Mr. Albini is an independent and corporate rock record producer of such bands as The Pixies, The Poster Children, Superchunk, and Nirvana just to name a few.
He has written an excellent narrative of how a band is lulled into acceptance of an artist-unfriendly contract by record labels. It lays out in a spreadsheet where all the “hidden costs” add up to the band making “about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11.” Oh, and they no longer own their own creative copyrights which means that if their music succeeds on the long tail, they’re out of even more money that would have been theirs had they had the guts and initiative to DIY.
With emerging artist-friendly software (like DJ Edna), the commoditization of hosting and credit card processing services, coupled with Moore’s Law, there’s really no reason this kind of tragedy needs to happen anymore.
The music industry game has changed forever in favor of the independent artist. Some day we’ll look back on the old recording industry business model in the same way we look back on how the meat processing industry was run at the turn of the century. The next generation of artists will simply shake their heads and wonder how the need to distribute small plastic discs ever led to such industry greed and artist misery.