Music Biz Parasites

I can get a good head of steam up talking about the business side of the music biz.

The word bitter may well surface in some readers' minds.

It may not be an unfair characterization of some of my attitudes but I want to hasten to point out that I'm not bitter about my own career/participation in the industry. (For the most part. One label still does still owe me for engineering an album from 1984 that I'm pretty sure I'll never see, but I was working for a pittance and the album was done in a very short period so it didn't amount to much at all, ultimately.)

I made my own choices and I had a lot of great experiences and really few personal disappointments.

But what really pissed me off was seeing how musicians and songwriters get screwed as a matter of standard practice among many in the biz.

People make money in the music biz. Some people make a lot of money. Some people only get by. But by and large, everyone working in the biz makes sure he gets paid... except the musicians.

Musicians are the host animal that the parasites feed off.


My first up-close experience with the music biz was long before I had any personal involvement with it. Some friends got signed to a major label. First, though, the people engineering the signing had to engineer a "cutting of dead weight" -- ie, most of the band. It was a progressive rock band with a horn section and they were really interesting -- and really popular in their market. They were making a lot of money running hall shows on their own.

The producer (a very well known guy at the time who apparently still keeps a finger in the industry) who engineered the label deal started to work on them, trying to get the three main singers to 'fire' the rest of the band. (I was friends with the main singer. These three singers were also the bass, drums, and guitar -- but they were only allowed to play on a couple of 'throwaway' tracks as the producer brought in his own cronies to play almost everything -- padding that recording tab nicely.)

They were being pressured to 'fire' guys they'd played with since jr high, for the most part and resisted bitterly. Ultimately, though, the word came down, it was either fire the rest of the band or kiss the contract goodbye. So they did and it caused some real upheaval in what had once been a very close-knit group of old friends.

These three guys considered themselves serious songwriters.

But Mr Famous Producer had other ideas. He started penning tunes for them working with his pet lyricist. The stuff they came up with was beyond peurile. Treacly love songs with insipid rhymes. This had been a hard-rocking, jazzy, progressive rock band. And they were reduced to singing drivel. Ultimately, they were only allowed to write two songs and one of them was only on a single B-side, not on the actual album. (It was arguably the best song in the project, so I guess that was only natural.)

Somehow -- well, I think we can presume it was a liberal appliation of independent promotion money, ie, payola -- the designated single from the album ended up a number 2 single in Detroit for a short period, but failed to break from there.

The band was contracted for five albums but wanted out. They couldn't get out so made the best of it and went back into the studio. But Mr Famous Producer's attentions had moved on to other projects (he was getting married around this time to the sister of a then-white-hot rock-pop singer and was managing her career), even though he was locked in as producer. The album somehow got recorded, and, probably because Mr Famous Producer wasn't paying much attention, it was actually a little better, a little more credible as for an early 70s rock band. 

Not what the label thought they wanted. They sat on it. Finally shelving it and telling the band there'd be no future sessions.

But the band was still signed to the major label. They couldn't record under their band name or even their individual names -- not even as far as sitting in on pal's records under their own names.

And then there was the money.

The label wanted a lot of the advance money back. All those padded recording costs? Right out of the band's pockets.

After all that crap, the label sued the band for $18K (about $93K today)... but the guys, two of whom had little babies and had reluctantly taken day jobs, were all but penniless. So the label was awarded their PA, some amps, and their gig van by the court. They got to keep their own instruments.


So, you know, that was my first up-close view of the industry. When I got into it as a knobber, I was happily working on my own songs in my funky little 4 track rig on my own -- but after a couple of classes as part of my commercial music certificate confirmed that my friends' experience was hardly unusual, the very last thing on my mind was putting myself in the maw of such a beast.

And, sadly, working with a lot more struggling musicians, I saw the same things over and over. (In fact, one of my non-music-biz clients is a guy who was signed to two major labels and a major publisher who was a pretty big deal in the late 80s and early 90s in this market; albums were partially recorded, never released; his publishing and hundreds of his songs were completely tied up by the publisher for years until, right at the end of the 90s, the publisher sent a small packet of stuff to him and said, Well, your free, have a nice life.)

As a consequence, I've never sent so much as a demo of my own music to a label or publisher and I seriously doubt I ever will. As a consequence, I have never been screwed over by the music biz.

Small victory.