When my band signed a recording contract with a major label in 1989, we weren’t particularly naive. We were graduates of Ivy League schools, we’d been writing, recording and touring together for over five years, and we’d already released two albums; one by ourselves, and one on an independent label. We thought we had a pretty good handle on the deal we were making.

When my band signed a recording contract with a major label in 1989, we weren’t particularly naive. We were graduates of Ivy League schools, we’d been writing, recording and touring together for over five years, and we’d already released two albums; one by ourselves, and one on an independent label. We thought we had a pretty good handle on the deal we were making.

But we couldn’t have — I’m convinced that no musician can truly understand just how inherently exploitative major label contracts are until he or she has been fed into one end of the system and spat out the other. The mechanics of who gets paid what and how under a standard contract are so byzantine it’s mind-numbing, and all the people who SHOULD be explaining these inner workings to the artists (such as their managers and attorneys) have no compelling reason to do so, as they earn their money by guiding neophytes through the system, not by attacking it.

This is not a diatribe. The music business is a business, after all, and a weird part of me almost admires just how much the businessmen manage to get away with at the artists’ expense. My story is not uncommon, nor is it a particularly heinous example of what can happen. But the very fact that my tale is NOT shocking is sort of the point — the vast majority of musicians who sign major label contracts are similarly mis-served. Unless they sell millions of records, they will have no chance of earning a living wage, they will not be able to afford health insurance, and they will find that they still owe the label hundreds of thousands of dollars long after the label has turned a profit on their work. Yet, while the labels have armies of business affairs people to enforce the terms of their contracts, artists almost never have commensurate resources to make sure the labels live up to their end of the bargain.

So why do artists sign these contracts, if they’re so oppressive? Speaking for myself, I made the trade-off because, even as outrageous as the contract turned out to be, at the time I believed it was the only way to get my band’s records distributed widely. The recording industry, for all intents and purposes, is a closed system. If you want your records in stores and on commercial radio, there just hasn’t been any place else to go. It’s a bit like coal mining early in the 20th Century — if you’re going to work in the mines, you have to agree to live in the Company town and get paid in Company scrip, which is only redeemable at the Company store. It’s brutal, but it’s also perfectly legal.

At the moment, anyway. That’s one of the reasons we’re planning to gather as many of these stories together as possible.

Sometimes, when I tell my story, industry reps try to dismiss it. There are a couple of cheap and easy ways to do this. The first is to call it “label bashing,” which always makes me chuckle since it suggests I’ve proven my point. If a simple recounting of the facts makes the labels look like villains, well, then they probably are. That’s another reason we’re gathering these stories — when you look at the vast accumulation of facts, you will be able to draw your own conclusions without any editorializing from us.

The second method is to dismiss me as a bitter failure. But since the same people who do that also dismiss more commercially successful artists who raise the same issues as ungrateful hypocrites, I let that one roll off my back. Maybe you’ve heard of my band, probably you haven’t. I don’t blame the record company for not making me famous — believe it or not, all I ever really wanted to do was make a living making music. Unfortunately, signing a contract with a major label is not a very wise path for any artist who wants to sustain a career, as an absurd percentage of them will “fail” just like me. That’s another reason we want to gather as many of these stories as possible — to warn other musicians, and to underline just how goofy and unsustainable a major label’s definition of “success” turns out to be.

The third method of dismissing stories like mine is to say, “You don’t understand how the business works.” But what they really mean is we’ve learned too well how the business works: that’s the final reason we’re gathering as many of these stories as possible: to let the rest of the world know.