Following Graham’s earlier example / post about record companies repackaging songs as if they were baked beans and leaving huge amounts of music fans might actually buy rotting in vaults in favour of Yet Another Compilation Of Well-known Songs With A Bad Cover , I thought I’d take you for a little morality tale, if you will.

In the 1990’s a band called Ned’s Atomic Dustbin sold 700,000 copies of their debut album “God Fodder”. Four years later, they were dropped by their record company, after the lowly chart position of 110 with their third album “Brain Blood Volume”. One can argue a million reasons why the album peaked at 110, but I dare say that a major factor is that the same album was released three months earlier in America, and all the high street stores were selling copies at £9.99 on import two months and three weeks before it came out in England. Therefore any chance of it actually selling any copies in Britain were : Nil. The hardcore fans had bought it ages ago, the casual voters didn’t even know it was out.

Sometime later, inspired by greed and no artistic principles whatsoever, the band’s former record company got some gofer at their offices to choose in some random order a bunch of their old songs, named it after an old single, chose a picture from a standard Image Catalogue (I used to love flicking through their glossy brochures, thousands of pages of high-res images lovingly recreated enmasse and provided free for potential customers), and shoved it out at £6.99. They even included one song twice.

Now, some former members of the band were a bit pissed off about this. Apropros of nothing, and, in fact, in direct competition with the first solo release by their singer (Groundswell’s “Corrode” EP), the label hastily ripped off their back catalogue for a fast pointless buck. Jonn even considered court actions to get the album withdrawn, or at the very least, a replacement made with full band co-operation (and consisting of all the singles, a couple of rare songs and other stuff fans might want) to be sorted out. However, having paid for all the promotion, videos, pressing costs, tour support, advances, managers costs, recording costs and so on and so forth out of their less-than-10% royalty stream, they found that they’d paid for everything, owned and controlled nothing, and owed something : they didn’t have the money to refute the shoddy ripoff release, and even if they did, it would be a long time thanks to the legal machinations that they’d receive anything like recompense, even artistically, from it.



The whole debacle was repeated in 2003, the only year in recent times that they didn’t play live, where another shoddy compilation, this time “Terminally Groovy” – was released without the band knowing about it – this time using a cheaply-photoshopped old magazine/press photo and another assortment of old songs. Hell, if the company wanted to make money, they had two full length video compilations that would’ve made a nice DVD, and a new Neds album, that they recorded in late 2001, that no label would touch with a bargepole. (In the end, the Neds released the album in late 2003, which accurately replicated the bands new lineup and their current live set). So new money for old product? Money for old rope? A CD costs the same to manufacture wether it contain old stuff or new stuff, and the promotion costs of a release by an ‘old’ band is next to nothing, being that the fans practically do the work for free.

“Street Teams” anyone?

Record companies are vandals pissing on the works of their “artists” and the artistic legacy. (Have a quick look at Motorhead’s discography-compilations if you like : the only reasonable unofficial Motorhead release is the album they made, didn’t release, and was then sold to a label by an ex-guitarist). The list is above is only the official albums. This is all the bootlegs.... that is,mostly unofficial compilations of previously released stuff to line the coffers of coked-up record company cunts.

Record companies don’t give a fuck about musicians : if they really cared about musicians, they might pay royalties to Jimi Hendrix’s bassist who sold his rights for £10k in the Seventies when he was absolutely broke. Broke, incidentally, as a result of record companies financial sodomy. Every news article listed above men tions that he died at just 57, and that he was battling for unpaid royalties. In an interview he joked "I should have been a plumber, at least plumbers get paid".

In the meantime, an enormous amount of stuff clogs up bandwidth : stuff that labels could sell at bargain basement prices and shift by the thousand : Pearl Jam and The Pixies have CD’s of every concert they play available for sale from their websites. (Incidentally, there isn’t going to be a live CD to accompany the upcoming Pixies live DVD, as they’ve already issued about 112 live albums this year so far). Pearl Jam only have 80 shows available.

This brings me onto record companies : rather than issuing stuff that nobody has (officially at least), they’d rather sell you something you already own, in a different box and a mastered slightly louder than it used to be. And this brings me onto Pink Floyd, who are undoubtedly big sellers. Even 2001’s “Echoes”, a shoddy compilation assembled by committee with only-one-previously-not-on-CD song, shifted 5 million with no live shows, no interviews, no DVD, and no promotion bar a couple of flyposters and a website.

Now, Pink Floyd are one of the big five in the bootlegging industry (at last count they have 775 bootleg albums released, or about sixty records for every one they made themselves), and if I could remember the web address, I’d point you to the place you can download a double CD (and a one hour TV Special) of them at KQED, in San Francisco, in 1970. All professionally mixed and ready. (Instead Click Here for a 1972 pre-release recording of them performing "Dark Side Of The Moon"..



Can anyone say 2CD/1DVD “Legacy Edition” deluxe box set? All you gotta do is slap up some new artwork (and there’s plenty of that hanging around in the Floyd offices) and Bingo! Christmas Reissue!

- or would you rather have a double CD of stuff you’ve already heard? –

So all you gotta do is run those tapes through a studio, remaster and spruce them up, run the video tape through a digital cleaner (and that’s easy to do) and bingo. Guaranteed sales. There’s also at least some seven or eight similar shows in the vaults that, despite being heavily bootlegged (and thus now available completely free - but only to geeks - on the wonders of the Internet) would still shift very respectable numbers, the kind of numbers that record companies would sell their souls for, if they had any.

Lets not even mention DVD’s that still languish in VHS Hell :And talking of Pink Floyd, I can think of at least six DVD’s worth of stuff that sits in vaults rotting when it could be shifting regularly off the shelves : three live shows and a documentary off the 1987-89 tour, as well as about fifty videos and TV performances, and a whole bunch of stuff filmed on the 1994 tour, some of which are on VHS, if at all. There’s also a gazillion U2 things that have been on TV and VHS that would do very good business should Island ever bother to sort it out.

It’s at this point that I tip my hat to Mute Records, Beggars Banquet, and Suede. Mute and BB are hard at work reissuing all their old videos on DVD, working with fans to get hold of rare and old footage, and packaging it all up in exhaustive releases : even the Inspiral Carpets got a CD/B-Sides/DVD Anthology package, and it cost about £11 for the lot. In the olden days you could buy CD’s and videotapes. Now you can get CD’s, DVD’s, DVD-AQ’s, SACD’s, VHs, PS2, X-Box, and the whole of the Internet. Is it any wonder the customer demands more? The Gravy Train is running out.

Suede and Depeche Mode have/had fans who worked in their offices. Megafans, who used to run fanzines or websites that were so good that the band hired them, and put them in charge of archiving the band’s releases, and in some respects overseeing reissues : on depechemode.com the megafan webmaster spends his time looking for old concert tapes in the band’s offices and archives, encoding them, and letting you watch them on the website (link currently wonky), and on suede.net, when the band was going, the guy who ran the fanclub was a fan, and made sure that the fans were well treated : even if the record company did nix plans for an archive series of rarities and a double DVD of the band playing-all-their-albums-in-order-and-bsides-over-five-nights-in-London . There’s no way that fans could feel ripped off really. (Even though the recent Depeche Mode 3CD remix package was a bit ‘money for old rope’).

The bottom line is that record companies have no understanding of what record buyers want. For every fan, there’s a megafan somewhere. Someone who will buy everything they stick out. Someone who knows what the band do, and how to treat the music they love with the respect it deserves. The sooner record companies bite the dust, and bands control their own work, the sooner artists can get on with being artists and not worry about being ripped off by unscrupulous, artless businessmen. To them, music is profit, and if they could make more profit selling beans, they probably would. Repackage old beans and put them in new boxes, and voila, profit. Or not. The new step would be simple : take an author’s work, take any letters you want, rearrange them, and voila, a new novel!

It’s that ruthless. Fuck the record companies : give the music to the musicians, or, as many artists do, they’ll fuck off and get day jobs. It pays more to work in an office than it does to be a musician playing to 2,000 people a night. And there’s something rotten in the world where artists starve.

So goodbye Gene, and (potentially) farewell Therapy, bands practically bankrupted by a heartless industry that doesn’t even pay it’s cashcows a decent per-hour-wage, whilst the companies are raking in 88% of the income, or even more if you want artistic control, where they’ll ask you to surrender even more paltry points. Sure most artists lose money and don’t sell many copies : but let’s face the facts, how can you sell 250,000 copies yet still be fired for being unsuccessful? There’s something rotten in the industry where 250,000 copies isn’t enough : get rid of the flab, and give the music to the people.

Though I must say it doesn’t bother me if they don’t treat back catalogues with any respect. There’s always FTP’s and MP3’s : I’ll get them for free and save myself the money thank you very much.

- posted by Mark @ 10:11 pm