'Corruption' in the music industry

Confessions from an industry shill

James Barber

May 11, 2024

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We’ve just marked the first anniversary of Stars After Stars After Stars and I’m grateful for the thousands of you who have signed up to read this newsletter. Special thanks to everyone who’s bought a subscription to a Substack that doesn’t (yet) have a paywall. Those cash deposits are a steady reminder that I owe you all some words about music.

I’ve been away from my desk this past month, first on a road trip to Chicago for the AXPONA audio show and then dealing with an illness in my family. I made some great connections at the show, and we’ve come through the medical crisis with remarkable success. Also, our 17-year-old dog Peaches died suddenly and we adopted Nigel (Tufnel), a shelter dog who came to our home with a persistent case of kennel cough. He’s a good boy and looks like Peaches if you squint. It’s been a busy month around here.

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So, back to work. Thanks to everyone for being patient.

Notes from the “cruel and shallow money trench”*

If you’re convinced that the entertainment industry is run by a cabal of cigar-smoking fatcats who only find happiness when they’re screwing artists and their fans, I’d like to add some perspective.

The good thing about making videos with my friend Rick Beato is that quite a few of you saw them and decided to head over here and check out this Substack. Rick and I always have a good time, even if I enjoy more songs in the Spotify Top Ten than he does.

The downside is that I’ve read the comments on our YouTube videos, and there’s an overwhelming number of viewers who think we’re exposing and attacking the industry when all I’m trying to do is explain how things work.

Americans love conspiracies and have long used elaborate theories to make sense of the mysteries of how things work in politics, sports, culture, and religion. Some of those tales are really quite impressive, but the truth is that most conspiracies fall apart because they depend on the alleged perpetrators having a level of organization and competency far beyond the abilities of almost any human who’s ever lived.

Just like most other working stiffs, the music executives who report to corporate overlords are stumbling in the dark, just trying to figure out what they can do to keep their jobs. Everyone at the top of those companies gets a big paycheck because they know they’re definitely going to be fired when the numbers come up short or there’s a changing of the guard in the executive suite and the new bosses just don’t like their face. The first day in a top position starts a relentless countdown to your last day at the company.

That leads to two basic principles that rule the music business:

1. Path of least resistance

2. Law of unintended consequences

Most people go to work and just try to finish the day without getting canned. Don’t think that people who work in the (alleged) glamor trades are any different from the schlubs in every other job. There are always a few incredibly ambitious and talented people who try to push things forward, but most of their colleagues would rather just go along to get along.

That means a lot of A&R executives have an incentive to sign artists who sound very much like the ones currently on the charts. No one will blame them if the records flop because they gave the promotion team something that everyone could recognize as a possible success.

Marketing people at the turn of the century stuck to the physical distribution model that had worked so well for decades rather than confront the threat posed by Napster and MP3 distribution. Why rock the boat when Best Buy is still ordering millions of CDs that they plan to sell at below cost as a lure to get people into the store to buy a television or refrigerator? The good times just might go on forever.

Most importantly for our story, a generation of record executives embraced the short-term planning and hyper-specific projection spreadsheets demanded by the corporations who took over the big labels in the 1990s. Rather than fight the new bosses and try to educate them on the unpredictable boom-and-bust cycles that had long defined the industry, they caved and tried to change the business so that it ran in the orderly and predictable way that their new owners and the stock market preferred.

Those corporate overlords never understood that those wild swings in fortune are what led to some of the industry’s biggest creative breakthroughs. Unfortunately, label execs decided it was better to adopt their new owners’ ideas about business rather than fight for the ramshackle approach and random fluctuations that had made recorded music such a success for the previous 50 years.

The decision to take the path of least resistance accelerated the arrival of the implosion that would rock the business at the turn of the century. No one involved was secretly plotting another new way to screw artists and fans. Executives tried to hold on as long as they could, and the industry walked blindly into a buzzsaw powered by low-res digital file swapping.

I’ll also argue that the law of unintended consequences almost killed the vinyl LP. When labels wanted to introduce the compact disc in the early ’80s, they were taking a big risk while they spent the money required to develop an entirely new format. Since they had no assurance of success, record companies asked artists to share the risk. Even though CDs would have a much higher retail price than an LP, they asked artists to take a “new technology” royalty reduction on CDs to decrease their financial downside while they tried to convince retailers to take a chance on stocking a whole new product line.

Artists made roughly the same net royalty per unit on a CD as they did on an LP, but those CDs had a much higher wholesale price. If you made $1 on an LP, you still made $1 on a CD, even though the label was generating more income on each unit sold.

Well, those reduced royalty rates never went back to the original percentage once CDs took off, so labels were making a far greater profit per unit on a CD than they ever did on an LP or a cassette. Vinyl was still selling, but labels suddenly had an overwhelming incentive to phase out LPs and convince customers to buy those more expensive CDs.

Vinyl barely managed to survive, thanks to an ongoing commitment from independent labels and artists, but cassettes were toast once automobile manufacturers started putting CD players into their new cars.

Labels owned or had a substantial interest in the record pressing and sleeve manufacturing plants. Those businesses were paid off and profitable, but they weren’t profitable enough when compared to the new CD bonanza. Accountants decided it was in the industry’s best interest to abandon a profitable product that people loved because the margins were no longer good enough.

Did the label business affairs lawyers who devised that new technology royalty reduction think their short-term plan would become a permanent thing? Did they realize how the clause might change their company’s balance sheets if CDs took off? Maybe someone will raise a hand and demand credit for devising an evil plan to kill vinyl, but I’m almost certain that LPs were more a victim of a business decision that never contemplated how things would actually turn out if CDs became a hit.

*Please note that Hunter S. Thompson never wrote this oft-quoted assessment of the label industry: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.” That’s not going to stop me from using it.

Music fans just get in the way

Here’s something else that a lot of music fans don’t want to hear: Many of the best executives in the business don’t really know much about or even particularly like music. What they do have instead is an unerring instinct for the zeitgeist and an eerie sense of what the public will enjoy.

People like this have been around all the way back to the very beginning of the industry. Many of the great genre shifts that we all treasure (swing, bebop, rock & roll, disco, new wave, grunge) were driven by promotion people who didn’t care what the records sounded like but had a hunch that this weird new stuff was going to find an audience.

The best of those cloth-eared executives are smart enough to align themselves with talented music people, creatives who are willing to go against the grain of contemporary taste. Those unmusical music executives are also self-aware enough to avoid ending up alone in a room with an artist because they’d have no idea what to say to them. Many of my favorite colleagues fit this description, and they were essential to the success of their companies.

For me, that alchemy between music and hustle is a huge part of what makes the pop record industry so much fun. It’s also the main element that separates the record business from what’s going on in the world of serious musicians. The public responds to a lot of “terrible” records, and those with trained ears and good taste are often perplexed and infuriated by their success.

A talented but tone-deaf promotion person can instinctively recognize a hit record. At the same time, they’re not burdened with any questions about musical talent, how well the music was recorded, or whether the artist would be considered cool by the other acts in their scene. These people don’t know and could not care less.

The hits generated by that attitude have made artists and the industry lots of money, and much of those profits went towards funding the development of the kinds of artists that the hip kids like. Hit records always take the pressure off, and the public sometimes prefers records that no self-respecting music expert would ever choose to promote.

Let’s ask a musician

I have also been reading Ted Gioia’s writing about the industry on his fantastic Substack The Honest Broker and finally paid up for a full subscription. Ted is a trained musician and someone who’s far more interested in the academic side of music history than I am. He’s also a much more disciplined writer than I’ll ever be.

His 1978 book How to Listen to Jazz was a massive influence on me. Ted helped me branch out from my youthful punk rock tastes and begin what’s a lifelong passion for exploring the weirder corners of music and record production. He also made a great video with Rick Beato last year, a conversation that at least partially inspired Rick to try making a couple of them with me.

Ted’s a serious guy who’s following his interests into some fascinating places, chasing his muse without the restrictions that he’d face if he was still writing for mainstream publications. Big fan, five stars, infinite respect.

Where I have an issue with Ted is his monolithic attitude towards “industry shills,” the people who help make and market records to the public. Sure, there are plenty of assholes who work in the music industry but I don’t think the percentage of them who fill out record company staffs is any higher than the percentage of assholes who play in the bands they sign. Look at politics, academia, the advertising business, or your local food co-op: Every field is at least partially populated by assholes.

Last month, Ted published an excellent piece called “30 Ways to Revitalize Arts & Culture.” Even if you’re not a paid subscriber, you can read down through to suggestion 5 on the list. (I’d suggest that it’s worth signing up for a paid subscription for at least a month so you can get an idea if his more advanced approach to these topics appeals to you.)

While he’s got a lot of great ideas on that list, I have to disagree with this one:

All Grammy Awards will be decided by a small group of elite judges—no more than 100 or 200 of the greatest living musicians. I’m talking about people on the level of Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, etc. No industry shills allowed!

The awards would immediately gain enormous credibility. Fans would pay attention to the winners.

Also, getting named a judge would become a huge honor—even bigger than winning a Grammy itself. New judges are chosen by the existing judges, who can only fill vacancies based on retirement or death.

That’s certainly a hot take from Ted.

I’ve made it clear that I don’t think awards for artistic endeavors are a particularly good idea. If we are going to have Grammys and Oscars, we should at least make sure that awards ceremonies are the best possible advertisements for our respective trades. While it would be great if winners of the major awards could challenge the audience to expand their taste, it’s most important that the awards celebrate the kind of music that’s making an impact on culture. See “The Grammys need to be a compelling advertisement for recorded music” and “How I got booted as a Grammy voter” for more from me on this topic.

Once you stop trying to identify the imaginary “best” anything from the equation, it’s all about generating interest in music by inspiring older fans to reconnect with new music and introducing young people to popular music as a cultural force.

I have always believed that A&R executives are the people most qualified to vote for Grammy winners, because they’re the ones whose job it is to keep up with what’s going on in the overall music culture. They’re the ones who listen to all the music released by other labels because their jobs depend on having insight into what’s heading for the charts and having the intel necessary to come up with a story about why you didn’t sign someone else’s hot new artist.

Are there a sizable number of idiot A&R people? Of course, see “assholes” above. But there’s a dedicated and talented group of men and women who’ve managed to stay employed in the industry, even during the darkest years of the Limewire era. Collectively, those A&R execs have an invaluable perspective on the details of record making and which music is resonating in the culture, skills that no other industry cohort can match.

I will say nothing bad about Stevie Wonder or Joni Mitchell, but I can’t imagine that either of them (or most other legacy artists) have kept up with the evolution of popular music in the past few decades.

There are some artists who might be exceptions. When Elton John lived in Atlanta, he was a well-known musical omnivore who would buy all the new releases every week at Tower Records. Of course, that was a while ago when there was a Tower Records here and people listened to CDs.

You could suggest Robert Plant. That guy seems to be just as much a record collector as he is an artist and hee’s always touting some new band in interviews. But, again, cool Uncle Bob the record guy was also sort of a 20th-century phenomenon.

However, the vast majority of great musicians are too busy being artists to be bothered with the minutiae of everyone else’s releases. Their job is to pursue their craft. Even if those artists were on a committee and picked albums of great musical quality out of a stack of submissions, they wouldn’t necessarily have a handle on whether that music was making an impact on the culture at large.

I’ve known quite a few great artists who weren’t active music listeners. They’d have no idea where to start with a process like this. I’ve had regular conversation lately with friends who know how to make records about the number of senior citizen artists who are embracing a young producer of dubious ability in an attempt to stay relevant. I wouldn’t want any of those people (who made great records back in the day) to be the ones who decide which records get trophies.

There have always been and will continue to be plenty of people hanging around the popular arts who can’t begin to tell you what’s good and don’t have the best interests of musicians at heart. I wish those people didn’t exist, but experience tells me they’ve never been in the majority. They’re just a loud and embarrassing minority who make a bad impression on the rest of the world.

Everyone’s heard stories about the worst label bosses or the rudest radio promotion staffs. I’ve got one particularly gruesome label horror story, one that I’ll share after the artist who got screwed has the chance to share their version of that story. I bring that up to admit that I know how bad things can be.

More often, I’ve also seen a lot of other alleged hacks and shills go to the wall to fight for the best interests of an artist or a record. They take real career risks to stand up for what they believe is the mission and responsibility of people who get the chance to work with music they love.

I’ll admit that I’m kind of a hard case on this topic. A few years back, I had an argument with a former Geffen artist whose career didn’t take off as everyone hoped. This person was slagging the label in social media posts that were promoting the band’s one-off reunion show.

Those posts accused the label of burying the record, but the truth was that people at the label loved the band but the album couldn’t get any traction after their single was thoroughly rejected by radio programmers. The commercial alternative brain trust was a solid brick wall of negativity, and people who worked at the label were really sad about the results. That one left scars on the people who promoted it, so I called the artist out on the notion that people had screwed up their career. That’s just not true, even though that’s the narrative that always plays best online.

Perhaps I could have been a bit more sympathetic to the artist’s disappointment about how things had gone, but reading those YouTube comments this year has driven home the reality of just how embedded these myths have become. Everyone (artists, producers, engineers, publishers, publicists, promotion execs, and even record retailers) is part of the same enterprise.

Artists aren’t the only ones who suffer when a record doesn’t sell. Everyone else in the mix takes a risk whenever they commit to a new band, and no one has enough job security to survive an extended cold streak.

Back to that video Rick and I made about how rock radio turned sour at the end of the ’90s, the one that one generated most of the comments that inspired this post. We described a very particular situation where alternative music’s downfall was fueled by the consolidation of the radio business. That disaster came about because of a Clinton-era macro policy decision which changed media ownership rules and set off a consolidation tsunami that inadvertently screwed up the music business.

I don’t actually think the people we described in that video set out to rip people off and screw over bands, but they followed the path of least resistance and that led them to a pretty dark place. There were dozens (if not hundreds) of people who fought a good fight against these changes when they realized where things were going, but corporate economics likely predetermined the deeply awful outcome (a/k/a law of unintended consequences).

The popular idea that these stories are revealing the real and hidden truth about music are what makes it hard for me to write or talk about specific missteps in the history of the business. When I point out that specific things weren’t right, I’m not issuing an indictment of the basic enterprise. Individuals may be flawed, but the history of recorded music is miraculous. People have made great records every year for over a hundred years. Something positive must be happening for us to experience so much amazing art.

I’m trying to share cautionary tales that I hope will inform the next generation of music executives as they try to fix what’s broken and invent new ways of getting their records into the hands of the fans.

I hope readers can learn from the past, hear some funny stories, maybe endure some rants about weird records that only the Stars guy seems to enjoy. There’s a lot of negativity out there, but there aren’t really too many people conspiring to ruin the fun. At the very least, the ones who would like to ruin the fun aren’t organized enough to carry out their evil plans.

I understand that some people are going to read these tales and use them as justification for their lowly opinions of any of us who make a living in music without actually one of the musicians who performs on record. They’re wrong. Artists have always done better when they have a team that can help translate their vision to a wide audience and act as a buffer from the outside world.

The best artists know that the right managers, promotion, publicists, booking agents, and crew are essential to their success. There are always incompetents and bad actors who will stand in the way, but anyone who wants a long career will find a way to embrace the right people and appreciate their contribution to the cause.

Stars in the public eye

Chris Dalla Riva writes Can’t Get Much Higher, another Substack that tries to make sense of the music business. Chris read my recent my post about the Grammys (“How I got booted as a Grammy voter”) and decided to investigate part of my premise with a post called “Investigating Fraud at the Grammys.”

In my original post, I shared a longstanding rumor that a label executive who sat on the nominating committees back in the day had a habit of altering the nominations to reward his friends and punish his enemies. Chris went back and looked at the Album of the Year winners over the past six decades to see if he could find a pattern and identify that executive.

He didn’t nail the answer, but I will say now that this individual is now dead and has been out of the business for decades. I’ve messaged with Chris and shared the idea that any pattern of thumbs on the scale would show up more in who got the nominations than who won the final vote. In this case, I think it was a “fix the primaries, not the general” problem.

That doesn’t make what Chris wrote any less interesting, and he’s doing some excellent work overall. Our experiences and perspectives don’t completely align, which is great because he brings a different point of view to the topic. Anyone who’s reading me or Chris and thinks we’re getting it wrong should remember that starting a Substack is free. Start typing, we need your input.

I recently stumbled on Fan Exile, Monia Ali’s Substack about fan culture. She was kicked out of One Direction stan culture after doubting rumors that the band was secretly planning to get back together, so she started thinking about what it means to be a fan and how the music industry interacts with the most devoted followers of its artists. She’s bringing a great perspective, one I haven’t seen before.

I’ve written about how some Beatles (and Taylor) fans are less interested in the music than the celebrity and iconography of the artist. Monia Ali writes about those attitudes as a survivor who’s got a lot more insight than I could ever have into the motivations that drive the culture.

After I started reading Fan Exile, Chris Dalla Riva published “The Darkside of Fandom: A Conversation With Monia Ali.” on his Substack. It’s a great introduction to Monia’s work, even if you only read the part that Chris is offering to everyone for free.

Like I mentioned when writing about Ted Gioia’s work, platforms like Substack enable people to write in detail about very specific corners of the culture without having to dilute their ideas to appeal to mainstream media editors. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to participate in what’s becoming a fascinating online conversation about music and its role in the culture.

Did Taylor finally cross a line?

Speaking of fans and the toxicity of fandom…

I know that Taylor Swift’s detractors think she’s got a carefully sculpted master plan designed to extract the maximum amount of money from the marketplace, but her new album The Tortured Poets Society is an impulsive mess, with (probably) too many songs and a completely screwed up release strategy.

After releasing the previously advertised album at midnight on Friday April 19, she released fifteen bonus tracks two hours later. That means everyone who preordered the LP only gets half the album. Or maybe the extra songs on the Anthology version count as different/additional record? But, wait, those streams counted towards her record-breaking week, so maybe they’re not from a different record. I consulted the Magic 8 Ball, which was no help and just said, “Concentrate and ask again.”

In the first days after the release of the album, the Tortured Poets Department page on Amazon was flooded with disappointed reviews from fans who were confused about the missing songs, asking why they only got half the album on their vinyl or CD.

The Swifties have since cleaned it up the optics, flooding the Amazon page with positive reviews and burying the confused/disappointed ones, but those one-star reviews still make up 20% of the total. Since Amazon always highlights the “best” negative review of anything, this well-reasoned complaint from Linda S survives on the front page:

Apparently, Linda preordered the MP3 version of the album and got blindsided when Amazon made the 31-song Anthology version available for $1 more a couple of hours after release. I can’t begin to get my head around how the label let this happen, but I’m willing to bet that it didn’t even occur to anyone in Swift’s camp or at Republic Records that there were still people who buy MP3s. I’m sure Linda is a fringe case, but there are people making big bucks to keep track of this stuff (see “law of unintended consequences,” above).

Of course, Taylor has done this before. When she released Midnights in October 2022, she dropped seven more 3am Edition tracks three hours later and a Til Dawn Edition with another three tracks in May 2023.

Those bonus tracks have never been on vinyl, but there was a CD version (The Late Nights Edition) that included them all. I think she briefly sold that double CD in her online store and at merch tables during her Eras tour. Reddit turns out to be a swamp of conflicting intel on the Late Nights CD mystery, so this theory is only my best guess. I have no idea where you can get a real one, but interested parties can find a ton of pirated copies on eBay, mostly shipping from China.

Maybe it’s true that vinyl and CDs are just souvenirs for most of her fans, and they end up listening to the music on Spotify like everyone else. It’s still weird to me that a huge chunk of her catalog isn’t available on physical media. It’s possible that she’s just saving them up for a $3500 box set that collects all of the digital-only tracks on vinyl.

I forgot that I had ordered the Collectors Edition of the CD, which arrived three days after release. That’s just awful. I guess the label wants to make absolutely sure that music doesn’t leak before the digital release and doesn’t ship until the last possible moment. We can concede that USPS has very occasionally been known to accidentally deliver things early. This time, all those efforts were in vain, because the entire thing leaked online a couple of days in advance. Fans still had to wait until Monday or Tuesday for a record released on Friday.

Note to the music business: Tuesday new release days were awesome and served everyone well for decades. Friday release days are terrible.

The Collectors Edition comes in one of those old-school double CD cases that I haven’t seen on a new release in probably 20 years. Each one of the four Collectors Edition sets is named after the CD’s bonus track and comes with a bookmark, magnet, patch, and four Taylor trading cards in a custom envelope. The swag fits in the side of the case that would have housed a second CD in the old days.

The retail versions available now are just regular CDs, so that means there’s a least eight versions of the new record on CD (unless there’s also a version without any bonus tracks, which would mean there are nine). There’s no Clean Version with alternate lyrics for sale at Walmart this time, which either says something about the artist or our country’s DECAYING MORAL VALUES.

I know that Republic wouldn’t make these seemingly infinite variations if fans didn’t buy them, but this has become exhausting. I look forward to watching an HGTV show that features someone who needs to renovate an ADU so they can house the Taylor Swift collection that their family can no longer tolerate clogging up the house.

As for any kind of record review, ask me in three months when I’ve had a chance to figure out if any of these songs stick. For the moment, I’ve connected with all the “fuck you, I love him” songs about Matty Healy, but I realize that response is just as much about my own issues as it is her songwriting. There’s a lot of music to work through here, and I’m not one for snap judgments.

What I do hear on The Tortured Poets Department is an artist trying to ignore all expectations and chase her own muse. The results are messier than what gatekeepers want to hear from someone they’ve declared is an Important Artist, but a more polished record would probably have been dismissed by the same instant hot take reviewers as cynical and canned. There was no winning this time around.

Back in 2020, the pandemic created isolation which became a safe space for an artist whose every move has been subject to tabloid scrutiny for over half her life. Taylor found a small circle of collaborators, musicians she could trust. That freed her to make music without the steady stream of leaks and rumors that would have gone along with working at an established studio in New York, Los Angeles, or Nashville.

Four years later, she’s recorded well over a hundred tracks with this team. They’ve made four new studio albums and four more remakes of her early albums. That’s almost an unprecedented amount of music released in a four-year span.

At this point, that tight creative circle is beginning to result in tracks that sound a bit claustrophobic and airless, especially on the songs she recorded with Jack Antonoff. It’s probably time for the two of them to take a break from each other or at least invite more musicians into their closed sessions. My first impression is that the songs are better than the arrangements on this album.

Taylor Swift can make any record she wants at this point. She can also afford (creatively and financially) to experiment and bury any sessions she later decides don’t work. She could benefit from letting a few new people into the studio bubble, and I hope she’s willing to take the risk.

Also reading

Tom Maxwell wrote the hit single “Hell” as a member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers before leaving the band at the end of the ‘90s. He’s just published a book about the North Carolina music scene called A Really Strange and Wonderful Time: The Chapel Hill Music Scene: 1989-1999, and LitHub published an excerpt that agrees with what Rick Beato and I said about the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in that first video I keep mentioning in this post (1.2 million views and counting!).

How Deregulation Destroyed Indie Rock Across America

Maxwell brings in Tom DeSavia, who worked at ASCAP and did A&R for Elektra in the ’90s. DeSavia talks about how corporate consolidation killed radio’s focus on local bands. He’s also the guy who teamed up with X’s John Doe to bring us Under the Big Black Sun and its sequel More Fun in the New World: The Unmaking and Legacy of L.A. Punk, two books that collect stories about the L.A. punk underground from musicians and members of the local scene.

You should check out the audiobook versions of these titles, because each artist who contributed to the book performs their own story. I’ve listened to both of them several times. My favorite story comes from the Go-Go’s Jane Wiedlin. “The Canterbury Tales” relates wild stories from the low-rent apartment complex that served as ground zero for the late ’70s L.A. punk scene.

Tom Maxwell also narrates his own audiobook, and I just bought that version. That means I don’t get an index, so I’ll have to listen to find out how much he has to say about my favorite bands from that era. I’m sure there will be a lot about Archers of Loaf and Superchunk, but I’m really hoping for more intel about the Motorolla Motocaster/Dish bidding war saga.

8-track of the day

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