How do you define what an artist's worth?

Let's all try to do better in 2025.

The end of the year is a good time to think about the things we value. Here in the USA, we pretty much want everyone to fend for themselves. Our social contract celebrates increased shareholder value as the true definition of worth, and derides anyone who doesn’t make a measurable contribution to the bottom line.

That’s not such a great system for people who operate independently in the creative arts. A few make a big pile of cash over a limited time span, but a surprisingly small number of those manage to hold on to it.

We can all name some musicians who were blessed to record a few songs that people still want to hear performed live. I even know a few performers whose new music finds a loyal audience decades after they started. They’re the exceptions.

Most musicians and artists are living gig-to-gig. I’ve known a lot of them who’ve delayed or even skipped the kind of basic health care that most of us take for granted. I know too many creative people who’ve died young from the weight of the struggle.

What’s the solution? We could decide to value art in a way that pays creators in a way that they have the chance to make all the responsible decisions that all our prosperous friends take for granted. Or we could just demand that anyone who wants the luxury of making art get a job to fund their hobby.

I asked OpenAI to generate an image of an 8-track tape player in the style of the genius mid-century industrial designer George Nelson. I think the model has zero taste but at least an idea of who Nelson was, but I think the 8-track part stumped the bot.

I’m not sure that would work. Many of the most talented people I know aren’t wired to hold down the kind of day job where an employer hands you a health insurance card and takes retirement money out of every paycheck.

I always come back to the idea that our greatest eras in popular music were fueled by cheap tuition here in American and taxpayer-funded art school in the UK. (DOGEboys: Please note that I didn’t call it free). See the Beatles section of my Art vs. Science in the 20th Century post.

Imagine a world where the President of the United States holds a jazz concert on the White House lawn and makes a point of speaking to Charles Mingus, who was unable to perform because he was suffering from ALS.

We lost two of the most talented creative people I’ve ever known over the past few weeks, and I’ve been thinking about them both throughout the holidays. Neither of them never got paid in spite of the fact that each of them made huge contributions to rock over their lifespans.

Barry Squire

This man had astonishing instincts about how well musicians would play together.

If you knew drummer and A&R executive Barry Squire, I hope you’ve already contributed to the Sweet Relief Fund started to help his family after his death on December 2nd.

I looked at my subscriber list, and I know that several of you have careers that were substantially enhanced by Barry’s work. His family is facing significant financial challenges, and they could use our help.

If you don’t know Barry, you know his work. He spent decades as a consultant who could put together backing bands for solo artists and found replacement members for dozens of famous bands when a member quit or had to be asked to leave.

This is a very particular skill. No one really wants to hold open auditions after their picture has been in Rolling Stone, so labels, managers, and artists depended on Barry to meet with potential musicians and figure out which ones would be a good musical and personality fit.

You can see a small number of the hundreds of projects he worked on at the above link, but people usually celebrate him for putting together the Alanis Morissette backing band for her Jagged Little Pill tour, a group that included several unknowns who went on to fame: Taylor Hawkins (Foo Fighters), Chris Chaney (Jane’s Addiction), and Jesse Tobias (Morrissey).

It’s my understanding that Barry got paid a one-time fee for those services, and he kept his rates low enough that we was able to work with hundreds of aspiring artists who needed help putting a band together.

I first met Barry when he came over to Geffen from Warner Bros. after Eddie Rosenblatt hired WB legend Roberta Petersen to run the A&R department. Roberta was brilliant and epically stubborn, a throwback to the old days when A&R folks were supposed to sign whatever moved them without considering if the promotion staff already knew how to sell it.

There were forces on the marketing side of the company who were looking forward to a less intense working environment after the departures of Tom Zutaut and John Kalodner. They had no idea what it was going to be like facing off against a creative head whose ambition was purely artistic and believed that it was the company’s job to figure out how to sell what she liked.

Barry moved on to Columbia Records for a few years after Universal Music shut down Geffen Records in 1999, but those major label paychecks represented a small window in a very long career.

In an ideal world, a guy like Barry would have gotten some kind of recurring payments from the labels and artists who used services. If you find a bass player who stays with a band for a decade, maybe there should have some regular bonuses.

This is someone who made an oversized contribution to the culture of popular music over the past three decades and there really wasn’t any recognition or compensation that matched what Barry brought to his clients.

Here’s where some of you blame a creative person for not being a good enough business negotiator. I see a role that’s been consistently undervalued and a person who was determined to provide a service that very few (if any) other people had the insight to offer.

I’m lucky enough to have the skills to hustle my way through the down times, but even I know that my creative work would have been better if I hadn’t devoted so much time to figuring out how to get paid.

Barry Squire was genuinely good person in a field full of schemers. I’m glad I got to work with him and learn a few things from his example.

Will Cullen Hart

I’m really heartbroken that we’ve lost Will Cullen Hart, the Athens-via-Ruston, LA musicians who fronted the Olivia Tremor Control alongside the late Bill Doss.

The last time I saw Will was at the Athens premiere of The Elephant 6 Recording Co. documentary in 2023. He was looking healthier than he did in the film, but he was still a bit fragile. I wrote about how the film captured an amazing era when broke musicians wrestled obsolete recording technology into some of the most amazing music of the ’90s.

Elephant 6 and the magic of limitations

The Apples in Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotels, the Olivia Tremor Control, and Elf Power are just the most famous bands in a scene that stubbornly (that word again) chased their ideal of how music should work in an era when big labels were showering huge bags of money on anyone they thought might turn out to be the next Nirvana.

You may think that guys like Bill Doss and Will Hart could have found financial security if they just tweaked their attitudes a tiny bit and cashed in on the post-Nirvana A&R hysteria. The cash was there for the taking, right?

I flipped over the band’s first album Music from the Unrealized Film Script: Dust at Cubist Castle and went to see the Olivia Tremor Control in 1996 with the full intention of bringing them to Geffen. I could have gotten away with signing just about anyone at that moment, but I knew within the first 30 seconds of their set that whatever delicate creative balance the band had found would be destroyed by corporate expectations that they deliver a radio-friendly Weezer-style smash in exchange for the giant check I’d have to offer.

(One of you should remind me to write about the absurdity of an era when not spending a large enough money to sign a band could damage their prospects. If they didn’t cost a million dollars, could they really be any good?)

I thought they’d have a better chance at having a productive and creative career without my interference. I didn’t realize just how fucking broke all those Elephant 6 bands were.

Would Will the person have been better off with that big corporate check even if he would have been strongly encouraged to hand his next album over to a celebrity mix engineer who didn’t have the time or inclination to dig into the minutiae that was so important to his scene? How would have Will, Bill, and the rest of the band responded to the results?

This is what I think about when I can’t sleep. How do we support artists who aren’t blessed (or cursed) with the entrepreneurial traits that would allow them to succeed in a fend-for-yourself economy? Could Bill Doss and Will Hart have gifted us with more great records if they’d had access to health care and a livable wage?

What frustrates me is that questions like this have become radioactive, irrevocably tied to politics instead of values. Does art (or teaching or public service or health care) have value outside of the profits it can generate?

People seem to love those records created by art school slackers who were writing songs when they were supposed to be learning graphic design. We’ve made better art when artists didn’t have to compete in a winner-take-all economy.

I have the nagging sense that we’d have a lot more music from Will Hart if he’d been fairly compensated for the joy he created. I know you can’t convert joy to cryptocurrency, but there has other ways for us to value culture besides shareholder value.

You may be saying, “Well, you know, that's just like uh, your opinion, man,” but consider this the hint of the (21st) century: OpenAI thinks this is what an 8-track tape looks like.

Spotify, again

My recent rant against Spotify was about the terrible quality of their music streams and didn’t get into their biggest scandal of the year. The company has been flooding its playlists with what I suspect is royalty-free library music. Liz Pelly published an investigation into the “fake artists” scam in the latest issue of Harpers Magazine:

The Ghosts in the Machine

People are losing their minds over the revelations here. I’m not sure Pelly exposed anything that will be news to the people in my circle, but this is most certainly the first piece of mainstream journalism that explains the scheme in a way that resonates outside the core of the industry.

As someone who actively collects vintage library music LPs (especially Italian ones!), I’m not going to presume that all of the music produced under this system is bad. There’s probably more accidentally great stuff than the detractors would like there to be.

But the vast majority of this stuff is junk and it’s taking up slots that could be filled my artists who are trying to make music that matters to an audience. I’m not sure I’m totally against the idea of a company commissioning its own music, but they should be transparent about what they’re doing. If we’re going to have to label AI-generated video and images, streaming music companies should label the royalty-free songs in their collections.

Give this a read, and adjust your habits accordingly.

Thanks to Ted

Ted Gioia’s writing about jazz was a huge help for me once I finally circled back around to it after rejecting the entire genre in favor of punk rock. Actually, what I rejected was what I now call “high school band director jazz” and not the dangerous, daring music that it really is.

Ted’s become an oracle with his newsletter The Honest Broker, writing about the history of music through the millennia and calling out the suits who degrade and exploit artists. He’s always worth reading.

He just published a list of the 25 Best Online Articles of 2024 and it’s not behind his paywall. Liz Pelly’s The Ghosts in the Machine article mentioned above makes the list, as do excellent pieces by Lemony Snicket The Basic Eight author Daniel Handler, War author Sebastian Junger, an amazing story about Sinatra and his grandmother from Chris Dalla Riva at Can’t Get Much Higher, Greg Epstein on Silicon Valley’s obsession with AI, and Kate Dwyer about the failure of artist development in the book publishing business.

I’m really surprised to see my piece about complicated history with the Grammy awards included in such accomplished company:

How I Got Booted as a Grammy Voter

Even more important to me is the pull quote that Ted uses to recommend my piece. It’s the bit I wrote about the widespread rumor that Grammy nominations were “adjusted” to better reflect the tastes of influential board members back in the days when I was a kid breaking into the business.

That was a hard bit for me to write, and it’s a paragraph that gets at the heart of what I’m trying to do here.

I didn’t name names, because I’m more interested in the business structure that created incentives for an individual to behave that way. I know a lot of people who loved the executive mentioned in the rumor, and I don’t know for a fact that this person actually fixed the voting.

Having lived through my own public dragging fueled by anonymous sources, there’s nothing that I hate more than a blind item. Whenever I talk about this stuff, I try to focus on the actual behavior and its fallout without leaving bread crumbs that fuel speculation about the personalities involved. I think Rick Beato and I did an excellent job of this in our video about the fall of rock radio. It’s the system that sucked and the system that corrupted people who generally tried to do the right thing by artists.

A recommendation from a writer like Ted Gioia means a lot, a fact that I can confirm because I’ve been flooded with new subscribers since he published his list. Thanks to everyone who’s been here for a while, and welcome to the new readers.

I also got into an argument with ChatGPT after it told me that Elvis had ever met Jimmy Carter in person. When I presented the evidence, it tried to tell me that this was photoshopped. I argued some more, showed it the receipts (which come up on page 1 of a Google search), and the bot eventually admitted I was correct. Trust no one.

Unplugged

If you’re connected to me on Facebook, X, Instagram, or LinkedIn, you may have noticed that I’m not out there pushing my work. I haven’t canceled my social media accounts, but I’m avoiding those sites as much as I can. (Note that I didn’t link to my pages. Don’t search for them. There’s nothing interesting there and I doubt I’ll see anything you try to share anytime soon).

That means I’m depending on my readers to share my work if they like it. If you find something interesting, just forward it to someone who might enjoy it.

I’ll leave you this year with an excellent piece by Ed Zitron, a PR executive and former journalist (who’s also a fellow veteran of TechCrunch). Ed spends a lot of time thinking about the rot in our digital economy, and a recent issue of his Where’s My Ed At? newsletter digs deep into the soul-crushing online experience (something that’s especially toxic for people who can’t spend their way out of the pit with expensive computers and fast internet).

Never Forgive Them

If you’re wondering why so many people you encounter online are so frustrated and unhappy, maybe it’s time to consider that it’s the awful experience that’s making everyone so crazy.

While every platform has its issues, I’m glad to have a way to connect with people that’s not primarily about collecting data about readers for me to sell to some anonymous corporate pirate out to exploit everyone they can.

8-track of the day

Those Elephant 6 bands talked about the Beatles, but they really reminded me of ’60s outcasts like the 13th Floor Elevators. Roky Erickson was lucky enough to have a family who supported him through his struggles.