Of all the wacky responses I got from the announcement of Punk Planet’s closure (“Have you considered going online?” “Why don’t you just move to Canada?” and “Why didn’t you warn me?!”) by far the most prescient was this one:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
All the hubbub about this being a revival of the question of “selling out,” though, misses the point. In the early 1990s, when bands jumped from an independent label to a major label, they did so for direct and indirect financial gain. Major labels offered wider access to a bigger audience and crazy fat advance checks that allowed members to quit shitty day jobs, no second thoughts. It was a faster track to the success all artists envision, and the big labels–hot for the next Nirvana and gearing up for the Telecom Act of 1996–were willing to make promises they’d never have to keep in pursuit of providing all culture. But what these bands left behind were the friends who’d brought them onto the independent labels in the first place, nurtured their smaller (or medium-sized) audiences, and provided them an autonomous but supportive environment in which to explore their sound. Sometimes, the labels were OK with it; they couldn’t keep up with runoff demand for their product anyway. But mostly, people were angry and hurt: the labels, the bands, and sometimes the major label reps whose bosses had promised to shepherd their picks through the process. Thus: “sell-out” became an insult, a trading-in of community for money.
Now, though, we’re not dealing with as clear a transaction: a band does not as frequently leap from an independent label to a major–the independent labels have been shoved out of the business or forced to cut back on releases or are unable to support their records with advertising. Since media consolidation kicked in full-bore 11 years ago, radio play has homogenized around Sony and Time Warner subsidiary releases. Online this has seemed a more natural process, with the integration of iTunes into our daily music discussions, but not a discussion of what may not be made available on iTunes–or what may not be available online at all. Licensing deals are more common for lesser-known bands on independent labels, and now taking them is one of very few options available for musicians who would actually like an audience to hear their music.
But we’re being drowned out by our peers in the supposedly independent media. Not just by Thurston Moore, who laughingly crowns Starbucks “the new record store,” but by music journalists like the Chicago Reader’s Miles Raymer [“In Praise of Selling Out,” June 22], who short-sightedly argues that the music industry’s recent decline can be “rescued by corporations that make everything but music.” Even if, he also acknowledges, it means a venue containing “no possible sight line that [doesn’t] intersect a poster, placard, or video screen carrying one or more sponsors’ logos.”
“Old-timey indie ideals,” Raymer calls this line of criticism, and he’s right: I remember when it was feasible to think of something, tape it or write it down or paste it up, and put it out into the world without having to go though a profit-minded distributor, music label, or ISP. I remember autonomous cultural production done for the sake of promoting ideas and not achieving fame or fortune, independent publishing devoted to engaged and critical journalistic writing, and a day when I could find some music somewhere that didn’t put money into the pockets of the corporate giant that shut down the coffee shop where I used to paste up my zines. I remember democracy. Ah! Those were the good old days.
