Download the show track by track here.

Download the entire show in one file here.

By popular demand (where “popular” = “2 people asked me”), I’m posting that presentation here. What follows is my own personal take — the other band members probably have their own opinions.

(If you like this sort of thing, you can find three other presentations I’ve given at previous Pop Cons elsewhere on the web: one called “How To Write About Music You Hate,” another about the history of the Walkman, and an audio-only version of “Been Caught Stealing,” about what I learned trying to clear samples for TMJ and Wonderlick.)

Full presentation after the jump:

Budweiser Bought My Baby: When and Why Did Licensing Music to Brands Stop Seeming So Evil?

The closest my band, Too Much Joy, ever came to breaking up was in 1991, as we argued about whether we should accept a lucrative offer to record a radio jingle for Budweiser, which I personally considered the second worst beer in America.

The argument began in our manager’s office. My position was not nuanced: commercials were antithetical to every reason we’d formed our rock band in the first place. This was debased, and rock bands – especially indie rock bands — needed to be pure.

My bandmates were unswayed. They pointed to the fact that we would be paid a large advance, which we sorely needed. They emphasized that Budweiser would not be using our own music, simply hiring us to play their theme song. They repeated the dollar amount of that advance.

The debate continued for weeks. Because I was even more stubborn in my youth than I am today, it was still going on after I had been outvoted 3 to 1 by the rest of the band, and we were recording the jingle in a fancy Manhattan studio.

Though I had been outvoted by my more mercenary band-mates, they were kind enough or just suspicious enough of their own motives to accommodate what remained of my punk rock principles. I was the lead singer, but they introduced me to the spot’s producer as the tone-deaf rhythm guitarist, the idea being that perhaps we could record the tune without any participation from me.

We first met the producer at his Manhattan apartment. Lloyd was probably a very nice and accomplished musician, but he looks like this in my memory:

(author's recollection)

and I couldn’t help but hate him as he sat behind a Casio keyboard and walked us through the changes to Budweiser’s jingle.

Although the tune sounded like it had been written on that very same keyboard, Anheuser-Busch’s agency had recently taken to having indie bands record it in their own style. In fact, the agency had provided a surprisingly lengthy list of bands with way more cred than TMJ who’d taken the same deal, and said list had figured prominently in my bandmates’ efforts to win me over to their way of thinking.

Happily, Lloyd fell for our ploy, though he did keep asking Jay, the guitar player who was posing as me, to “do that gruff thing you do on the record.” Watching Lloyd frown while searching for encouraging ways to say, “No, that’s not quite it,” every time Jay tried and failed to imitate me went some way toward re-bonding the band members.

They also refused Lloyd’s cautious but repeated efforts to get us to sing the words of the jingle to the music from a song of ours called “Long Haired Guys From England” that was currently doing OK on college radio. Though I remained pissed at the band, it was nice to know they still drew the line somewhere.

In the studio, Lloyd continued his doomed efforts to get Jay to “do that gruff thing,” playing a bit from “Long Haired” where I growled a verse, and lamenting, “It just doesn’t sound the same,” whenever Jay tried to recreate the timbre. We pretended the sound had been the ingenious result of some expensive studio effect employed by our L.A. super-producer, and insisted we were having the same problem live. Jay, bless him, also strapped on my telecaster when Lloyd said it was time to lay down the rhythm guitar parts. “I’m better than he is,” Jay said, “so I play all the parts when we record.” That much, at least, was actually true.

It looked like I was going to escape without having to participate in what I regarded as a monstrosity. Unfortunately, Lloyd decided I should join in on the gang vocal shout of “Budweiser!” so I found myself swaying in front of the microphone and lip-synching the shout every time the cue came up. Lloyd, who maybe wasn’t as dumb as I remember him, kept telling me to get closer to the mic, because he couldn’t quite hear me.

It took about six hours to record the 60 second spot, and this is what we had when we were done:

18 years have passed, but my skin still crawls when that plays. I really do think it’s an abomination, and it amazes me that anyone thought it would help sell cans of beer. It makes me hate my band. It makes me hate myself. It sounds cheap, dirty, and stupid.

Which may be why it played endlessly on radio, all that year and into the next, on top 40 stations as well as the Modern Rock stations toward which it was originally aimed. And every time it did, each band member, including myself, earned residuals. The checks arrived very regularly, and they were very large.

I had considered the advance blood money, and briefly flirted with the idea of spending my share buying hundreds of cases of Molson Golden, the beer I actually drank back then. But my New York apartment was tiny, and they wouldn’t all have fit. So I gave it to charity, instead.

I didn’t touch the residuals, either, though I did rationalize that leaving all that money in the band account to fund gear, and recording, and touring expenses, was somehow non-evil.

While it wouldn’t be possible to overstate my continued disdain for the jingle, I am deliberately stressing my low opinion of it, and my ongoing qualms about the money it earned, because I’m going to spend the rest of this presentation trying to convince you of two things: the first is that my feelings are both very real and completely justified. The second is that those feelings are wildly wrong.

It took me 30 years to figure this out, but I’m pretty sure the change in my thinking is based on a better understanding of what music is for, and that this change mirrors an evolving acceptance of brand sponsorship among alternative bands and their fans.

Important fact #1: each band member earned enough royalties individually as a result of that little jingle getting played throughout 1992 that, for the first time ever, we all qualified for health insurance through AFTRA.

For me, that health insurance led directly to one very profound result: Abby Quirk, my spokes-model today.

(Abby was there in person to help prove my point, but you get the idea)

I can state this categorically, and you don’t need to be embarrassed for her because she’s been hearing me say this for almost 17 years, now: if my stupid band hadn’t done that awful commercial, my daughter wouldn’t exist.

Basically, Budweiser bought my baby. Too Much Joy had been signed to a major label for three years when we did the jingle, but those residuals marked the first time we hit the earnings threshold necessary to get on the union health plan. My wife and I had been talking about getting pregnant, but hadn’t wanted to embark on that adventure while uninsured. Though I never cashed Anheuser Busch’s checks for myself, their mere existence literally changed my life (and created hers).

So, it is possible for me to say two seemingly contradictory things: I still hate that jingle, and yet I’m very, very glad we did it. Punk rock ideals are nice. But living, breathing human beings are possibly more important.

Clearly, parenthood mellows you. And it’s always easier to compromise when you can blame it on your kids. But I’m pretty sure the reasons I say I’m wrong to be such a diva about the ad apply even in the absence of children.

Because here’s important fact #2: as much as I detest the taste of Budweiser, and as lame as I think that jingle is, they offered us a far better deal than we ever got from any music company.

It’s kind of amazing, when you think about it. The publishing deal we signed with Virgin got us a quarter of a million dollars, which was sweet, but we traded 50% of all future publishing royalties in exchange. And our major label deal provided advances of almost $500,000 for three different records, but that money all got spent making the records, which the label owns in perpetuity.

Anheuser-Busch, and other brands, are different. They don’t want anything more from musicians beyond a few moments basking in our glow, in the hopes some coolness rubs off on them. Sure, some of their lameness rubs off on us in the transaction, and the psychic scars may never heal, but they pay handsomely for the privilege of briefly pretending Bud isn’t horrible.

In my experience, sponsors demand less from and give more to musicians than labels or publishers. So why was I giddy when I got signed, but ridiculously conflicted about lending my efforts to a brand campaign?

My reservations probably sound weird to fans of genres where sponsorships are badges of success. Even among rock fans they may just seem quaint: the Clash are selling Levis, Bob Dylan’s selling lingerie, insert your own unlikely example here.

But for the longest time, this just wasn’t done.

My first hint that something beyond my former high opinion of myself was changing came in 1998. Two strange things happened while I watched TV one night. The first was hearing the Who’s “I Can’t Explain” in a commercial for the Ford Taurus. This seemed odd, because I was pretty sure Pete had once sworn no sponsor could pay him enough to deal with the venom and bile Who fans would hurl at him if he ever allowed such a thing. Also, the connection between the song and the four-door sedan it was endorsing felt strained at best (although I think the announcer did say something about how Ford’s competitors “can’t explain” why their cars aren’t as good).

The second, even stranger thing happened just after the commercial ended. Or didn’t happen, to be more precise. I sat there, waiting to feel angry, or betrayed, or something.  I mean, Pete Townshend was a childhood hero of mine. What was he doing shilling for my dad’s car? Surely, this called for some kind of reaction. But it turned out I just didn’t care.

Please note that my lack of reaction was not connected to my own misadventures in sponsorship land. In the intervening years I had maintained my ability to get righteously angry when bands I admired sold their music to advertisers, and I’d developed a tortured “tiers of terribleness” system to justify my hypocrisy. The bottom, and most forgivable, level belonged to developing acts who’d done what I had: lent their voices or even their names and likenesses to a sponsor. It was still wrong, but newly understandable.

The next tier was for developing acts that went a step further, and let the sponsor use one of their songs. It’s easy to be sponsored by no one when you’re Neil Young. It’s harder when you’re Luna, so I was actually kind of happy when I heard a snippet of one of their songs in an ad launching a scent by Calvin Klein, because I was pretty sure they were getting more out of the transaction than he was.

Perhaps this calculus was more informed by my own experiences than I was ready to admit, but at least it had an internal logic: there was a dividing line before which the artist was taking advantage of the man, and beyond which the man was ripping the artist off.

And that logic insisted there was a ninth circle of hell that belonged to established musicians who thought the songs they’d given to us still belonged to them, and that the rewards we’d bestowed on them already weren’t enough. That just seemed greedy, and inconsiderate. I still remembered the sense of betrayal I’d felt in the ‘80s when Lou Reed lent both his rock and roll animal persona and his song, “Walk on the Wild Side” to Honda for a series of TV and print ads pimping a fucking scooter!

Because it would take an entirely different 20 minute paper to explain all the ways an ad like that made the world a worse place for everyone, including Lou Reed, I will focus solely on the painful transition from documentary-like shots of the squeegee men and graffiti-ridden trucks that were actual facets of life in 1980 Manhattan to the well-lit dude playing the sax break from Lou’s biggest hit, because crap like that only exists in dreams, and the actual dreams of actual people are way more complicated and weird and get MORE disturbing as they progress, not less, and the thing that’s persistently terrible about even well-done television commercials of this type is that they hijack our subconscious and try to convince us that our frightening brains can be tamed if only we buy this one particular THING.

This is a lie, of course, but I believe the lie is easiest to see in older ads, because television advertising is an arms race with our own sense of sophistication, and the more sophisticated we think we are the savvier advertising has to get to win us over to its point of view. This spot was fairly cutting edge back in 1980, though it feels arcane today, given how ham-fistedly it cuts to Lou.

Yet the fact that Lou Reed is in this ad is not the point of this ad. He’s just like the squeegee men and the graffiti on the truck: a symbol of dirty city living. The fact that Lou is hawking scooters is no more ridiculous than the fact that every shot we’ve seen before was leading to a shot that posited scooters as the culmination. It’s kind of weird that he’s in the ad, but it’s actually less weird than everything else the ad is trying to talk us into.

Here’s something important my Budweiser jingle experience taught me: there’s no faceless conspiracy of Mad Men deliberately co-opting icons of rebellion and turning them into mouthpieces for the status quo. My band got our ad because two dudes at the agency were fans, and figured we could use the money. They thought they were doing us a favor. I assume the dudes working for Honda were thinking the same way.

Because most people who saw that Honda scooter ad had no idea who Lou Reed was, even if a good deal of them had heard “Walk on the Wild Side” at some point in their lives. That might be part of what makes fans so upset when their personal heroes’ music appears in commercials: the music is by definition not the most important thing there. It’s being harnessed to celebrate something beside itself. It’s literally diminished.

Almost 20 years later, stuff like this had lost the power to offend me. Or, if advertising is an arms race, maybe it’s more accurate to say musical commercials had gained the power to neutralize my offense mechanism. And one way they did this was by seeming to honor the music they used.

I can't embed this one for some reason; click the image and it will launch the clip in another window

That’s Luscious Jackson, in one of a series of well-received Gap ads from the late-‘90s. I assume you agree with me that it somehow feels less embarrassing than the Lou Reed spot, right? I mean, it’s just a band playing one of their tunes. Maybe you don’t know the band, and maybe you’re not sure what they’re advertising, but those mysteries kind of draw you in.

But perhaps you also share my lingering sense of unease. Something isn’t quite right, and I don’t mean that the song is obviously longer than the 30 seconds it lasts here. The band just looks too uncomfortable when they play the notes to the old jingle, “Fall in to the Gap,” at the end there. It’s unclear whether they always look that awkward when they’re not playing music, or if they’re simply realizing they’ve gone one step too far.

This was just one of many examples at the time of bands I loved cropping up in ads for brands I did not. I was curious enough about the phenomenon to track down the people responsible and ask them, as non-judgmentally as I could manage, what they were thinking.

Luscious Jackson’s singer, Jill Cuniff, explained they took the spots more for publicity than for cash, as the band had spent a wearying year promoting their last album, and still hadn’t broken out to a wider audience. “We ended up promoting ourselves as much as the Gap,” she insisted.

Michael McCadden, the Gap’s head of Marketing, concurred, telling me, “TV Guide wrote an article about the campaign, and they showed a picture of Luscious Jackson, and the whole thrust of the article is who are these cool people in this Gap campaign? We heard about radio stations across the country getting calls, ‘Can you play whoever that all female group is in the Gap campaign?’”

Both Cuniff and McCadden felt the trade was fair, but things still felt unbalanced, to me. McCadden didn’t help matters by explaining how the band’s outfits were chosen: “They did go to a store, and they sort of told us what they really liked, we also brought a lot of clothes, and then we worked with them to make their outfits really what they would wear.”

“We worked with them to make their outfits really what they would wear.” Not what they DO wear, mind you, just what they WOULD wear, you know, if they were gonna be in a Gap commercial.

If you’re an SVP of Marketing, it’s your job to say things like that with zero irony. I was more taken aback by Cuniff’s similar lack of irony when explaining she knew she did the right thing because “our publicist’s very concerned with our image,” and the publicist said it was a great idea.

“We said to ourselves, ‘Here we are. We’re in the marketplace. Is this stepping over a line?’” They didn’t think so: they liked the campaign’s simplicity, and the fact that it looked like a music video. A deciding factor, in Cuniff’s words: “There was not a lot of room to look like a cheeseball.”

That felt like an important insight: their decision was largely driven by production values. As of 1998, doing a commercial was no longer unthinkable — just doing a cheesy one.

Well, production values are better than no values at all. And Luscious Jackson turned out to be pretty prescient, as TV commercials are now considered a legitimate source of new music discovery, and artists fall all over one another competing for the chance to be in a spot like this one:

That ad did wonders for Feist’s career – the track it used went from selling 2,000 copies in a week before the ad aired, to 73,000 after.

The spot also seems like a pretty natural evolution from Luscious Jackson’s Gap ad 13 years ago. Both take a minimalist approach. Both present the artists ostensibly being themselves. Both tease you with a snippet of a song that is much longer in real life. And both try to make the connection between band and brand as natural as possible. The Nano ad just does it all a lot better.

It helps that the ad’s showing an actual Feist video. And it helps that one of the actual functions of the device being advertised is the showing of videos. You can’t get much more aligned than that. Spots like this may be the closest artists can come to preserving everything fans value about their music while also earning serious dollars and, not incidentally, exposing themselves to new fans.

Sara Bareilles quickly proved Feist-like bumps are repeatable when she lip-synched “Love Song” in a Rhapsody commercial:

A chart Billboard ran after the fact demonstrates the ability of commercials like this to break developing artists with mainstream audiences:

In two weeks, “Love Song” leapt from sales in the low thousands to 269,000. No promotions before that had anything close to the same effect.

Duh. TV ads work. We’ve known this for at least 50 years. What’s new is that they’re now working for musicians, not simply because of them.

None of that means we’ve reached some uncomplicated nirvana where artists get to be pure AND rich. It just means that things have changed, and at least one or two of those changes are for the better.

It means not every single ad with a song by an artist you love automatically sucks. It means some artists in some ads are getting more than money. It may not ever mean the music in an ad is the most important thing, but it suggests that music can sometimes be just as important as whatever’s supposedly being advertised.

It’s possible we have the arms race to thank for this development. My assumption that the artists can sometimes tie, if never win, may just be the latest example of Madison Avenue’s ever-increasing sophistication at feeding us the illusions we crave.

But I stand by my assertion that bad advertising hijacks our subconscious, whereas music’s job is simply to explore that subconscious. So when I see advertising in which music is forced to hijack rather than highlight, I am saddened, even if I understand the factors that made the musicians in question agree to have their art used in that way.

Whereas any time I see a commercial that leaves the music alone to weird us out however the music wants to, I am happy, because I’m pretty sure that by setting the bar higher it will result in less advertising that makes me want to kill myself.

And there are still far too many ads like that. They’re so easy to find that I’m going to play us out with one that’s only two weeks old. It aired during this year’s Grammys, and is notable for making even WORSE use of “Walk on the Wild Side” than Honda managed oh so many years ago.

Apologies for leaving you with an awful commercial instead of a non-detestable one, but we should recognize and reward ads that showcase music without diminishing it, and there’s no better way to demonstrate WHY than reminding you what the alternative is.

Tim and Jay will be appearing at a Dear New Orleans benefit concert at the Black Cat in Washington, DC on Monday, October 4th. They’ll be performing a few songs, backed by Bonerama, the NOLA R&B band they’ve been working with on several songs for the next Wonderlick record.

If you’re in town, you should come by the show, as the bill’s pretty stellar: it also includes Damian from OKGo, an even rarer live appearance by Jenny Toomey, Jonny 5 from Flobots, Rebecca Gates and some surprise guests we’re not allowed to pre-announce. More details, including how to buy special VIP passes that get you into soundcheck to hobnob with the artistes, can be found here.

Today’s the official release date of Dear New Orleans, and you can hear the entire, epic benefit album right here.

OK Go, Mike Mills from R.E.M., My Morning Jacket, Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Steve Earle, Allison Moorer, Jill Sobule, Flobots, the Wrens…do I really need to go on?

Spread it around.

Oh, if you just want to jump straight to “The American Way,” the latest salvo from Tim and Jay’s Wonderlick project (complete with three trombones), you can play/share this little widget:

The album’s being released to mark the 5th anniversary of the flooding caused by the breaking of the levees after Katrina hit, and proceeds will go to the community organizations still helping to rebuild the city and preserve the wider Gulf area.

I’m biased, of course, but I think the album rocks pretty hard. The full line-up will be announced next week, but for now I can tell you that A) it includes several of my personal heroes, B) all the participating artists are alumni of the artist-activism retreats ATC and the Future of Music Coalition have been hosting in New Orleans for the last few years and which I blogged about last March, C) it comes with a booklet featuring artwork by the Mekons’ Jon Langford and some liner notes by yours truly, and D) Wonderlick has a new track on the album.

That track is a new version of “The American Way,” complete with a brass band — multiple trombone parts were arranged by Mark Mullins from NOLA’s own Bonerama, and the Bonerama horns recorded their parts in New Orleans just a couple weeks ago.

More details will be coming over the next week, including news about how to snag the triple album for the price of a 7″ single (really) the day before it comes out.

Sadly, that may be the most notable fact about the tune. It’s not my proudest moment as a lyricist, and the arrangement is charitably described as busy, which may be why it was played live all of twice before being retired from the set.  Some fans seemed to like it, though — one sent me a letter with an essay he’d written for a high school English class about the song.

The dude the song’s about really existed, and really did used to wander around Scarsdale and Hartsdale writing down the license plate numbers of all the parked cars in a little notebook he carried around just for that purpose. The bit about throwing rocks at him is dramatic license — not that I never did anything cruel to sad figures when I was a kid; I just don’t remember throwing rocks at him, specifically.

In a semi-related bit of trivia, one of the rare arguments I’ve had with my wife happened one night during a Scrabble game, when I scored a bingo playing “cheesery” using a Y that was already on the board. She challenged me. Turns out it’s not in the dictionary.

And now it’s not in Hartsdale, either.

]]> http://www.toomuchjoy.com/index.php/2010/03/song-of-the-week-pride-of-frankenstein/feed/ 2 http://www.toomuchjoy.com/index.php/2009/12/a-brand-new-too-much-joy-song-free-because-its-christmas/ http://www.toomuchjoy.com/index.php/2009/12/a-brand-new-too-much-joy-song-free-because-its-christmas/#comments Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:07:58 +0000 tim http://www.toomuchjoy.com/?p=1427 We tried to have this ready for Chanukah. But art takes time. So we are compensating for our tardiness by offering not one free download, but four – one from Too Much Joy, and one from each of the three side-projects that have sprouted like mutant limbs from TMJ’s trunk. Just click the button below to snag your tunes (you can also push the play button in the widget beneath to hear all four songs in their entirety — feel free to share with friends).

Free Downloads! (Merry Everything)

The TMJ tune is called “Mystery Limousine.” It was written in the early-‘90s, but never got recorded. Until now. In keeping with our holiday theme of family, love and forgiveness, the song features both original member Sandy Smallens (on bass and vocals) AND producer/replacement bassist William Wittman (on too many guitars), and was mixed by old friend and Son of Sam I Am producer Michael James (who may have added some guitars, too, but you can still hear Jay cutting through them all). The lyric, if you care, was written when the band was riding around in limos, and trying to process the disappointed faces of onlookers who were expecting someone more famous to emerge from said limos when they pulled up at hotels.

The Wonderlick tune is called “Easy,” and should be self-explanatory. It is one of several songs Wonderlick recorded recently with a live band – it’s a rough mix, which will evolve over time, and the first salvo in their third LP, which they hope to have finished by springtime. Besides Tim and Jay, the band features Ken Flagg on keyboards, Chris Brague on drums, Daniel Fabricant on bass, and the awe-inspiring Jean Cook on violin. Ken and Jean and a guy named Justin from the studio all shout along at the end there. More free rough mixes will be forthcoming before Christmas Eve are now available on www.wonderlick.com.

The Surface Wound song is a selection from their brand-spanking-new LP, The Kids Are All Gone (Acquired Taste). It’s called “Pretty French,” and features Sandy and Tommy from TMJ plus guitarist Steve Hamilton.  The horns come courtesy of ska band Edna’s Goldfish brass section (Gary Henderson on trumpet and Thomas Comerford on trombone).  NYC-area gigs are being slated for the new year.  You can stream and buy the album (for only $6!) and learn more about the band at www.surfacewound.com.

The Its song is called “You Are All That I Need.” That one’s basically Bill, Jay and Tommy from TMJ singing a lyric by Tim. It was originally written as a stalker anthem, but in this more festive context perhaps we should hear it as a cry of love from each Joyboy to the other. (12/19 update: turns out we had a mis-named file in the original package, so if you downloaded before 5pm on Friday, 12/18, the Its song you got was actually “Don’t Say a Word.” The problem is fixed, so just hit download again if you want a free copy of “You Are All That I Need.”)

Fah-hoo-doh-ray.

(The songs are yours for the taking, but if you have any desire to throw some digital coins in our metaphorical hat, you are welcome to do so — just click the button below):

I got something in the mail last week I’d been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included our digital earnings. Though our catalog has been out of print physically since the late-1990s, the three albums we released on Giant/WB have been available digitally for about five years. Yet the royalty statements I received every six months kept insisting we had zero income, and our unrecouped balance ($395,277.18!)* stubbornly remained the same.

Now, I don’t ever expect that unrecouped balance to turn into a positive number, but since the band had been seeing thousands of dollars in digital royalties each year from IODA for the four indie albums we control ourselves, I figured five years’ worth of digital income from our far more popular major label albums would at least make a small dent in the figure. Our IODA royalties during that time had totaled about $12,000 – not a princely sum, but enough to suggest that the total haul over the same period from our major label material should be at least that much, if not two to five times more. Even with the band receiving only a percentage of the major label take, getting our unrecouped balance below $375,000 seemed reasonable, and knocking it closer to -$350,000 wasn’t out of the question.

So I was naively excited when I opened the envelope. And my answer was right there on the first page. In five years, our three albums earned us a grand total of…

$62.47

What the fuck?

I mean, we all know that major labels are supposed to be venal masters of hiding money from artists, but they’re also supposed to be good at it, right? This figure wasn’t insulting because it was so small, it was insulting because it was so stupid.

Why It Was So Stupid

Here’s the thing: I work at Rhapsody. I know what we pay Warner Bros. for every stream and download, and I can look up exactly how many plays and downloads we’ve paid them for each TMJ tune that Warner controls. Moreover, Warner Bros. knows this, as my gig at Rhapsody is the only reason I was able to get them to add my digital royalties to my statement in the first place. For years I’d been pestering the label, but I hadn’t gotten anywhere till I was on a panel with a reasonably big wig in Warner Music Group’s business affairs team about a year ago

The panel took place at a legal conference, and focused on digital music and the crisis facing the record industry**. As you do at these things, the other panelists and I gathered for breakfast a couple hours before our session began, to discuss what topics we should address. Peter Jenner, who manages Billy Bragg and has been a needed gadfly for many years at events like these, wanted to discuss the little-understood fact that digital music services frequently pay labels advances in the tens of millions of dollars for access to their catalogs, and it’s unclear how (or if) that money is ever shared with artists.

I agreed that was a big issue, but said I had more immediate and mundane concerns, such as the fact that Warner wouldn’t even report my band’s iTunes sales to me.

The business affairs guy (who I am calling “the business affairs guy” rather than naming because he did me a favor by finally getting the digital royalties added to my statement, and I am grateful for that and don’t want this to sound like I’m attacking him personally, even though it’s about to seem like I am) said that it was complicated connecting Warner’s digital royalty payments to their existing accounting mechanisms, and that since my band was unrecouped they had “to take care of R.E.M. and the Red Hot Chili Peppers first.”

That kind of pissed me off. On the one hand, yeah, my band’s unrecouped and is unlikely ever to reach the point where Warner actually has to cut us a royalty check. On the other hand, though, they are contractually obligated to report what revenue they receive in our name, and, having helped build a database that tracks how much Rhapsody owes whom for what music gets played, I’m well aware of what is and isn’t complicated about doing so. It’s not something you have to build over and over again for each artist. It’s something you build once. It takes a while, and it can be expensive, and sometimes you make honest mistakes, but it’s not rocket science. Hell, it’s not even algebra! It’s just simple math.

I knew that each online service was reporting every download, and every play, for every track, to thousands of labels (more labels, I’m guessing, than Warner has artists to report to). And I also knew that IODA was able to tell me exactly how much money my band earned the previous month from Amazon ($11.05), Verizon (74 cents), Nokia (11 cents), MySpace (4 sad cents) and many more. I didn’t understand why Warner wasn’t reporting similar information back to my band – and if they weren’t doing it for Too Much Joy, I assumed they weren’t doing it for other artists.

To his credit, the business affairs guy told me he understood my point, and promised he’d pursue the matter internally on my behalf – which he did. It just took 13 months to get the results, which were (predictably, perhaps) ridiculous.

The sad thing is I don’t even think Warner is deliberately trying to screw TMJ and the hundreds of other also-rans and almost-weres they’ve signed over the years. The reality is more boring, but also more depressing. Like I said, they don’t actually owe us any money. But that’s what’s so weird about this, to me: they have the ability to tell the truth, and doing so won’t cost them anything.

They just can’t be bothered. They don’t care, because they don’t have to.

“$10,000 Is Nothing”

An interlude, here. Back in 1992, when TMJ was still a going concern and even the label thought maybe we’d join the hallowed company of recouped bands one day, Warner made a $10,000 accounting error on our statement (in their favor, naturally). When I caught this mistake, and brought it to the attention of someone with the power to correct it, he wasn’t just befuddled by my anger – he laughed at it. “$10,000 is nothing!” he chuckled.

If you’re like most people – especially people in unrecouped bands – “nothing” is not a word you ever use in conjunction with a figure like “$10,000,” but he seemed oblivious to that. “It’s a rounding error. It happens all the time. Why are you so worked up?”

These days I work for a reasonably large corporation myself, and, sadly, I understand exactly what the guy meant. When your revenues (and your expenses) are in the hundreds of millions of dollars, $10,000 mistakes are common, if undesirable.

I still think he was a jackass, though, and that sentence continues to haunt me. Because $10,000 might have been nothing to him, but it was clearly something to me. And his inability to take it seriously – to put himself in my place, just for the length of our phone call – suggested that people who care about $10,000 mistakes, and the principles of things, like, say, honoring contracts even when you don’t have to, are the real idiots.

As you may have divined by this point, I am conflicted about whether I am actually being a petty jerk by pursuing this, or whether labels just thrive on making fools like me feel like petty jerks. People in the record industry are very good at making bands believe they deserve the hundreds of thousands (or sometimes millions) of dollars labels advance the musicians when they’re first signed, and even better at convincing those same musicians it’s the bands’ fault when those advances aren’t recouped (the last thing $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man yelled at me before he hung up was, “Too Much Joy never earned us shit!”*** as though that fact somehow negated their obligation to account honestly).

I don’t want to live in $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man’s world. But I do. We all do. We have no choice.

The Boring Reality

Back to my ridiculous Warner Bros. statement. As I flipped through its ten pages (seriously, it took ten pages to detail the $62.47 of income), I realized that Warner wasn’t being evil, just careless and unconcerned – an impression I confirmed a few days later when I spoke to a guy in their Royalties and Licensing department I am going to call Danny.****

I asked Danny why there were no royalties at all listed from iTunes, and he said, “Huh. There are no domestic downloads on here at all. Only streams. And it has international downloads, but no international streams. I have no idea why.” I asked Danny why the statement only seemed to list tracks from two of the three albums Warner had released – an entire album was missing. He said they could only report back what the digital services had provided to them, and the services must not have reported any activity for those other songs. When I suggested that seemed unlikely – that having every track from two albums listed by over a dozen different services, but zero tracks from a third album listed by any seemed more like an error on Warner’s side, he said he’d look into it. As I asked more questions (Why do we get paid 50% of the income from all the tracks on one album, but only 35.7143% of the income from all the tracks on another? Why did 29 plays of a track on the late, lamented MusicMatch earn a total of 63 cents when 1,016 plays of the exact same track on MySpace earned only 23 cents?) he eventually got to the heart of the matter: “We don’t normally do this for unrecouped bands,” he said. “But, I was told you’d asked.”

It’s possible I’m projecting my own insecurities onto calm, patient Danny, but I’m pretty sure the subtext of that comment was the same thing I’d heard from $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man: all these figures were pointless, and I was kind of being a jerk by wasting their time asking about them. After all, they have the Red Hot Chili Peppers to deal with, and the label actually owes those guys money.

Danny may even be right. But there’s another possibility – one I don’t necessarily subscribe to, but one that could be avoided entirely by humoring pests like me. There’s a theory that labels and publishers deliberately avoid creating the transparent accounting systems today’s technology enables. Because accurately accounting to my silly little band would mean accurately accounting to the less silly bands that are recouped, and paying them more money as a result.

If that’s true (and I emphasize the if, because it’s equally possible that people everywhere, including major label accounting departments, are just dumb and lazy)*****, then there’s more than my pride and principles on the line when I ask Danny in Royalties and Licensing to answer my many questions. I don’t feel a burning need to make the Red Hot Chili Peppers any more money, but I wouldn’t mind doing my small part to get us all out of the sad world $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man inhabits.

So I will keep asking, even though I sometimes feel like a petty jerk for doing so.

I do not share this information out of a Steve Albini-esque desire to rail against the major label system (he already wrote the definitive rant, which you can find here if you want even more figures, and enjoy having those figures bracketed with cursing and insults). I’m simply explaining why I’m not embarrassed that I “owe” Warner Bros. almost $400,000. They didn’t make a lot of money off of Too Much Joy. But they didn’t lose any, either. So whenever you hear some label flak claiming 98% of the bands they sign lose money for the company, substitute the phrase  “just don’t earn enough” for the word “lose.”

** The whole conference took place at a semi-swank hotel on the island of St. Thomas, which is a funny place to gather to talk about how to save the music business, but that would be a whole different diatribe.

*** This same dynamic works in reverse – I interviewed the Butthole Surfers for Raygun magazine back in the 1990s, and Gibby Haynes described the odd feeling of visiting Capitol records’ offices and hearing, “a bunch of people go, ‘Hey, man, be cool to these guys, they’re a recouped band.’ I heard that a bunch of times.”

**** Again, I am avoiding using his real name because he returned my call promptly, and patiently answered my many questions, which is behavior I want to encourage, so I have no desire to lambaste him publicly.

***** Of course, these two possibilities are not mutually exclusive – it is also possible that labels are evil and avaricious AND dumb and lazy, at the same time.

Also, NPR has been doing some end-of-decade coverage on their Monitor Mix blog. They surveyed a bunch of musicians and other industry-type folks. Today’s question is “What does “indie” mean to you. I answered that, and several others on earlier days, and theoretically some more to come, if you want to check it out.

The Cover Music Podcast

“Coverville” has set the standard for great music podcasts. Imagine, a downloadable show where you can hear a vast array of covers by all sorts of bands.  They’ve featured TMJ in the past a few times, and now they’re going to be debuting Surface Wound’s brand new cover of that synth pop classic by Yazoo, “Nobody’s Diary.”

Check it out right here.

You may notice that the vocals are even more growly than usual at the end of the song — that’s because the very sexy and gravel-throated George Fullan (from LI hardcore band Three Years Older) sings along on the last chorus.

“Nobody’s Diary” and 11 other (original) tunes all co-habitate on Surface Wound’s upcoming full-length debut, “The Kids Are All Gone” (Acquired Taste Music).  More fun premieres and stuff to come…