Applied Science #14: Independence, Revisited
“We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.”
- Arthur Jensen (played by Ned Beatty), Network (1976)
In 2021, I wrote the following on the topic of independence in music:
“The most commonly discussed notions of independence are largely fictive, rooted in ownership that still requires mass media outlets and tools for successful exploitation. Even Prince, arguably the most important paradigm for creative and commercial independence, did one-off license deals with majors in his early 2000s comeback period in order to maximize his product’s reach. He still owned the product, but the pipes belonged to someone else. (E-40’s career followed a similar path of joint ventures and distribution partnerships that typically worked in his economic interest)
…
Defining independence demands a further step. It’s not purely a matter of who owns and exploits the copyrights, it’s about data ownership and platform control. Autonomy is the ultimate goal—the capacity for self-determination.”
Three years on, the “independent vs. major” paradigm has hollowed further, a false binary useless for analyzing artists’ options for monetizing their music.
A small sampling of Billboard’s Indie Power Players list traces the mirage of independence. Among the companies mentioned:
LVRN, a well-funded label and publishing company with a long-standing Interscope joint-venture.
Big Machine Label Group, the HYBE-owned, Universal-distributed label best known for launching the career of indie darling Taylor Swift.
The Darkroom, an Interscope joint-venture home to budding artists like D4VD and relative unknown Billie Eilish.
Concord, a multi-billion dollar company that almost purchased another billion dollar company (Hipgnosis) recently and has become a major power in the record and publishing businesses.
BMG, quite literally once a major label.
Big Loud Records, a Republic-partnered country powerhouse.
Disney Music Group. I would hope I shouldn’t have to explain why the notion of any arm of Disney being independent is, at best, a pretty funny joke.
With no judgment as to the quality of the work these companies do, referring to them as “independent” does little justice to the concept. If these companies aren’t partnered with majors, they’re distributed by majors, or funded like majors.
At this juncture, independence is an illusory skin, a narrative device conjured to make companies and individuals seem scrappy or ideologically pure in comparison to their major counterparts and competitors. We have largely outgrown the need for the notion that there is some collection of independent resources or powers that stand in opposition to the major label system. This divide is a calcified story that we tell ourselves, a myth of an older version of the industry that reached its apotheosis in the early 2010s, as music streaming and a variety of venture-backed companies like Stem and Bandlab opened up new possibilities for unsigned creators, and when Chance the Rapper took his independent act all the way to the Grammy’s. The “indie” companies on Billboard’s list are a part of the same commercial extraction ecosystem as the majors. How could they not be? Success in any context, “independent” or major, requires significant expenditure, infrastructure, and collaboration between entities.
If you have not watched HBO’s recent Stax documentary Soulsville, USA, I recommend immediate viewing. In episode three, the tiny Memphis-based company picks up the pieces of a disintegrated relationship with Atlantic Records. A larger major label exploited a regional label in a tale as old as time, as Jerry Wexler’s Atlantic merged with Warner Brothers and absconded with Stax’s entire catalog to date. Tasked with rebuilding canon from scratch, resourceful Stax vice president/partner Al Bell tells his staff producers and songwriters to hit the studio and write like their lives depend on it. A reflective, older Bell talks about how expensive it is to be independent: The cost of promotion, staffing, and the conveyor-belt production of a new trove of music required to generate income from a standing stop.
Stax regains momentum and reaches previously unimaginable popularity as the ‘60s tumble into the ‘70s. Its independent engine turns Isaac Hayes into an Academy Award winning icon in short order. Stax begins to resemble the majors that it attempted to stand apart from, if not by choice, then by the sheer necessity of answering popularity. The laws of commerce force Stax to play by certain rules and engage in behaviors that would allow it to compete at the highest levels. At the height of Hayes’ success, Bell strikes a first-of-its-kind distribution deal with Clive Davis and powerhouse CBS/Columbia, keeping 85% of Stax’s earned royalties and paying a 15% distribution fee to its new partner. The deal took effect on Oct 24, 1972.
Two years later, Clive Davis had been ousted. CBS strangled Stax’s regional distribution in an attempt to force the terms of a renegotiation.
Two years after that, Stax would close.
Some 50 years ago, Stax’s rise and fall already illustrated the idea that “independence” can mean many things, but often refers to the ability to control your own destiny and be the final arbiter of your creative decisions. It can also be a forced choice: Stax started out as an independent because Memphis was far from major-studded New York and Los Angeles. Yet when Stax sought something bigger, Bell recognized the need for corporate partners, whether banks or major labels. Even in perceived independence, the interconnectivity of commercial entities that may or may not be “independent” is inescapable.
Stax’s story illustrates the outcomes of classic capitalistic competition: Get acquired or merge with powers of a similar size in pursuit of profit or distributive power. Refuse this bargain and risk death in the process.
We live in an age of flattened walls. If the music industry once resembled a panopticon (the major labels the prison guards, the artists the prisoners, the indies a liberatory option), now it is a prismatic prison in which the prisoners and guards cannot be sure who is who. The inside is the outside.
Part of this confusion comes from the tooling renaissance of the last decade. It is easier to make music, get it to DSPs and digital stores, and promote it than at any point in history. A proliferation of apps and reading materials make it possible to understand the historic imbalances of a notoriously complex business. We launched the record and publishing deal simulators a few years ago to allow anyone to visualize the economics of deals. Singer Kindness created an incredible glossary of music industry terms at the start of the pandemic. Catalog’s Alex Siber recently published a thoughtful two part essay on the perpetuity record deal, questioning exploitative practices by both independent and major labels and conceiving healthier alternatives. Two weeks ago, independent mainstay Daddy Kev launched contract and royalty analyzer musiclawyer.ai, utilizing ChatGPT and Gemini to assess record deals. It is a fantastic resource that will hopefully help level the playing field for any artist, producer, or songwriter negotiating a deal.
Daddy Kev’s tool makes me think of another passage I wrote in 2021:
“The future of the major music business is a data lake, an aggregation of ISRC’s, ISWC’s, and IPI’s readily available for exploitation. The record label as we know it is a romantic notion, a vestige of a past in which labels dominated the funding and dissemination of music (not to mention the public imagination, symbols of quality and specific aesthetics worth wearing on a t-shirt). We are entering an age of vertical exploitation—the intellectual property locker as a hub surrounded by various spokes designed to find new ways to monetize the art stored in the core.”
While the aims of Kev’s tool are beneficent, it is built on at least one program (ChatGPT) employing dubious practices. We can hope that our data is being handled with careful consideration by companies like OpenAI (ChatGPT’s creator), but that company and many others like it face constant accusations and threats of legal action for violating copyright and name/image/likeness protections. What’s more, we have decades of understanding that companies like Google and Meta treat our data as a product. It feels foolish to assume magnanimity on the part of any major corporation, least of all the ones handling mountains of our personal information. If you’re inputting your record deal into a tool that uses ChatGPT, is your data really safe? Is it really your data at that point? Was it ever, or does it belong to the company contracting you? And if that data is being gobbled up by a company training to build an AI-powered competitor to Google, is any tool that uses it really independent of corporate tendrils? To reframe a question from Applied Science #7: Can anything digital really be considered “independent” when all of our data architecture is governed by publicly traded companies and multinational behemoths? When our data is a product we may not own outright? This tangle of corporate interests and potential privacy violations is one of the many places independence breaks down for me as a concept, as the realities of a digitally connected world make it difficult for any individual to have true sovereignty without making the extreme choice to go completely off grid.
To consider the music business (or, truly, any business) on a continuum from independent to major is to largely miscast the current playing field. I find it more useful to regard individuals and institutions as:
Informed vs. uninformed
Empowered vs. limited
Connected vs. isolated
Resourced vs. under-resourced
Profit-driven vs. purpose-driven
These spectrums expand on the concepts of autonomy and artist sovereignty I raised in 2021. They characterize a flattened landscape in which the tired business metaphors of moats, war chests, and walls give way to quicksand, phantoms, and ever-shifting borders. They enable a clearer thinking about place and meaning, making room for a balancing of factors that every IP business has to account for in some capacity. These five categories reflect our present age of copyright fear and explosive boom/bust cycles (both macroeconomically and on a company-by-company basis). Freeing ourselves from the dialectic of independents and majors opens up a more nuanced conversation about artists’ needs and the options that exist to achieve their goals. Any other framework is just storytelling.
A broader, perhaps slightly outlandish thought about how our present took shape. 1976 appears to resemble a specific, silent rupture in American history. In the wake of the Vietnam tragedy, the American bicentennial year comprised the closure of Stax, the filming of Star Wars, the formation of Apple, the release of Rocky, the merger of the NBA and ABA, the Viking I Mars landing, the Son of Sam murders in New York, the release of Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, the Band’s final performance, the release of director Sidney Lumet’s Network, and the attempted assassination of Bob Marley. In order:
1/12/76 - Stax ordered to close
3/22/76 - Star Wars (dir. George Lucas) begins filming
4/1/76 - Apple Computer Company formed
4/9/76 - Family Plot (dir. Alfred Hitchcock) released; it would be the final film from the directorial titan
4/23/76 - The Ramones’ self-titled debut album released
5/24/76 - The Judgment of Paris takes place, with a collection of California wines beating out French competitors in a blind-tasting of wines
6/17/76 - NBA/ABA merger
7/2/76 - North Vietnam/South Vietnam reunification (following the end of the Vietnam War in April 1975)
7/3/76 - In Gregg v. Georgia, the United States Supreme Court rules that the death penalty is not inherently cruel and unusual punishment
7/4/76 - American Bicentennial
7/20/76 - Viking I lands on Mars
7/29/76 - Son of Sam murders in NYC begin
9/28/76 - Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life released
11/2/76 - Jimmy Carter elected 39th President of the United States
11/21/76 - Rocky (dir. Sylvester Stallone) released (the eventual highest grossing film of the year)
11/25/76 - The Band performs the concert that will become The Last Waltz
11/26/76 - The Sex Pistols’ debut single “Anarchy in the U.K.” released
11/27/76 - Network (dir. Sidney Lumet) released
12/3/76 - Attempted assassination of Bob Marley
12/8/76 - The Eagles - Hotel California released (the album will ultimately become the third best selling album ever)
It is a time when art seems to reckon with a tectonic shift. Particularly Wonder’s magnum opus and Lumet’s masterpiece , the former a solemn and hopeful antidote to the pitch black, prescient satire of the latter.
On Songs, Wonder attempted to encapsulate life in its totality, joy and pain, politics and philosophy, grand religion and personal storytelling. It is as ambitious a project as any produced during a decade of grand visions, an attempt at an artistic salve for a nation still reeling from the procession of tragedies that pocked the ‘60s and early ‘70s.
In Network, writer Paddy Chayefsky conceived a screenplay so prophetic and tightly worded that its vision of corpocracy feels not only modern, but predictive of times yet to come. One of its finest quotes opens this piece and by now I hope you can see why.
While Jaws may have invented the summer blockbuster in 1975, Star Wars minted the Hollywood franchise film as we know it. Rocky’s release later in the year breaks ground for one of the most enduring sports series in film. Thus begins an era of infinite sequels, haunting cinemas and streamers to this day.
Apple needs no further historicization. It is the consumer electronics company that has captured the public imagination more than almost any other since its founding.
That the year began with the choking out of independent, Black-owned Stax and nearly ended with the murder of a liberatory, Black musical icon merely adds to the haunting poetic resonance of America’s 200th birthday.
Perhaps 1976 marks the end of the era of true independence, the dawn of the golden age of the conglomerate, a time driven by profit at all costs, a slithering freeway from the post-World War II fever dream of the American middle class to Reagan’s greed-is-good-god-bless-America ‘80s, the fetid birth of a new individualistic thinking that continues to rot the core of this country.
But, hey, the new Don Toliver and Kodak Black song is pretty hot, so let’s kick those moral qualms to the curb and zone out for three minutes and twenty-two seconds.
1976: The year we lost the War for Independence. Nice!!!😆👍