What's All This, Then?

A little background: I’ve worked in the “music business” since 1987, when I wrote reviews for my college newspaper. Once out of college, my first job was as a personal assistant to Susanna Hoffs right after the Bangles broke up. Learning the music business at that age, in that time, at the level, and from that perspective has shaped everything that has followed. 

Being in the living room for the very earliest days of Mazzy Star and house-sitting for Ad-Rock were some of the cool perks, but I also witnessed the tension between industry and audience expectations on the one hand versus artist integrity and reality on the other. It was very often NOT an equal weighting.

Then I spent a year in the business affairs department of Virgin Records. Janet Jackson, Lenny Kravitz, and Paula Abdul were reigning supreme, while Ben Harper and the Wallflowers were just getting signed. That time was incredibly educational for me. Not only did I come to understand that the standard 60-page artist contract was wildly extractive, but I also got to see another side of the friction: the industry folks who felt both worship and disdain for the artists who make the entire business of music possible. 

For Black artists, in particular, the music industry is no different from society-at-large… appropriating if not outright taking everything it can from Black culture while giving very, very little good in return. I mean, I saw archived contracts from a bunch of the old blues artists who signed with an actual X and were paid pennies for compensation. That said, the extractions have never been limited to race: One time, I pushed back against higher ups who wanted to intentionally mis-interpret a deal in their own favor at the expense of a very successful white artist. I was only 23, but I won that stand-off.

In the more than 30 years since, the industry has gotten even more extractive, squeezing every single cent it can out of the music and its makers. Streaming decimated album sales; politics incinerated touring and merch sales; and technology not only severed the artist-fan connection with algorithms, but also flooded the distribution zone with AI. 

Real talk: Artists are… a unique breed. Their hearts and minds are brilliant, thoughtful, and unimaginably healing. The way they experience and express the love and loss that touches every life helps us all see our current world and imagine a better one. With that, their creativity has given my life – and probably yours – context and connection when it has been most needed. 

Right now, there’s a modern-day Mazzy Star figuring out their sound and writing their first songs in a friend’s living room. Then what? 

That's the question we're here to answer... together.