommate had one of these). $1000 is about the cost of a guitar amp and a guitar to get started.
This equipment will not make you rich, but it will give you access to the tools you need to learn the craft. I'm contrasting to a time (the 60s) when you needed half a million dollars just to put a sound on tape. Putting a sound on 'tape' these days doesn't even cost anything, the technology is everywhere.
Edit: To more specifically address your post, yes you're right, the talent is still the "hard part" of making music. My point was that if you have the talent, recording it is not as expensive as it once was.
That aside, the guy who recorded the "Owl City" records started out by releasing tracks from his parent's basement while working at Coca-Cola. Imogen Heap I think started off on home recording gear and recorded her entire first album herself. Also check out YouTube for Ronald Jenkies, that will give you an idea of what you can accomplish with a modern workstation, which will run you $3k new, decently equipped.
Edit: It has also occurred to me that if you're a band, and you can perform your music well (everything in 1 take), you can probably buy enough studio time to get a good sounding album for under $3k. I can't think of any specific music this applies to, but a great deal of grunge music in the 90s was recorded in this kind of a scenario.
Not the best sounding record but when you have no money, you do what you can.
Recorded as a favor from a studio owner. Sounds pretty decent, I think!
My kids pretty much use Grooveshark, Pandora and iTunes to play music. CDs are only used in the car and even there we frequently use MP3 players. Even though we still have a vinyl record player for my old Blue Note records it's not used very often.
What hasn't changed is the fact that there's a lot more record companies do than distribute the final product. It's pretty clear that the reason these companies have so much power is that they produce and market artists. Without that power the distribution wouldn't be so valuable. Someone still has to pay for studios, producers, designers, publicists, etc. This is particularly true for bands that survive not so much on the musical skill of their members but the overall sound and image.
"Exactly how record companies screw over successful artists [2000]"
would work just as well.
He fixed it, thanks!
Yet, I see many rappers living in multi-million houses and owning Ferrari's etc, in MTV Cribs. Do they do something different?
In our market, 32,000 such companies launch each year, and of those, only 250 generate more than $200,000 in revenue. Only 30 generate $20m.
What is a fair percentage to offer the VCs?
Yes, I appreciate that there are many differences between bands and start-ups, but if, as she says, only 250 of 32,000 albums sell more than 10,000 units, then this $10m the record company makes from her band must go, in a large part, to cover the costs of funding all the bands that dont make it. Maybe they are still making a handsome profit, but its not as unjust as she makes out.