“There was still a chance of making a profit. Now, it’s doubtful.”

Will be a busy day for me already, I can tell, but anyone interested in the economics of music in America — or, indeed, the economy — would do well to read this Idolator post that just went up courtesy of Lucas Jensen, talking specifically about how the ‘you-make-your-money-on-tour’ model of bands’ surviving these days is taking a major hit. This isn’t just a simple rant or observation, but a detailed breakdown and invitation to ask for more data. Absolutely essential. To quote a chunk:

More and more of my artists were telling me that they had to work a day job and couldn’t hit the road. At first, I thought they were missing out on golden opportunities. Hit the road! Make new fans! Do it the way our indie forefathers did it! But these days, a day job seems like a way to go. Unless someone provides me with a statistic that people are going out to shows more, I’m gonna assume that they aren’t. Going out costs more for music consumers: ticket prices are higher, traveling costs are higher… hell, beer costs are higher. Bands have to ask more from clubs. Clubs have to charge customers more to cover the bands, etc., etc. It’s a downhill slide that ends with the music consumer eating a load of crap.

And that’s all before the hard data gets posted. Give it a read, and also read Kate Richardson’s piece and linked article from yesterday.

Some days I hear or read music news that makes me feel like Edmund, Lord Blackadder

Specifically in the context of the opening minute of this YouTube clip:

And more specifically his slow burn of frustration up to the point about 40 seconds into the clip where he says, “LOOK, cretins…”

My latest reaction along these lines was courtesy of a NY Times piece with the stunningly brilliant and utterly new observation “Hey gee, there sure are a lot of people who like vinyl out there.” (It’s become such a cliche that when I mentioned said phenomenon in passing in my Thursday post on single, album and Net sales, I did so under the full assumption that anyone interested in the general subject of music had already heard it plenty of times, and was likely very sick of it.) The article in question was linked over on ILM by Chuck E. with the preface, “How many times has this article been written in the past few months? (Gets dumber every time, I think.)” A follow-up comment ran, “Yeah, these articles keep treading over the same territory, but I never get tired of reading them … especially if they are so chock full of LOLs at the expense of corny indie types and clueless record execs.”

There’s plenty to pick apart in the piece that prompts such talk — a classic eyeroller being the amazingly hamhanded attempt to equate vinyl worship with going for local/organically grown food. (As a flagbearer for the latter several times over, I couldn’t even begin to imagining coming up with that comparison without the copious aid of drugs or money, or both.) The big winner, though, comes from someone who I recognize instinctively as a fellow denizen of my past life — the college-age music freak with a love for things indie or somesuch. Thus one James Acklin talking about bonding with a bright young lass over Broken Social Scene (of all bands! I guess the Arcade Fire would have been too obvious):

“There was this immediate mutual acknowledgment, like we both totally understood what we define ourselves by,” continued Mr. Acklin, who considers his turntable, a Technics model from the 1980s that belonged to an aunt, a prized possession. “It takes a special kind of person to appreciate pops and clicks and imperfections in their music.”

Needless to say it’s the latter quote, contemptuous and condescending, which brought the LOLs on the thread so far. Deservedly so, but let’s be fair to Acklin — years ago, John D. on ILM once described the genius of the first Christian Death album (overwrought, ridiculous, absolutely beautiful in its self-conscious extremity) as a classic example of the ‘dumb-blowtorch-of-youth’ syndrome. That sounds contemptuous and condescending in turn, but he meant it, rightly, from the point of view of self-recognition, that he’d been there as well and appreciated it for what it was, while not wanting to go back there. Acklin’s flash-of-pseudo-insight arrogance isn’t that far removed from plenty of sins we’ve all committed — and lord knows if I listed mine I’d be here forever (sure am glad I didn’t say something like THAT in the first two paragraphs of an NY Times thinkpiece when I was twenty, though — if he has a sense of humor about himself he’ll live with it).

That caveat said — such a stupid statement, and the cascade of similar sentiments, or at least parallel ones, building up throughout the article provoked my invocation of Blackadder there. You just can’t believe the willful ignorance at play sometimes, or the self-delusion, or more. Allowing for your own sins as always, as already noted, sometimes it’s just breathtaking.

For instance, let’s take this sentiment, which since it isn’t a direct quote leads me to wonder how much of this is a leap of interpretive faith by author Alex Williams:

Young vinyl collectors said digital technology had made it easy for anyone — even parents — to acquire vast, esoteric music collections. In that context, nothing seems hipper than old-fashioned inconvenience.

Hahah…no. This much more than whatever Acklin says is true arrogance, an amazing if utterly expected twist on the standard idea of obscurity equalling quality. It’s not enough now that you have something unique or obscure on vinyl as compared to all that nasty mass-market stuff out there — now that music’s around for everyone, you have to show you’ve sweated and somehow earned the right to enjoy music precisely because you had to scrounge for a physical manifestation of same. Confronted with a literalization of Marx’s dictum about all that was solid melting into air, solidity is now suddenly the most crucial thing about a release, its ‘realness’ as much as its ‘inconvenience.’

Thus, to follow that part I just quoted, in a truly dumb-blowtorch-of-youth move (but which also leads me to conclude that Williams took this one guy’s claim as being more universal than it really is):

“The process of taking the record off the shelf, pulling it out of the sleeve, putting the needle on the record, makes for a much more intense and personal connection with the music because it’s more effort,” said R. J. Crowder-Schaefer, 21, a senior at New York University who said he became a serious vinyl disciple a few years ago.

A whole ten to fifteen seconds worth of ‘effort’ validates an experience! LOOK, cretins…

And I realize that mocking laughter ain’t going to fly much as an explanation, so on the off chance this fellow’s self-googling leads him here (odder’s happened…) — look, dude, what matters to you? The song, or how you hear the song? The feelings or emotions or awe that a piece of music creates in you, or whether or not you found it at a thrift sale as opposed to purchasing it through iTunes? The artistic creation or its physical incarnation?

This actually opens up a huge can of theoretical worms, one admittedly long since opened in general. (Invoking Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is almost as bad a cliche as these ‘vinyl’s back!’ pieces, and yet the man’s words remain still relevant even as we move from mechanical reproduction towards digital.) And there’s much to discuss and has been discussed in the act of how we receive and understand ‘art’ as conceived and formalized — what do we expect our books to look like? our movies and their presentation? and so forth. To go on would be more than I would want to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon, thanks.

Rightly or wrongly I keep feeling like I want to pull the ‘you kids, why back in my day…’ move, which I suppose is inevitable. And as I keep telling people, the fact remains that different generations will have different expectations and desires about ‘their’ art, how it is presented and conceived — mine isn’t the only way to look at things and should never be. Love vinyl all you want, folks — as someone who collects things like Folio Society books, I’m hardly averse to the idea of fancy presentations, quality materials, the whiff of exclusivity. We each deal with such things in our own way.

But it would be *utterly* ignorant of me — utterly, totally, completely — to make a claim along the lines of how, say, the fact that I have a sleek, high-quality-paper edition of something like Gulliver’s Travels or the complete work of Keats means I am somehow making a ‘much more intense and personal connection’ with those pieces and their authors than someone who reads them in a cheap paperback version or, in fact, googles and finds them online. (Which, of course, you can.) My hope — and really, my end belief — is that someone like Crowder-Schaefer will recognize that on his own quickly enough. I am a natural optimist that way.

Meantime, to conclude — you’ll note I haven’t gotten into the ‘but vinyl just sounds better’ argument. Frankly that’s a road even MORE long-trodden since the 1980s. So instead I’ll leave the final words to Scott Seward, again from that ILM thread, who’s around my age and has been a vinyl lover pretty much all his life, in response to Acklin’s ‘pops and clicks and imperfections’ appreciation:

ugh, i get really tired hearing about the allure of pops and clicks. blah. buy clean vinyl, you dolts.

Amen. And in the meantime, if you could put this bag over your head to pretend you’re the person I just had executed…

Mid-week meanderings and mumblings

As it were. As mentioned, this is a bit of a big work crunch time for me so my usual disquisitions are going to be at a premium for a bit (however, stay tuned for the end of the week, in that I’ll be doing some further experimenting with the blog on a couple of fronts). So for the moment, here’s some quick things noticed here and there:

• This story about a library employee in the Central Valley is a striking one, and now that I’m more aware of the case I’ll be following it as I can. More than anything else, I hope it illustrates to folks who might think of librarians and library assistants as simply people who get the books and tell people to shush — or whatever other stereotype you might care to put into play — as people who, on all levels in a library system, can deal with vexing questions that relate to both many levels of the law as well as social standards.
• The grinding out of the 2008 Democratic primaries, while expected at this point, is starting to become something worthy of one of my favorite phrases, ‘savage torpor.’ There’s a combination of ennui and passion at play which in combination with the calendar has produced a feeling of suspended animation on the one hand and a near-reflexive lashing out on the other. Most of the commentary out there reflects this, to one extent or another — and quite understandably, really. As ever, I am keeping my eye on other factors — and the big Iraq news of the day is disheartening all around — and hunkering down a bit as we wait.
• It’s been a very good year for music so far — lots of excellent albums out — but nothing as yet is a core album/performer/song of the year for me. One quarter of the way down and more to go, of course, but I’m not surprised that the full process of hearing record after record without time or inclination to regularly return to something has reached this state for me. Mine is a very specific context, though — active listener who does a lot of freelance writing and all — so I’m not pretending that this signals something beyond my own ears and thoughts. It’s still an intriguing if not surprising development, though, and I’m not surprised that my concomitant interest in a variety of other things has increased alongside this change.
• It’s spring and it’s beautiful outside. And sometimes that’s more than enough!

More soon!

So about that there instrumental NIN album (again)

Last week I offered up a fairly discursive ramble about its release and what it might all mean. As has been reported in a variety of places (here’s Idolator, linking to Billboard), it seems to have been a heck of a smash success, since, unlike Radiohead, NIN are reporting some numbers:

Nine Inch Nails’ 36-track instrumental opus Ghosts I-IV, released March 2 via NIN.com, has amassed a first week total of 781,917 transactions (including free and paid downloads as well as orders for physical product), resulting in a take of $1,619,420 USD.

Now a little under half of that comes from one thing alone, namely the deluxe $300 set that sold out in under two days and adds up to $750,000. As further noted, ‘transactions’ don’t specifically equate ‘sales’ and wouldn’t be meant to. These numbers aren’t being officially submitted to SoundScan, which is an interesting move as well, and while on the one hand there’s no reason to doubt any of them, at the same time this could be the start of a new realm of claiming first day/week ‘transactions’ that, in order to be accepted, would need some sort of auditing or verification from an outside source (presumably — it might not be needed, after all, but that seems unlikely, given human impulses to create lists, determine who is top dog, etc.).

Largest point to make right now, though, is the obvious one — this is major money. As Jess obliquely notes in the Idolator entry, the trick in ways is seeing whether or not the numbers and sales last beyond this initial burst. If this is what in UK chart terms has long been described as a ‘fanbase release’ — IE, one huge week of sales and then disappearing, thus the history of most singles by, say, T. Rex or Depeche Mode — then while Trent and company aren’t crying their way to the bank at all, it just reconfirms the special case scenario this all really is so far. But let’s say it becomes a catalog item of sorts — that every week they’re able to show numbers that aren’t huge but consistent, and reflect further income going straight to the band. Then the general interest in this as a stepping stone becomes a heightened one, especially in a time of economic unease combined with relying on worldwide audience possibilities (something Trent has been pursuing and carefully building up over these last few years in particular — aside from a Hawaii date, all Year Zero shows were in countries other than America, though he’d toured With Teeth into the ground — while the official website prominently offers options in Russian, Chinese and Korean).

Meantime, having finally made a long overdue step on the cell phone front (seriously, some friends of mine are absolutely astonished I did this), I can say something else — Ghosts I-IV is an incredible iPhone album (or if you like an iPodtouch one). By which I mean that its being designed as a full release with individual song art so ridiculously and perfectly suits an iPhone — its screen quality, the way the photos look and so forth — that I was honestly surprised a bit when giving it an ear this morning. The importance again isn’t that anything new per se is being done here, merely that Trent and company are incredibly canny people when it comes to maximizing opportunities and possibilities with this release.

Don’t overlook an equally viable — though as with Trent, if you have the cachet, money and time — model that Idolator also noted yesterday, namely Timbaland’s mobile record-and-release song-for-song unit. As Mike Barthel notes, this isn’t Mr. M. entirely going it alone, as Verizon is sponsoring it all, but the likelihood of this being a new standard is becoming increasingly clear — and what this application of “the Radiohead model gone pop” means to how pop itself is considered is damned interesting. And will require more thoughts at another time.

[EDIT: oh, and now there's the official NIN YouTube channel, building off of the remix site and the like. And onward and along!]

The Ghosts of Trent R./Blow wilder than before

(First, that title isn’t meant to be a criticism. Trust me. But go here if you’d like some context.)

Among the other joys of my birthday was discovering that one Mr. Reznor had decided to release a new album out of the blue (or almost out of the blue — there’d been a cryptic ‘two weeks’ comment on his site that amount of time prior to Sunday, so something was going to be up; I actually think he might not have even needed to do that, but more later). Among the slight sorrows, though, was the realization that nobody had expected demand to be the insanely high thing it was — both Trent and his official minions had various ‘whoops, sorry folks’ messages up on the main site and the store and album sites saying as much only a few hours after the announcement, and it wasn’t until over a day later that everything was running smoothly.

Which it did, and this morning I was able to download the album (Apple Lossless format at $5), and I’m giving it my first listen now. More concrete thoughts on that will appear at the end of this post, as well as a possible follow-up, but there’s much more to talk about right now, because this, ultimately, may well be the turning point for early 21st century music distribution…maybe.

The problem with hyperbole, of course, is just that — it is hyperbolic and it doesn’t necessarily bear any relation to reality. So my claim just now had best be regarded with several lumps of salt. In taking the time to think about this album over the past couple of days, though — its existence and its availability and much more besides — the sense of a real moment has been settling in, something that can’t not be noticed with interest, concern, fear, celebration — a lot of different things.

Let’s get one thing out of the way now, though — the Radiohead comparison. Which is logical, because the controlled leak of In Rainbows was the story of late last year on the music business front, and still represents a way forward. As a combination promotional tool, excitement builder and a careful leveraging of resources, ranging from the group’s Internet infrastructure to the passion of its fanbase, In Rainbows was a stroke of genius — and any of you following my countdown to the release knows that I was happily caught up in it all as well.

It was around this time that Trent announced his departure from Interscope, leaving with a not-bad-at-all remix album for Year Zero, noting Radiohead’s move and speculating where things might go next. In this regard his most important release since wasn’t Ghosts I-IV but the Reznor-produced Saul Williams album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, which was made available in two basic options — a temporary free download at a passable mp3 bitrate (much like the Radiohead option, which was also the only choice aside from the full limited edition release) or a charge of $5 for a variety of download options, from higher bitrates to FLAC files). It wasn’t a blockbuster — Reznor and Williams clearly had no illusions it would be, as well as knowing that a large amount of interest would be generated solely because of Reznor’s fanbase — but it did work well enough.

And so now Ghosts I-IV, which as a full-on NIN release unsurprisingly has generated a slew of attention, god knows exactly how much Internet traffic and most notably the widest variety of ordering options yet for a high-profile release like this — as you can see from the order page, there are a total of five, including one that’s not available any more which I’ll discuss more in a bit.

It’s all early days still, and trying to make a unified essay out of it all is a bit much for me right now, so instead let me dwell on a variety of observations to make:

—

* This is still an established artist’s privilege, first and foremost — a pat thing to say, but to spell it out: let’s say that a group out of nowhere offered its debut album in the fashion given here, including the limited editions and all that. Exactly how far do you think they’ll get? In contrast, in NIN we have the example of an established band, musician, brand and more — now almost two decades in the public eye, high profile at every step of the way, packing out arenas and so forth for the last few tours — able to command a fanatical loyalty that isn’t a matter of assumption but utterly demonstrable via the demand for downloads and other bits of evidence. Ignoring that loyalty or shrugging it off is a stupid assumption to make, so don’t make it — right now, most of the working musicians in this world would love to have this kind of attention and following.

* A record label is unneeded — the corporate entity releasing this project is simply ‘The Null Corporation,’ an obvious reference to the old Nothing label setup with Interscope and just as obviously Reznor’s own self-contained unit. Where Radiohead contracted with a Dave Matthews-affiliated label to formally release In Rainbows, right now it seems like there’s no need or reason for Reznor to go that kind of route. Realistically, why should he? Why would he need to? What would be the point? To get the product into the stores? To spread the word via radio marketing? To drum up interest in a tour? These questions all answer themselves at this point, and while they are extensions of the kind of fanbase-supported labels and band ventures that have long been commonplace for new and old bands alike, it is the scale here that is the difference. This approach will be copied as swiftly as possible by established bands and singers wanting to pull the plug on their own contracts or otherwise seeking alternate options.

[EDIT: this said, ILXor Creeztophair did notice something I'd missed, that the album will be available in some sort of retail form in April via 'an exciting partnership and experience,' which sounds wonderfully plummy and ridiculous. I almost hope it's through Hot Topic for the hell of it.]

* iTunes is unneeded — in ways, this is actually the bolder move, though conditionally so. The fact that one can also order mp3s (and that’s it) of the album through Amazon’s music service shows that Reznor is hardly averse to working with a larger organization where it can be helpful, and in fact this was the only way to get the album during the initial day and a half of main site swamping. So a little corporate power isn’t being sniffed at here — but again, it was through Amazon, *not* iTunes, which clearly wants to be music central and is now among the top retailers for it around. Rightly, the order options indicate which files can and can’t be played in iTunes without conversion — Reznor knows what software nearly everyone’s using — but that’s the extent of it. Now imagine, knowing what he now knows demand will be like for whatever his next release is — especially since it’ll presumably be something with vocals and straight-ahead anthems as is his wont — why he would want to pair up with iTunes (OR Amazon) when he could just acquire some more server space upfront and go to town.

* You don’t need anticipation — Radiohead did a ten-day delay, got people talking, got critics wondering, the thing became a huge enough news story, and so forth. His one little post aside as noted, Trent basically said, “Here ya go” and that was that. Both demonstrated that the established promotional/run-up to release process could be readily ignored but NIN have taken it to a logical conclusion — you’ve recorded something and have it ready? Put it up. Now, this in and of itself isn’t new — all you have to do these days is put music up on a Myspace page or something similar as you record and release it, if you don’t want to strain your own site. But you can just as easily make it an event, as formal as you want it to be, and this clearly is a formal release. And again, anticipation? Sure, it’s exciting to wait, but Reznor knows that he’s at a time where everyone wants something now, so now it is.

* You don’t have to adhere to a fanbase expectation — this is, after all, an instrumental album, where NIN has gained so much of its reputation for its perfect shout/scream/angstathons. Hey, it’s how I first got into the band back in 1990 or so, and anybody who discovered them via the With Teeth singles would have had the same visceral reaction (if they liked what they heard!). Of course, at the same time Trent has the ability to afford avoiding adherence. To put this into some context — bands like Marillion and Einsturzende Neubaten, to name two examples of many, have exercised the option where fans contribute money towards recording and manufacturing costs of releases. However, going that route, which seems logical on the face of it, can create a vicious circle — do fans want you to simply repeat what you’ve already done? Will they accept you trying something totally different? If they don’t like the results, will they be so interested in the next time around? Rather than doing that, Reznor got into the studio with his preferred collaborators — Alan Moulder again does production, Atticus Ross as cowriter of every track, Adrian Belew guesting on guitar on many songs and so forth — and did whatever the hell he wanted to do in the belief that people would be interested in whatever it was he did. He said up front it was an instrumental album and people did in fact go for it.

* You can embrace ‘piracy’ and still make a hell of a lot of money — this might actually be the real stroke of genius here, with, again, the clear caveat that this is because Reznor is established and well-off enough to be able to make this work for him. Break down those ordering options a bit — you’ll note that on the one hand he’s offering the first nine tracks as a free direct download; elsewhere, he’s directing folks to grab high-quality mp3s straight through one of the highest profile torrent sites around, the Pirate Bay. Having recently come under fire legally, for them to have Reznor not merely in their corner but as an active participant is a perfect middle finger back — artist and distribution site allied for mutual benefit, and Reznor himself neither under illusions that all of Ghosts won’t be copied and shared, even though he only shared those first nine songs directly, nor standing on ceremony when it comes to copyright. As the release notes indicate, Ghosts I-IV has been released under a Creative Commons license, similar to what I do with my photos on Flickr. That’s pretty sharp all around.

So where does the hell of a lot of money come in? Easy — there’s that $300 limited edition package that was also offered, with each package containing the full album on both vinyl and CD, a separate CD of data and multitracks, a Blu-Ray disc, tons of photographs, Mr. Reznor’s autograph, etc. etc. Tchochtkes galore, and I’m sure more than a few people thought he was nuts and that whoever working for him was nuts. Certainly I looked that price tag, shook my head and shrugged.

But having been put on offer the evening of March 2, it had fully sold out by the morning of March 4. Like that, the Null Corporation had raked in a jaw-dropping $750,000 from the sale of 2500 album packages.

Again, fanatic fanbase, established artist, etc. I keep having to say it because it can’t be ignored. But *think about that* — three quarters of a million directly to Trent and whoever he has on his staff and whoever he pays his bills to (including of course manufacture of the packages — which aren’t going to eat up all that cost by any stretch of the imagination). And that was just the hyper-limited edition — now add in the straight downloads, the CD pre-orders, the slightly fancier CD deluxe edition, all the money to be made from those, straight to him and his accountants or whoever. I don’t think any American artist has it quite so good right now and I’d be surprised if anyone else in the world does either.

—

So all that said — how’s about the music? I’m now mostly finished on my first listen through it all, and it’s very enjoyable. I had actually figured shortly after hearing it was a lengthy instrumental album that this might well be his Selected Ambient Works Volume II, some kind of monumental release with extended meditations and explorations. It isn’t, and part of me is kinda disappointed, but that’s really by means of comparison (let’s face it, if I’m thinking about that as the role model, almost everything else will suffer!) — taking it as it stands, it’s a grand mix, touching on everything from more immediately obvious fragments and sketches to anthems without lyrics, from contemplation to swagger. As such it’s an extension of Reznor’s recent work more than anything else, though in its quieter moments especially it suggests the musical approach he’d embraced on The Fragile and then left behind for subsequent efforts, something which I’m glad to see him work on again.

Beyond that, though, I have little to immediately say about Ghosts I-IV artistically — not that I can’t, just that these are my first quick impressions after a still incomplete listen (I have about three tracks to go). But given what I’ve discussed, I’ve no doubt that this, Reznor’s least immediately accessible ever, might well also be his most important, for what it is more than for what it sounds like. Time will tell, and I can’t wait to see what surprises me next.

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.