It’s a Long Way Down
August 30, 2021 1:20 PM   Subscribe

There is anecdotal evidence to suggest this process may disproportionately affect women and people of colour. Songwriter Coco Morier, who has written for Britney Spears and Demi Lovato, says she’s seen plenty of young female artists “lectured and berated” by the male studio teams they are collaborating with, and who are “deemed a creation of the label and the producers behind them, instead of them being signed on their talent and allowed to have their creative vision.” from The Pop Stars Kept in Limbo by Major Labels
posted by chavenet (20 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
The music biz and contracts are brutal to big stars, where sitting in limbo is somehow still common. I'd imagine they are even worse to up and coming artists and people who came up through the 'system' rather than people who played first and then the 'system' found them.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:01 PM on August 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


Flock of Cynthiabirds, it’s certainly true that there are many talented artists who never get a recording contract. The article seems to be saying not that only those artists with contracts have talent, but that artists with contracts also necessarily have talent - that their success is not solely due to the support of their labels.
posted by eviemath at 2:12 PM on August 30, 2021 [4 favorites]


No reg for the article required here.

So it's gone from "... and now you owe us a shit-ton of money" to "... we won't let you work, and now you owe us a shit-ton of money". What a delightful industry.
posted by scruss at 2:35 PM on August 30, 2021 [7 favorites]


I love the fact that the record company signs the artist for a four record deal then refuses to let them create or release a record, meanwhile making money on a series of singles while the artist is kept in a state of nebulous serfdom unable to fulfill the contract. Brilliant!

Since the “album” is very much an archaic, obsolete quantity of production, I sure hope the agents and lawyers are up to date enough to have negotiated other benchmarks and payments based on streaming, EPs, digital downloads, etc. I’d love to read her contract.
posted by sudogeek at 3:03 PM on August 30, 2021 [8 favorites]


Yeah, I don't have to register to read the article. I think if you read several Guardian articles in a month you might reach a threshold that triggers a registration wall, but I've never run out of free articles myself.

Anyway, I don't think there's anything really new in this article -- stories about bands full of talented young dreamers who received a mid-level advance only to have their record basically abandoned by a label that didn't understand how to promote it have been plentiful over the last few decades. And sexism is endemic, not just among label execs but among fans as well. When Courtney Love was being celebrated for her work with Hole, there were a bunch of trolls who insisted that Kurt Cobain obviously wrote her songs. When Liz Phair took the indie world by storm with fuckin' Exile in Guyville, dudebros insisted that she owed her success to producer Brad Wood. And I was surprised (though I guess I shouldn't have been) to see a bunch of people who should have known better take to the Internets after a televised Taylor Swift performance a few years ago (Grammys? CMAs? Can't remember) to express their shock that she had played a song on solo guitar (or piano, again, can't remember which) without accompaniment. I mean, the lady's a pro musician. Why would you think she can't play a guitar?

No wonder women, especially, have a hard time in the industry — they're stuck with dudes constantly trying to see past them, looking for the shadowy Jack Antonoff or Max Martin figure they imagine must be there, tugging the puppet strings.
posted by Mothlight at 3:11 PM on August 30, 2021 [7 favorites]


[Archive version]
posted by chavenet at 4:01 PM on August 30, 2021 [2 favorites]


She is not a talented singer.

She is a competant/adequate singer.
posted by fluttering hellfire at 4:05 PM on August 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


I’m curious (in a purely rhetorical sense) about the baseline for your definition of talent there. Demi Lovato certainly sings better than the vast majority of ordinary humans I know personally, even though I know a number of musicians, including some who can sing as well or better than her. I can more or less carry a tune on key and not too gratingly most days myself, even, but no amount of studio money is going to transform a recording of me singing into something that sells tons of albums, for example. Is the current US major record label system a meritocracy where only the best talent rises to the top? Clearly not. Do you have to have above average talent compared with the general population as a prerequisite for success in the system? Yes, you do. Does everyone have the same musical taste, making “talent” an objective scale in the first place? No, but the fact that I don’t personally enjoy the singing style of, say some new country singer dude or death metal vocalist doesn’t mean I could come anywhere close to doing as well or better at that style than they can. (See also: Can modern art be incredibly pretentious and have some highly questionable incentives for who becomes successful? Yes, absolutely. Does everyone universally enjoy modern art and find it worth their time? No. Can your toddler paint a Jackson Pollock? Almost certainly not.)
posted by eviemath at 5:01 PM on August 30, 2021 [6 favorites]


there's a world of difference between being a talented musician and a talented entertainer - it's always been a better path to success to be an entertainer, if you have the team to help you pull it off, if you come at the right moment with the right kind of music - for those who don't make it, it's better to be a talented musician, as there are still plenty of places to go in the music business that reward you with a decent living, but no fame

or there were - i think one of the problems now is that no one's really sure what the music business is, thanks to covid - there's no point in stadium filling acts when the stadiums aren't available

there's also no point in releasing albums for money when no one's buying them, which is something that's gone on for years

my niece is getting a fair shot at success by scoring for video games - and that strikes me as a lot better move than trying to become a pop artist - she won't be famous, but she'll make money
posted by pyramid termite at 5:23 PM on August 30, 2021 [2 favorites]


Mod note: A couple deleted. The article is about how the music establishment dumps on female singers to keep them down, so dumping on female singers mentioned in the article is not really forwarding the discussion.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 6:39 PM on August 30, 2021 [22 favorites]


As always, it depends on what one considers being successful.

An artist or band breaking onto mass-market radio requires a lot of variables to all click, and fitting into some A&R guy's conception of What's Going To Sell is a big part of that. Sometimes it's the music. Sometimes it's the right look or sound at the right time, sometimes it's a particular marketing strategy, sometimes it's that ineffable something that no one seems able to predict effably. And if a major label is your goal, well... the times have changed, but much of the system has not.
posted by delfin at 6:43 PM on August 30, 2021 [1 favorite]


Just FYI, folks: Demi Lovato came out as nonbinary this spring, and just this month [August 2021] publicly clarified that at this point in their life they prefer they/them pronouns.
posted by Laetiporus at 3:01 AM on August 31, 2021 [10 favorites]


The members of TLC famously had to declare bankruptcy a year after releasing an album that has now sold 14 million copies, since everything was expensed back to them, instead of the people they were making rich. Music industry contracts make film industry contracts look fair.
posted by kersplunk at 3:11 AM on August 31, 2021 [9 favorites]


Steve Albini on this process and The Problem With Music.
posted by delfin at 6:03 AM on August 31, 2021 [2 favorites]


Criminy, that Albini article on top of the OP.

What would fairer contracts be for long shot bands? How, for instance, could you make sure an artist could make an album? I don’t understand how you make it impossible to make an album - does that mean the label won’t pay for recording and advertising, or is there something even stronger forbidding it?
posted by clew at 9:08 AM on August 31, 2021


Having looked at it, here's how it works:
  1. record a bunch of songs
  2. edit them together into an album of songs
  3. submit it to the label
  4. have the label say "well, these might be okay, but these three don't work, go make some more
  5. record more, work out the order again, resubmit
  6. have the label tell you that it won't sell, because you need to fit a demographic you didn't know you were supposed to it into at the start of the process or never were part of before
  7. have the label refuse to release it because it won't sell according to their demographics (see previous) so you need to start over to fit the new demographics they want to aim you at
  8. GOTO 1
Eventually (in descending order of probability), you either lose your desire to make music and get another job and your soul is broken and scarred, or you turn into a machine for them and your soul is broken and scarred, or something happens to make you notable enough that your record gets sales and they end up releasing something because they want that money and you hope they don't use math that makes Hollywood Math look like basic division to screw you over badly (see Taylor Swift's issues with her original label that is having her rerecord most of her older albums because she doesn't own the master tapes, or Kesha's absolute Hell with a certain producer, or Prince's reasons for changing his name).
posted by mephron at 10:29 AM on August 31, 2021 [2 favorites]


An artist or band breaking onto mass-market radio requires a lot of variables to all click, and fitting into some A&R guy's conception of What's Going To Sell is a big part of that.

Often on first albums by new artists, you can hear a song where the label's producer got to call all the shots, to make their idea of a single for radio. Example: Lyle Lovett, You Can't Resist It. It's not horrible, but......making this comment is the first time in years I've sought it out to hear.

I have no trouble imagining that I've heard stories about bands who got signed, the A&R person or people who signed them left, and they just stayed marooned - the label wouldn't let them record, or play, and wouldn't release them.
posted by thelonius at 10:41 AM on August 31, 2021


Here's the scary thing -- that Albini article is nearly thirty years old. Imagine how much more finely tuned the screwover process is now.

With the rise of the Internet and its many side effects, it is easier now for a musical artist to find and reach a compatible audience than possibly ever before. But then we're right back to defining 'success'. Do you want to make music your own way, at your own pace, tuned to reflect your own musical desires and craftsmanship, and have critics look at it and say "that's good" and audiences of some size provide positive feedback, too? That's certainly possible.

Or do you want to be a star? Where your song's on the radio, everybody's heard it, everybody knows your name, and you can go somewhere ten years from now and people will have heard of you?

That's possible, too. But that road is infinitely more heavily guarded, and has quite a bit more traffic.
posted by delfin at 1:14 PM on August 31, 2021


Doesn't Demi Lovato use they/them pronouns?
posted by jonp72 at 6:24 PM on August 31, 2021 [1 favorite]


Some activists have set up a site for automaticallly calling up archive versions of Guardian articles, mostly in protest against the Guardian's centrist politics/platforming of transphobes, though also usable for bypassing paywalls. Tl;dr: replacing "theguardian.com" with "dumptheguardian.com" in the URL will do the trick.
posted by acb at 2:55 AM on September 1, 2021 [3 favorites]


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