Rants // Steve Albini vs The Music Biz

Chances are – if you’re into indie/punk rock and were a teenager in the 90s you probably remember Steve Albini’s essay “The Problem with Music“. If not, its very much worth a read because problems outlined in it never really went away. Or did they?

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke.”

What’s lesser known is a follow-up Albini delivered via Face the Music in Australia in 2014. That one not only reiterated his previous points, but also claimed that all the problems outlined in the original essay were fixed by now. Safe to say, that is not a take I agree with and that’s putting it mildly.

And its particularly odd to hear said take coming out of a mouth from someone who swore by punk ethos throughout much of his life and career. How could someone raised on punk rock not see that the same bullshit they fought against tooth and nail was now being sold to the public by tech companies? Just because it comes in a shiny new wrapper doesn’t make it any less smelly. To wit:

The internet has facilitated the most direct and efficient, compact relationship ever between band and audience. And I do not mourn the loss of the offices of inefficiencies that died in the process. I suppose some people are out of work. But the same things happened when the automobile replaced the horse, and all the blacksmiths had to adapt, spending their time making garden gates rather than horseshoes.

Dragging out Steve’s corpse for a problematic take of old would be highly unfair. The man, after all, have a long history of them and he even apologized for some, though maybe not others, whatnot with Peter Sotos association appearing to be intact, unexplained and unaccounted for up until his passing – possibly even a matter of pride too.

As a side note – I always wondered why Albini was listed as a producer on Sotos’s grossfest of an LP, 1992 Buyer’s Market which consists of nothing but field recordings/voices. Typical Albini’s weird humor, perhaps? But I digress…

This case is particularly interesting to me for a number of reasons. The follow-up, unlike the original essay, takes some work to find on Google and probably faded out of public memory altogether by now.  The search, though, does bring up interesting results adjacent to the matter – at some point both Big Black and Shellac catalogs were removed from Spotify. As of 2024, however, both returned to the platform.

Also, while I vehemently disagree that Internet fixed the issues outlined in the original essay, I can admit there was an illusion of such. The brief window of opportunity for artists that existed in 2010s closed rather fast, but anyone could get through for a couple of years before enshittification took hold of both Spotify and tech products in general. Its also worth noting that The Baffler also published another great essay – Rich Woodall’s “The Masters Own You”, one that outlines how big music business largely stuck to selling nostalgia in the digital/streaming age, mostly at the expense of anything else.

All of this makes me wish Steve was still around so that I could ask him to give me an honest opinion on streaming/music business circa 2024. I have a feeling the man would’ve given yet another take, one wildly different from both the original essay and the keynote address. Or as my Bluesky follower petnoodle put it

I would hope that he would complain about it, but then he was a complicated guy