Emily The Intern...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
There’s quite the kerfuffle on the ’Tubes this week due to a post to NPR’s All Songs Considered blog by one Emily “The Intern” White. If you haven’t read it, you don’t really need to bother. The gist: “I love music a whole lot. I just don’t like paying for it.”
That post is typical of the mindset of people her age, but I’ll tell you one thing three times: there’s like a thousand performing, recording, touring musicians (in America, anyhow) at any given time that aren’t flat broke. This hasn’t changed since the 50s. Nobody makes shit from touring or album sales. Nobody ever has, nor will they ever. Soundscan says my own Sister Machine Gun records have sold around 400,000 copies total; this isn’t including the various soundtracks and comps I’m on. Figure a CD costs about a buck to make, and the wholesale is around $6.00 per, someone walked away with about $2,000,000 courtesy of my creative output. But it wasn’t me. You want to know how much I’ve made in artist royalties? $0.00. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Goose-egg.
My absolute best year as a professional touring musician was 1996. That year, we had a semi-hit that tied in with a multi-platinum selling soundtrack album. I got a large (for me at that time) amount of mechanical royalties from the sales of that soundtrack, plus we played about 300 shows that year, mostly in theaters and larger venues as a headliner. I was, by any measure you’d care to use, one of the more successful musicians of that year. You want to know what my before-tax income was? $75,000. That’s the best I ever did, as a demonstrably successful artist in the top tier of my chosen genre. That seems like a lot now, but I paid self-employment tax on that money, and whatever was left over went to bills. So I spent 1996 more or less broke, like every other year in the 90s.
And that lifestyle isn’t really available to musicians today. I was signed to the largest indie record label in the world, one that had plenty of money and let me indulge myself. That label doesn’t exist any more. None of the distributors it sold records to exist any more. The record stores where my records were sold are almost universally out of business as well. The entire supply chain, from the guy who bet I would sell records by fronting the costs of recording them on to the store where the physical product was ultimately purchased, is gone.
But you know what? I got to ride around in a tour bus with someone else footing the bill, and play a show every night. To an audience. A SHOW! How awesome is that? I have songs in some cool movies. I’ve been to every state in the Union (except Alaska, because who the fuck plays in Alaska? EDIT: Apparently Berlin played Alaska twice) and to a bunch of other countries. I’ve been on MTV. I’ve been in Rolling Stone. I don’t think I get to complain. I signed the contracts, with legal representation advising me. I knew what I was getting in to back then, and I knew what it would turn in to the day Napster went live.
So I don’t blame Emily for the fact that I’m not in my 20s any more. She grew up in a different world than me and that dude from Camper Van Beethoven. In the world we grew up in, we created a commodity, with a supply chain, bankers, retail outlets, and a fairly strict machinery for ensuring all that moved smoothly. While Emily can certainly enjoy lots of material that was created with that machinery, I’ll bet you her tastes largely revolve around the current DIY-flavored indie scene. (Yeah, while I was indie to the bone, I recorded my albums at Chicago Trax, Battery and Brittania Row, mastered them at Bernie Grundman and Sterling, and sold them in Tower, like everyone else. Different meaning to the word “indie” today.)
So David Lowery, get off your high horse. Emily doesn’t need to donate any money to Old Musicians Who Don’t Have Shit Any More. She is no more responsible for the state our industry is in than I am responsible for something stupid my parents did before I was born. She doesn’t understand what the fuck you’re talking about. She just likes music. It isn’t a commodity any more, but value-added content. If people want to make new shit for her to diss on All Songs Considered, that’s their own prerogative. It has nothing to do with us and our 80s/90s understanding of the music industry.
If you want to blame someone, blame Sean Parker.
26 comments
Good post. Although you forgot to mention that you were also in Playgirl. :)
You deserved more for your work than just the memories. I know I paid a bunch of money for your albums and concerts so I hope whoever got the money enjoyed it.
As much as I would love to see SMG again I can also understand from this why it doesn't really pay to do it.
I wondered what your take on this would be. The loudest complaints about piracy have always come from folks either out of touch (Ulrich) or folks who just can't seem to sell records (most everyone else) and think "Well, fuck, it can't be me - it's Piracy!"
Personally, I make a decent amount of money every time I release something independently. Not enough to live on. Actually, that's inaccurate. If I released 2 AP, 2 Milkfish, and a CA album per year - probably. But I'd be strung out all the time. A lot of people care enough to pay. A lot of people who don't show appreciation in other ways.
I did share the article you're referencing on Facebook - because it was reposted by Aimee Mann. I like her and, unless she did something terribly wrong, she should still be living off the money she made on the Magnolia soundtrack.
I'm mostly perplexed by how an economics professor can get worked up over consumers reacting to disruptive technologies and making the choice that a good is now too expensive. He must not be a particularly good professor.
I wish it were still the 90's as much as the next musician, but it's not -- consumer tastes and technology have changed, and the industry needs to adapt or get socked in the eye by the invisible hand.
Mewling that consumers ought to do the "ethical" thing and pay for CDs is as equally absurd as whining about the weather. You might not like that it's raining but it's not going to change, so get with it and buy an umbrella already.
(Basically, what I'm trying to say is: great post.)
Yup. What cracks me up is how "entitled" gets bandied about in this particular situation. You want to see a sense of entitlement? Find a has-been musician from the 90s. Hell, guilty as charged.
-CR
It bugs me every time I hear the "piracy been breakin' my music industry!!1" argument. I hear it as "my customers aren't paying me enough" when the question that artists should be asking is "my personal business model is broken, how do I fix it?".
A huge problem that I see is the continued prevalence of the $10 album. The major labels have spent 15 years showing us that the $10 album model is broken. Why copy that busted business model as an indie? In the same time frame, we have seen the rise of $10 Bluray discs that cost two years and $150million to produce, and $1 games that entertain me for the same one hour as an album does. Indie artists really think that $10 is a competive price among the other digital offerings that the consumer is looking at?
No, I'm not promoting piracy. I do get tired of repeatedly hearing the same tired argument that puts the blame on the consumer though.
Exactly. The consumer's only crime is that he likes what you did. He'll take the path of least resistance to fuel that _every_ time. (And before you all chime in with your "I'm an altruistic motherfucker" anecdotes, save it. This is me you're talking to. I know better, and I have the numbers to prove it, in the form of the red balance on my Capital One Visa card I used to make Unsuspected Sounds.)
$10 does seem fair to me for an album. $10 seemed fair in 1985, when I bought a lot of imports, and that's what imports cost when you ordered them in a record store from the Schwann's catalog. It still seems fair to me. But I'm fucking old. I turned 44 today. I'm twice as old as Emily. The only thing she knows about the 80s (when, I'll mention, she wasn't even alive) is what is re-imagined in 2012 by hipsters. $10 doesn't seem fair to Emily. They are, after all, only variously-aligned ones and zeroes in her flash memory, and not something she can hold in her hands that obviously has physical worth.
As to what the fix is? Fuck if I know. If I was just getting started today, I have no doubt I could hustle a living in the same way I did in 1989. When I signed a recording contract, it didn't come with a Rolls and a house in West Hollywood. Don't know why all the sudden I seem to think it should have.
-CR
I didn't have so much a problem with what she said and did, a lot of what she said she had was promos anyway. I got irritated at some people who picked it up and ran with it. There was a small army of spoiled frat boy Libertarians coming to her aid.
bb
And I listened to All Songs Considered exactly one time. It was the most irritating, clueless thing I may have ever heard. I say this as a big NPR fan. It may have just been that particular episode, but I'll never know.
bb
In all fairness, while I'm not disagreeing with you, the $10 Blu-Ray vs $10 CD isn't really a fair comparison. The $10 Blu-Rays are the discount blu-rays and the discount CDs you can buy at $5. At least that's what I see when I walk through the CD/DVD section at Wal-Mart/Target/Best Buy/whatever.
And to throw another variable in the equation, I'm old school and own a bunch of CDs. But the majority of them I bought used. I certainly have my share of new CDs, but, even if you were getting a good deal on royalties, you still wouldn't have gotten one cent from the used copy of Sins of the Flesh that I bought back in 1990-something. From your perspective, my purchase of a used CD is no different than if I downloaded the song off of BitTorrent today. With that said, my purchase of a used CD was helping keep the stores that sold them in business (and today, they're going to the guy on eBay or Amazon who is selling it), so the money is going somewhere to benefit someone that is not getting done by me downloading it. But the people in question have nothing to do with the making of the actual music. I suppose you could argue that by keeping the record stores in business, you help promote more music that could get sold there that doesn't get played on the radio, but that ship has long sailed. Why should it make a difference to an artist if I buy a used copy of his CD from a re-seller on Amazon or if I BitTorrent it?
Keep in mind, I'm not promoting piracy (even though I'm not going to play innocent and pretend I've never pirated anything), but I'll also be honest and say that the reason I'm not promoting it is because I like CDs. When I want to listen to it on a portable device, I extract the mp3s from the CD. I've never actually paid for an mp3 (OK, I can't say that... there was Unsuspected Sounds and some other digital releases here and there, but they're in the minority), and if I was a primarily digital person, I probably would be doing a lot more pirating.
I'm with bongo_x on both points, although calling out All Songs Considered is sort of an ad hominem fallacy at this juncture. I listen to virtually nothing but NPR in the car, and I agree that it is in general a terrible show, but that's neither here nor there in the scope of this conversation. Roughly akin to me pointing out that I can't stand Camper Van Beethoven. But then again, I'll bet he doesn't like my band either. (FWIW, I don't particularly like my band at the end of the day.)
Her actions, to be clear, are indefensible, and I'll fuck a Libertarian up on more than this point. But they are certainly understandable, and in my opinion inevitable. And Lowery laying a guilt trip on her, while dropping a whole lot of numbers but leaving out the whole "people now think I'm cool, plus I got laid a lot, plus deli tray" bit, which is a currency unto itself, is equally indefensible. The reason his opinion has weight, and to a lesser extent the reason you're reading this blog, are because someone rich dropped a lot of money on us when we were young men. Might want to mention that part.
-CR
The All Songs Considered comment was a total aside, and I should have made that clear, but it is interesting that she put this out there in their name. I have restrained myself about any opinions on Camper Van Beethoven.
bb
There was a time long ago in the later half of the 90s when I spent about $2K a year on new CDs, when I grossed about $16K a year. For those bad at maths, that is a huge fucking percentage. The competition for those $15 discs was $10 VHS, $10 books, $20 games and really not much else in terms of media to consume.
Today? Home movies are of vastly higher fidelity. Books are digital and suffering much the same problem as music in showing me their value per dollar. Games are far, far more flexible in price and on far more platforms. In addition, there are a handful of $10 a month services that I like. Namely Netflix, Hulu and Spotify all of which give me what amounts to "all of the media".
Last week I bought three $10 pieces of media. Alien Resurrection on Blu, the latest Castlevania (a $30 million game), and the Humble Bundle which gave me 7 brilliant games and their soundtracks. The current offering for music? A lower quality version of what we had in the 90s. No liner notes. Terrible dynamic range. Lower fidelity. It's a terrible value proposition in comparison.
As for solutions? I really like the "pay what you want, $1 minimum" that Bandcamp offers. It lets me easily get an album, and it let's me pay more to people that I want to directly support. The number of people that have had the business acumen to make that extremely successful for them is extremely low though, as it is in any industry.
For some reason, musicians tend to be a lot more vocal about failing though. ;)
You summed up her post as, "I love music a whole lot. I just don't like paying for it."
After reading her post, I have to disagree with that as a valid summary. I don't think she ever implied that she doesn't like paying for it.
She wrote, "But I honestly don't think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience."
I read that as, "I love music and will gladly pay for it if it's offered in a format that caters to the modern consumer's wants and needs."
She goes on to talk about a Spotify-like music utopia where everyone gets paid their fair share and consumers have access any music they desire. This is a bit unrealistic but, I think, it's more or less what every music consumer would want. Ideally, we all want the musicians to get paid. We also want, as Emily puts it, "the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it."
The whole ability to listen to what I want, when I want, and how I want it may sound a bit entitled to some but she is the consumer and consumers are entitled to get what they want. If consumers are not given what they want, they won't open their wallets and then your business model fails. End of story. That's how it works.
That's what I got out of it anyhow.
There's a lot musicians pointing vigorously at said article, as well as film and game geeks, as of this is the Clarion call that will turn the tide and make the millennials wake up and start paying 15 dollars an album again. Which it won't. It's a pretty muddled piece of reasoning.
Thing is, I am sympathetic to this resistance against the want-it-now culture we've become. What, HBO won't let me download Game of Thones the night after it airs? They want use it sell subscriptions to their primary service? Fuck that--bit torrent! Not everything can be scaled to a DIY economy. Large productions need to be funded and the corporations that fund them have every right to choose the terms of their distribution. One may not like it, it may be a failed model, but if you want their product you agree to their terms. Or you "steal" it but be honest about what you're doing. I don't like iLoks. So I don't use shit that requires them. Period. I don't rip it and pretend its some moral battle against the man.
Anyway, Lowery is suspiciously light on specifics. I was around at the height of Camper's popularity, an indy rock kid, and even, in a fashion, a fan. How many Camper van albums did I buy? None. I taped their major label debut from the college radio station where I "worked." (I liked that LP which is pretty much the only thing I know by them, other than those novelty songs and that terrible cover.) So they got Virgin to pony up an advance and probably tour support for a couple of albums. But really, before that all those indy releases did not provide the entire band with a 'good living.' I bet they all had day jobs. And what about the drummer, how much do you think he saw from those Virgin albums? We all know Camper van broke up "owing" the label money. Same with Cracker I'm sure. Lowery may get a bit more if he's been smart with his publishing, but beyond the shadowy mechanics of advances, Lowery and his indie rock brethren weren't alive in some mythical time when records we're a an easy, safe way to make a living. You toured like hell, and scraped by. For every REM their were thousands of Ednaswaps and Letters to Cleos who had one decent payday they split 4 or 5 ways had a minor hit then went back to slugging away like everyone else in their local scene.
What's particularly risible, beyond his conflating a lot of aspects of the digital culture as if it's all of piece, is that he drags in a few tragic tales of cult musicians to prop up his slightly specious reasoning. It's sad that he lost friends, and it's fucked up how their stories ended. But what would have really helped Chestnut and Sparklehorse and Chilton would have been universal fucking healthcare. I don't swallow that any of those dudes was ever making that much money off their record sales even before Napster. I bet they would have told you tales of how often and hard they got fucked over by their labels.
So yeah, I was there. Over half my collection was used albums; I taped a lot of stuff from friends --cause I was a kid who liked music and books and wasn't rich. Sure, I bought plenty of albums new. But musicians bitched about SST and Homestead not paying them or how their major label deal that fucked them over with shady accounting. It has always been hard to be a working artist, except for a very lucky few. Bands toured. You cultivated a fan base. You hoped you could sell a jingle or two. How different is it really?
That. Exactly. I haven't "acquired" an album in years, and even when Napster and Kazaa were going concerns, I only really used them for incredibly obscure French post-punk tracks that were literally unobtanium here in America at the time. I buy all my music, always have, always will. I have no problem whatsoever with the current delivery mechanisms; I buy digital albums from Amazon all the time, or from Bleep when they're available there. If there's a record that will benefit from the medium (usually older jazz or IDM) I'll buy new vinyl, and I regularly re-buy my favorite albums on used vinyl.
That said, I'll merrily download Game Of Thrones from Vuze, because I've made a mental calculation somewhere that the value provided by subscribing to cable + a premium service doesn't line up with what I'm willing to pay for access to certain aspects of that service.
Does that make me a hypocrite? No. Comparing the two mediums is a fool's errand. Does it mean I have maleable ethics that change to suit circumstances? Sure. But I'll say this much: I know exactly what it costs to make a record, in real dollars and also in sweat equity. I know, in short, what music is actually worth. I only have a vague concept of what a premium cable network's prime time drama is worth. It has no "real" to me, and thus my morals are more maleable in that context. The only way I could possibly line it up is that buying Cox Basic Cable + HBO is roughly akin to having to buy dozens of albums a month you'll never listen to in order to keep hearing that one song you like.
But this very concept goes to what I meant when I summed up her post. She's talking about something she doesn't know anything about; she's not qualified, as a consumer, to even make an informed decision about consuming because she has no basis from which to even ascribe an ethical position to her actions. She doesn't even consume in the traditional manner. She can't say "I'm trying to save money" because she never spent any in the first place.
But all that said, all of this is ultimately bullshit. You know who really makes money in the music industry? Budweiser. A live concert venue of any size is simply a machine for turning music in to beer sales. Don't believe me? Go book yourself a show at a venue that has both all-ages and 21+ shows. Book the show as all ages, then ask what the advance would be if you booked it 21+. Yeah. You'll get paid at least double, if not triple, if you can fill a place with adults who drink overpriced beer instead of water out of the tap in the bathroom.
So any time an old-school pro like David Lowery goes on some sort of jag against these sorts of people, it should go in one ear and out the other. When Lowery or Aimee Mann or Courtney Love or Steve Albini talks about being used to sell shitty American pilsner, then I'll listen.
-CR
God, what a depressing topic. My mother should have taught me to paint or esoterically arrange a bunch of crap instead of giving me piano lessons. Basically, everyone here reading this blog got into the wrong division of the art biz:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7403948n
Just to follow up my tripe, it would seem that, in 2012, it only pays to be an artist if you can create a single instance of one physical object that only one (rich) person can possess. Unless of course you want to be a 21ist-century comedy act like LMFAO who tours around as a bunch of white dudes with afros wearing speedos. Classy. Wonder how much they're makin'?
What wonderful times we live in.
It pays to be an artist if you make something that other people like. The more they like it, the more it pays. And there is other currency besides money. If you're getting in to this business to make money, might I suggest opening a factory that makes paperclips instead?
-CR
What we clearly need is a beer delivery system in download form!
Enjoyed the Ana Tijoux - thanks for the tip..
Seems to me music is supporting more people than ever whether through teaching, virtual instruments, sound-sets, placements, more people are on the teet than ever before.
Probably the greatest gift I've received as a musician is being told that my stuff is shit and I should stop.
It's harsh but if you can survive that and find a reason to continue on you'll be coming from the right place and more likely to receive some financial worship when its your time.
You have to carve out and earn a spot at the table - there's only so much bandwidth~
I just logged in to say that it's nice to hear a pragmatic point of view on such a vexed subject for a change.
@ ehdyn: you're right about the limited bandwidth. The s/n ratio isn't that great either, so make sure those tones are pure!
Finally, here's a take on the situation that's not based on gut instincts and generational bias.
http://www.futurehitdna.com/is-stealing-music-really-the-problem/
It's a good read and pretty much the last thing I need to hear on the matter.
So many smugly dumb or dumbly smug moments in that article, I found myself shouting my refutations at the the screen out loud.
Try to capture it in a synopsis and I'll tell you what I'll say to that synopsis.
"Duh."
- c
That reads kinda asshole-y. Sorry.
To say "You know what? Popular things are popular. And unpopular things are less popular than those things" is to waste my time.
The minute he starts looking into the metrics for Camper Van Beethoven, I knew the whole thing was fucked. Why would David Lowery's work be germane whatsoever? Who thinks that's what this is about?
And his notion of major labels as being confident and psyched on where all of this is going suggests zero research.
'Cause, yeah, not so much.
- c
Fair enough. Certainly don't be sorry; I don't read that as anything more than an honest reaction. Honestly, when it comes down to it, what the fuck do I know? I'm just trainspotting. And I'm so burned out on the topic I can't even bring myself to go back to see what it was I thought was trenchant. I respect your opinion over some randomly linked dude that I picked up somewhere. Sorry for lowering the signal-to-noise ratio.
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