Why You Should Continue To Steal Major Label Music From The Interweb

Too Much Joy is a band from Scarsdale, New York that have been around since the 80s and are still occasionally active today. They were ubiquitous at various NY/NJ clubs back in the day, but probably suffered a bit commercially by being hard to categorize; a bit too gritty for the power-pop crowd and a bit too poppy for the glory days of alt/grunge/whatevs. They were a good rock and roll band, a commodity that is hard to market. I was a big fan of their Warner Bros. album "Mutiny" which featured an inexplicable cover of the Records' "Starry Eyes" and a tempered sense of humor that made you smile without seeming too jokey.

As we all dance around the bonfire that engulfs the burning skeleton of the big time music business it's easy to forget that large sums of money still flow into buildings shaped like records and into the pockets of large corporations like Warners, Sony et al.

And while a certain percentage of that money may make it into the gilded pockets of a hand full of high-profile artists, most mid-level, orphaned bands we all know and love, never see a penny. And they are usually (technically speaking) in debt to the tune of (no pun intended) millions of dollars.

Big-time media royalty accounting is the stuff of legend.(1) Most musicians know that music royalties are not going to pay the bills anymore. This is the reason that so many artists -folks who previously put a lot of effort into releasing new music- have turned to churning out cover records (Bob Dylan, Hatebreed, Matthew Sweet etc.) They've just given up making new music. The real money is in "publishing" and that income goes directly to the songwriter, NOT the performer like a lot of people assume. Songwriting royalties are automatic and compulsory (roughly 7 cents per song, per record sold, more or less.) What you get for actually recording those tunes is subject to the whims of the record companies.

These days, it's all about merch and touring and it's getting harder to make a buck. For a bunch of guys setting out in a van, a slight uptick in gas prices might make the difference between profitability and coming home broke.

But -as Too Much Joy's Tim Quirk documents here- it's still a bizarre and complicated business. The new "revenue models" for artists and musicians are still in the experimental stages at best. Sure there will always be someone, somehow raking in music-derived money from big corporations, but for tons of mid-level "baby bands", it's an open question.

(1)Sketchy financial practices are not limited to screwing over hippies and punk rockers. For a look at how Hollywood uses "creative accounting" click here to read about Art Buchwald's legendary problems with Paramount over "Coming to America."