[VERNIXX]

That Albini article has been out for a while now. But it is still relevant, maybe even more so that when it was published many years back.

As many of you know, I was once in a major label hard rock band, The Toadies. I jumped ship well before the label started pumping money into the band, but I watched a lot of what Albini described happen to people I know personally. Endless touring, poor support in some markets, total saturation in others. No tour support beyond shitty per-diems and the same deli trays in every town. Then I watched them get no support and dropped uncerimoniously. No warning...just a flip of the coin meant they no longer had support. SAME EXACT THING happened to my friends in The Buck Pets. They were all over MTV in 1989-1990. Then dropped in a label reshuffle. With NOTHING to show for it but bitterness and hard experience.
It's a vicious business. I still more than occasionally hear The Toadies and Buck Pets music on modern rock radio (not that I listen to stale boring FM rock, moreover it gets pumped into gyms, mall stores, and sometimes places I visit in my job). Are they getting royalty checks for airplay of their music?!?!? According to them, HELL NO. They signed away their publishing rights for cold hard cash. Not a lot of cash, mind you. Just something to sate a hungry musician. But now, they could still be making some money residuals off the songs they wrote, performed, and took all over the World today. This happens to a LOT of performers, evn happened to The Beatles and Eric Clapton at one time.

After The Toadies, I was in a fast rising electronic rock band called Parasite Lost. We were getting HUGE in Texas, and actually at one point got courted by Capital Records as well as Interscope. Expense-account lunch and drinks, the whole "we are your friends...we are on your side" schtick that I had heard before. We wanted full control of our catalogue and songs, exclusive BMI rights to our royalties, even offered to record our album splitting the buget to do it our way. WE WERE LAUGHED AT. "No one does things their own way in this business, kids." Funny, because now a lot of these hip new bands like Built To Spill and The Decemberists ARE doing things their own way, because the industry has changed with the advent of file sharing and dropping sales. There are bands out today who do everything through e-commerce! Band who do everything their own way!!! And they get popular through the internet without a label even behind them pumping money into promotional campaigns.

Needless to say, my band never signed a deal, broke up in the interim, and I have not played on stage in the last 8 years with a band. The industry is only for hardened people ready to whore themselves for their "art". Way too much for me.

BUT, things are getting better in the industry...but it is a JOB. AND a BUSINESS! Lots of hard road work, endless promotion, and whore oneself is still the norm...

The Byrds had it right all those years ago when they made a Number One song making fun of this business.......