In 1993, sound engineer extraordinaire Steve Albini wrote an extended essay titled the ‘The Problem With Music’. In it, Albini mercilessly describes the shortcomings and faults of the music industry, from business practices of major labels to the monetary breakdown of a record deal, all the way down to the technical mastery of sound engineers.
By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum. There is a pervasive caricature in popular culture of a portly, middle aged ex-hipster talking a mile-a-minute, using outdated jargon and calling everybody “baby.” After meeting “their” A&R guy, the band will say to themselves and everyone else, “He’s not like a record company guy at all! He’s like one of us.” And they will be right. That’s one of the reasons he was hired.
Albini’s ethics can harldy be questionned. Of note, he’s always squarely refused to be paid on a percentage basis, preferring to set a fixed price on his work. With thousands of albums under his belt, and having worked on the music of both stadium-fillers and of obsure indie rock bands aspiring to fame, the depth and breadth of his work is unparalleled in today’s music industry.
Between a widely spread piracy and the rise of streaming services, the landscape of music has changed dramatically in a very short period of time. Back then, Pearl Jam was in a legal fight against the monopoly of live music behemoth Ticketmaster, and they lost. How many hundreds of millions of dollars have been collected in convenience fees since then?
In a recent speech, Albini gave the closest thing to an update to his 20 year old piece. It’s not all pink but Albini seems to embrace the new model in which the relationship between bands and audience is both more direct and richer.
I disagree that the old way is better. And I do not believe this sentence to be true: “We need to figure out how to make this digital distribution work for everyone.” I disagree with it because within its mundane language are tacit assumptions: the framework of an exploitative system that I have been at odds with my whole creative life. Inside that trite sentence, “We need to figure out how to make this work for everyone,” hides the skeleton of a monster. […] So there’s no reason to insist that other obsolete bureaux and offices of the lapsed era be brought along into the new one. The music industry has shrunk. In shrinking it has rung out the middle, leaving the bands and the audiences to work out their relationship from the ends. I see this as both healthy and exciting. If we’ve learned anything over the past 30 years it’s that left to its own devices bands and their audiences can get along fine: the bands can figure out how to get their music out in front of an audience and the audience will figure out how to reward them.
It’s humbling enough that Albini is a talented and hard-working person to begin with. But it’s mind-blowing to me that he also finds the time and intellectual energy to think deep and hard about the larger picture and the changing problematics of his industry.