Steve Albini: the internet has solved the problem with music

Back in the 1990s, Steve Albini was the music industry’s resident and persistent cynic. At the time he was doing what he continues to do today: playing in bands (such as Shellac) and producing the music of other bands – although he prefers to call himself a recording engineer. In his mind, the word better captures the technical skill that all producers should, but often don’t, have. He has engineered more than 2,000 records – by bands you mostly won’t have heard of, although a few of them you will, including PJ Harvey, Joanna Newsom, Pixies, Fugazi and that little three-piece out of Seattle, Nirvana. In certain musical circles, he is nigh-on worshipped for his singularly independent spirit and approach to production.

On occasion Albini would write with eloquence and humour about the business of music and, more specifically, rail against its perceived inequalities. These were best summarised in his seminal essay, The Problem with Music, published in the Baffler in 1993. It memorably opened with the image of bands voluntarily swimming through a trench “filled with runny, decaying shit” in a race to reach a major label contract on the other side. Albini described them viciously fending off other competitors, only to get to the end and be told: “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke.”

Albini was 31 at the time and had considerable experience in the music world, as a musician, an engineer and perhaps most importantly as a consummate fan of, and evangelist for, talented musicians. His essay was not a broad anti-corporation rant – there’s no high-flying ideology – but highlighted specific gripes, illustrated by personal experiences. The industry, as it was then, was dominated by the big labels and the bloated middlemen who exploited the music of (generally) poorly paid musicians, resulting in a lack of choice for consumers.

More than 20 years later, it’s a vastly different place. As Albini said on Saturday in his keynote address at Melbourne’s Face the Music conference, he has consistently worked in music throughout the past two decades and is thus well-placed to speak about its changes. As someone who is now Albini’s age when he wrote The Problem with Music, I am accustomed to figures of his generation waxing lyrical about the past, too often declaring today’s scene nothing but the ashen heap of a once-glorious kingdom. Would the music industry’s biggest curmudgeon still have something to rail against?

As it turns out, no he doesn’t. That’s the thing about Albini – he was never rebelling for the sake of rebelling. Throughout the intervening years he has demonstrated moral consistency in the face of the digital revolution. Albini has always put the music first and in his mind the old paradigm, dominated as it was by labels, radio stations and a handful of mega-successful musicians, did not produce a healthy ecosystem. A wealth of talent not only failed to achieve sustainable careers, but were exploited by a multimillion-dollar industry, which flogged their music with virtually no financial risk to themselves and returned little in terms of royalties to the artists.

Back in 1993, Albini couldn’t have known – or at least gave no hint of knowing – that the internet would shake up the music world as it has. The fact that it has, providing solutions to the many challenges faced by both talent (how do we record and distribute music easily and cheaply?) and fans (how do we find and consume music easily and cheaply?) is to be celebrated.

Nor does he skirt around the issue of pay; his original essay famously included a financial breakdown of who gets paid what in the music industry. And if anything, Albini argues that for the vast majority of musicians the internet has provided comparable, if not superior, pay rates than the system of old.

We’ve published the entire address (with a few edits; I removed a throwaway jibe at Prince in case his highness’s lawyers come knocking) and it’s worth reading as a follow-up to his essay written 21 years ago. Albini explains in detail how major labels would carelessly spend money on promotion, thereby propping up record stores, radio stations and PR companies, safe in the knowledge that this money would be recouped at the artists’ expense.

As he explains in his address: “It’s as if your boss, instead of giving your paycheck to you, could pay that money to his friends and business associates, invoking your name as he did. Since his net cost was the same and his friends and associates could return the favour, why would he ever want to let any of that money end up in your hands?”

In the eyes of Albini and his cohort of hard-working, indie bands – not to mention many musicians who had a brief (and largely financially unrewarding) time in the spotlight – the internet has offered a way of creating a sustainable career.

Albini has a knack for colourful imagery, such as this description of how the internet has provided music lovers instant access to a cornucopia from around the world: “Imagine a great hall of fetishes where whatever you felt like fucking or being fucked by, however often your tastes might change, no matter what hardware or harnesses were required, you could open the gates and have at it on a comfy mattress at any time of day. That’s what the internet has become for music fans. Plus bleacher seats for a cheering section.”

For every David Byrne or Taylor Swift critiquing the new pay model, there are acts such as Detroit’s Death who are experiencing a career renaissance, thanks to music obsessives who trawl through back catalogues and share them in a noisy, heaving, digital jungle. Or to provide an Australian context, young, new artists such as Courtney Barnett, who have the initiative to take advantage of this brave new world, selling music and T-shirts through Bandcamp and taking a higher per-piece profit as a result.

Albini has always been an outsider but today it’s his optimism that sets him apart. In the final third of his hour-long speech he dismantles a commonly uttered platitude: “We need to figure out how to make this digital distribution work for everyone.” Within this seemingly inoffensive statement are tacit assumptions, he explains, namely “the framework of an exploitative system that I have been at odds with my whole creative life”.

For Albini, the internet has placed us on a path to a democratic utopia which does not require the flailing, corrupt figures of a fading musical past. He leaves us with an even more radical idea in the area of copyright: that we should let go of all attempts to exert control over the distribution of works once they are released. He uses that word “release” in a literal sense – like “a bird or a fart”. As he says: “music has entered the environment as an atmospheric element, like the wind, and in that capacity should not be subject to control and compensation.”

In contrast to what almost anyone else will tell you, Albini believes there has never been a better time to be involved in music – as a fan and as a musician (excluding, perhaps, the megastars): “I see more bands and I hear more music than ever before in my life. There are more gigs, more songs available than ever before, bands are being treated with more respect, and are more in control of their careers and destinies.

“I see them continuing as a constellation of enterprises: some big, some small, most small but all of them with a more immediate response from their audience and a greater chance to succeed. It is genuinely exciting.”