The half-life of a record company, the death of a magazine

So here’s how it went today:

Last night, AllHipHop.com sent out another one of its random news mails linking to this bit of schadenfreude:

New York based independent record label TVT Records terminated the majority of their employees today, sources revealed to AllHipHop.com today (February 18).

TVT, which is home to major recording stars like Lil Jon & The Eastside Boyz, Pitbull, Ying Yang Twins, The Polyphonic Spree and others, is expected to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this week.

TVT Records was founded by its current President, Steve Gottlieb, who launched the label out of his New York City apartment in 1985.

Meantime, Gottlieb himself has responded claiming things like “I am optimistic that the company’s independent spirit, history of innovation and willingness to pioneer new music and new business models are more valuable in this marketplace than ever before and that we will emerge from this reorganization a stronger more vibrant entity.” And if your eyes glazed over while reading that, you weren’t alone.

So you might be thinking, “Mm, another nail in the music industry, not a good sign.” We’ll get back to that. You might also think, “An indie label going down, that sucks when the majors are still going.” Conceptually a good point.

Thing is, though, that Gottlieb has a bit of a reputation.

Does he ever.

The first I knew about TVT, aside from the ‘TV’s Greatest Themes’ compilations that made their initial name, came courtesy of a little release of theirs in 1989 called Pretty Hate Machine, the debut album release of another entity equally well known for a three-letter name. I remembered looking at the cover art and all at KLA at UCLA and thinking, “Oh, another thing on Wax Tra…wait, this isn’t on Wax Trax? What the hell?” (Keep in mind this was at a time when it seemed like EVERYTHING that NIN was, shall we say, inspired by was on or had been on Wax Trax, with the exception of Skinny Puppy. There were other roots as well but context is all and if you told me then, “Stern industrial/dance album with blunt themes…label?” I would have said “Wax Trax.” Everyone would. It was that era.)

Thanks to a handy combination of touring, photogenic looks and payola grease (or whatever else was needed), that proved to be the breakout release for band and label, getting reasonable attention and airplay at a time when few small labels could. That Trent Reznor might have ended up on a major label at some point seemed clear, but as this handy little page summarizes, he was driven to those arms more rapidly than might have initially been guessed, thanks to Mr. Gottlieb:

While NIN was touring both with Lollapalooza and other bands, relations between Reznor and TVT Records got much worse; TVT had released a ten song EP in the USA for Head Like A Hole which was actually a few minutes longer in length than Pretty Hate Machine. Reznor claimed that he should have received more royalties from the sales of Head Like a Hole because, according to contract, he should have received payment as though it was an album, not an EP; TVT disagreed. Also working to break down this relationship was TVT’s restrictive attitude toward NIN; Reznor wanted more freedom with what he could do with Nine Inch Nails but TVT wanted him to make a specific sound and assign him producers (a problem other bands have also had with the company). Reznor countinued to tour to bring in money without having to make another album for TVT and recorded his next album, Broken, in secret with the personal funds he raised during the first Lollapalooza. He was also going to use that money to get a lawyer that would get him off the label (”I decided to leave the label at any cost, if that was the end of my career then that was the end of my career.”). He eventually left TVT but the battles took up precious time which, along with touring, caused a long lapse in time between recordings.

Reznor worked out a deal to jump ship to Interscope and start Nothing Records; meanwhile, in a very sly bit of criticism, he recorded a studio version of a live favorite, a cover of “Physical (You’re So)” by Adam Ant. In the original, Adam, who himself had moved from a minor to major label in similarly fraught circumstances back in the late seventies, introduced the song with a quite but audible slam back at said label, “Eat your heart out, Do It.” In Trent’s version, this was changed to “Eat your heart out, Steve.” It’s a classic bit of hypermusicgeek nerdery, and of course I love it (I would).

Now, without thinking that Reznor is some sort of perfect prince himself, I pretty much figured that from there on in anyone who ended up on TVT was going to eventually complain about Gottlieb. I hardly kept a running count, but it was more obvious than not that my guess was justified. One famous battle was between the Brian Jonestown Massacre and TVT — their signing to the label was part of the brilliant film Dig!, while the commentary from some ex-BJM members on the DVD spells out more thoroughly just what the band thought of Gottlieb soon thereafter. (Anton Newcombe’s own opinions are equally dire.) Meantime,as the first link I’ve put in briefly touches on, TVT’s relationships with hip-hop, while profitable, have also been highly problematic, with nearly every artist going on to vent, complain and rant about Gottlieb.

One of the more amusing consequences of it all was this old NY Times piece — which is, in fact, a correction to an earlier piece, but which runs almost as long, it seems. This is just the start:

In a profile of Mr. Gottlieb last Monday, The New York Times reported incorrectly that Mr. Gottlieb had defaulted on a $23.5 million loan and that as a result, in February he had lost control of his company, officially called TeeVee Toons Inc., to Prudential.

In fact Mr. Gottlieb was never personally responsible for the defaulted loan and remains in full control of his company. Even if Prudential were to prevail in the dispute, which is still pending in court, its remedies would be limited to seizing certain music royalty rights that TeeVee Toons transferred in 1999 to an affiliated company called TVT Catalog Enterprises. Prudential has no claim to TVT Records itself and therefore would not be in a position to sell the company, as the article reported.

The article also cast a negative light on Mr. Gottlieb’s history of involvement in lawsuits, describing him as litigious — a conclusion that is not a fair reading of the legal cases.

And it keeps going. I suspect Gottlieb and/or his lawyers had made quite a phone call or the equivalent.

Anyway, so the world goes out last night that TVT is going down, and I really shed few tears for Gottlieb or his company — and neither does Mr. Reznor, who linked to the AllHipHop story from his homepage with grim humor.

Which is where it got funnier. I noted when I first checked in that there were a slew of comments to Trent’s post and thought I would amuse myself a bit. I got a few comments into it and felt myself becoming stupider, so I closed it and went on about my day.

Bless Idolator, though. They DID read through it. And you should read their breakdown of the kind of posts they saw.

But rather than concluding on that note, I’ll talk more instead about something else that announced it was going away today — No Depression magazine. I never felt any real connection to the aesthetic of the magazine — rootsy Americana, however narrowly or broadly described, is not a listening priority, and neither is willful nostalgia, as seen in stated goals like “The design philosophy behind No Depression is meant to reflect aesthetics in vogue from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. Illustrators working in one or more of those styles are encouraged to apply, but please don’t trouble us with work that looks as if it were generated on a computer.” It’s all a bit much for me — I prefer a free play of interchange within the historical moment, options rather than contractions — but No Depression had its approach and sought to serve its own purpose and goals rather than bow to whims, a stance I always approve of.

Sadly — and I do think this is very sad — they are ending publication. And their letter circulating about the closure, which I noticed on ILM and then referred to Idolator, contains some of the sharpest, simplest thoughts about the changing musical and music business landscape I’ve read in a long while, regretful but not self-pitying, closely observed but not railing. You owe it to yourself to read it all, but to take a core point:

We, like many of our friends and competitors, are dependent upon advertising from the community we serve.
That community is, as they say, in transition. In this evolving downloadable world, what a record label is and does is all up to question. What is irrefutable is that their advertising budgets are drastically reduced, for reasons we well understand. It seems clear at this point that whatever businesses evolve to replace (or transform) record labels will have much less need to advertise in print.

To say that there’s a direct connection between TVT and No Depression’s troubles is silly, but that there is a conceptual one is clear. If, as is cogently noted here, ‘what a record label is’ is up for grabs even as a concept, then an economic model rooted in a certain implied stability cannot hold. A label like TVT loses revenue, cannot afford to advertise. A publication like No Depression that needed advertising to survive, in an affordable way for readers and in order to pay its writers, cannot afford to publish.

And then what?

Obviously I write from a position of self-interest, being a (very) semi-pro writer myself. As the No Depression letter says clearly, it isn’t that there aren’t potential readers, nor potential writers, nor that they aren’t proud of their work and believe in it. But older locus points of discussion are no longer surviving as they used to, and other ones may not be as stable.

And so as the TVT thing shakes down in whatever way it does, remember instead No Depression’s farewell note. The one was ultimately about money. The other, about love of a chosen art. I know who I would side with.