Those of
you old enough to remember when the word “grunge” described both a
genre of music and an “alternative” lifestyle choice may remember
an influential Baffler essay by rock producer Steve
Albini, “The Problem With Music.” You can read the whole thing
online
here, but the gist was a sort of punk-radical, anti-corporate
argument that the entire music industry was set up to benefit
everyone—the studios and the scouts, the image consultants and
video makers, the lawyers and managers—except the fans and the
musicians. Thanks to the complex structure of recording contracts,
bands with huge deals could come out of the process making
essentially nothing, or in some cases technically in debt.
This was an essay that people interested in the alternative
music scene talked about for years afterwards—it was published in
1994, but I don’t think I heard about it until the late
1990s—because it seemed to capture and diagram the slimy, stupid
awfulness of the generic, corporate-captured music that dominated
the era. Not only that, it came at an unusual time for the
punk/alternative community. The big labels appeared to be handing
out zillion-dollar record contracts to punk and indie-rock bands
with roughly the same sort of attitude that one throws parade candy
into a crowd. Garage bands with six songs and three shows under
their belt were being shown big dollar signs, snapped up, and
pushed through the corporate-music grinder, or at least that’s what
it felt like. There was a big debate within the scene about what
constituted selling out, and whether it was a good thing or a bad
thing. This was all informed by punk’s longstanding suspicion of
commercially successful art and corporate culture. It was a scene
where the most common stage move for a frontman was to turn his
back on the audience and look at this shoes. It was all very angsty
and introspective. People wore a lot of flannel.
Albini’s essay made such a big impact in part because was
arguing that you could sell out—and still manage to not get
paid. Which was about as strong an argument against selling
out and going mainstream as one could imagine. And, of course,
Albini’s credibility on the subject was more or less unimpeachable,
because, as we used to say, he’d been there and done that. Albini
was Kurt Cobain’s choice to produce Nirvana’s final studio album,
In Utero, which was made to sound dirtier, noisier, and,
well, grungier than the slick rock sound Butch Vig had given the
band’s breakout record, Nevermind.
I note all this because Albini recently returned to the ideas of
his famous essay in a brief interview with the online magazine
Quartz. Somewhat surprisingly, Albini, who
was typically pretty consistent for his music-business pessimism,
is now rather upbeat, even as many in the music industry have
become increasingly pessimistic.
“The single best thing that has happened in my lifetime in
music, after punk rock, is being able to share music, globally for
free,” he
told Quartz. Here’s a bit from the piece:
“Record labels, which used to have complete control, are
essentially irrelevant ,” he says. “The process of a band
exposing itself to the world is extremely democratic and there are
no barriers. Music is no longer a commodity, it’s an
environment, or atmospheric element. Consumers have much more
choice and you see people indulging in the specificity of their
tastes dramatically more. They only bother with music they
like.”
In the physical music era, company executives and the music
press were the arbiters of taste—a band needed to convince a label
to sign it, fund it, and often get critics to like it, to have a
realistic shot at success. These days, it’s a much more
meritocratic process: people can make music in their garage
and reach their audiences through YouTube, BandCamp and any number
of internet avenues. “You can literally have a worldwide
audience for your music….with no corporate participation, which is
tremendous,” Albini says.
I think Albini’s right that the Internet has positively changed
music culture, and allowed for strange niches to develop and
individuals to explore and connect with what they like. I used to
spend weeks or months hunting down certain albums, hoping for a
chance to hear some obscure band from across the country that I’d
heard about at a show. Touring bands would travel with bins full of
tapes, and eventually blank CDs, copying and trading interesting
new music from local artists at every tour stop. When a new band
would come into town, suddenly you’d find new music being passed
around. But the process of diffusion was pretty slow. It could be
weeks before anything new or interesting popped up again.
That doesn’t really happen anymore, because everyone has heard
everything already. Practically anything anyone wants to hear is
already there, on the Internet. The concept of “alternative” music
basically doesn’t exist anymore. There’s just the music that people
like.
The downside, if there is one, is that the old revenue models
are gone too.
It’s hard
for even fairly successful artists to support themselves on
this model. At best, selling music ends up being a loss leader for
live shows and other revenue streams. But that only works in a
limited number of cases. Concert tickets
don’t make up nearly as much revenue as the industry has
lost.
What keeps me hopeful, though, is that there’s still a lot of
great new music being made. And it’s easier for fans to access, and
artists to break out, than ever. Nor is it if it were ever easy to
make it playing rock-n-roll. As Albini’s original essay made clear,
it’s always been hard for artists. It still is. But the Internet
(and cheap, high-quality home recording technology) has changed the
focus of the industry from discovery and distribution to the music
itself. Overall, that’s a good thing.