They Want to Participate

Chris Swanson started the record label Secretly Canadian with his brother, Ben, in 1996 in Bloomington, Indiana. Over the years, the label grew into an immediate family of three labels, with Dead Oceans and Jagjaguwar (home to Bon Iver), and a much larger extended family related by SC Distribution, Secretly Canadian’s distribution wing that handles distribution for Asthmatic Kitty, among many others. Secretly Canadian developed into one of the keystones of independent music in the 2000s. Like Chapel Hill, North Carolina’s Merge Records, New York City’s Matador Records, and Seattle’s Sub Pop Records, Secretly Canadian is known as one of the “major indies,” independent labels who stand alone in their sustained success and influence.

As the co-founder and head of Secretly Canadian and Jagjaguwar, Swanson shared his observations of music’s contradictory, chaotic digital age from his office in Bloomington. How did the head of a successful independent label, a perspective sorely missed through the Decade of Dysfunction, digest the state of digital music?

I was in college in ’94, so I missed Napster. I didn’t have high-speed Internet. I didn’t understand it, either. We started in ’96 but we didn’t get our first digital distribution deal until ’99. We didn’t think anyone would ever pay for MP3s. We were all reared in the Touch and Go, Dischord record-label universe. We were naive—we thought people who liked our kind of music wanted it on vinyl and CD, not as an MP3.

Metallica was such an unsympathetic band. I felt when The Black Album came out that they were creatively dead. They became the thing that metal was originally rebelling against, because they had become so successful. They were no longer a revolutionary band. It felt lame—it just felt lame when they were fighting Napster. I didn’t think about it much more than as the dismantling of an age-old infrastructure.

The value of the recorded master decreases every quarter. There’s still money to be had—the pie is big enough and we’re enjoying growth in this period—but the total pie is definitely getting smaller. It’s not as if we were planning to become a major label, but the shrinking pie does make me wonder…. I think it will shrink another 60 to 70 percent when all is said and done.

But there are also huge upsides to what is happening. It’s a more direct conversation between artists and fans. The thing that drove me and my peers into the music business was a desire to participate in rock culture. It’s a culture you’ve been consuming your entire life and people want to participate—that drive is an important thing to reckon with. I don’t think people are purely selfish. They will pay for things if they think they’re getting something of value. I also feel like artists need to find ways to demonstrate the value that they’re bringing to the community.

This reminds me of a similar conversation that’s been had regarding NPR and the National Endowment of the Arts. It’s a question that now hangs above rock culture, “Why should taxes go to this? Why should my money go to this?” It’s kind of a liberal conceit. I don’t know, maybe private individuals stop paying and it goes back to benefactors. I was talking to a film producer at SXSW and he was lamenting that he got into the film business too late. “No one is buying DVDs,” he said. “Yeah, we need to accept the fact that it is changing, we have to accept the fact that we’re not rock n’ roll anymore. We are jazz.”

Maybe those large sums of money that were made just aren’t an entitlement, maybe music or film become more like poetry. I’m hoping it won’t. There’s still some money to be made, just not as much. Today, you have to be a hustler. I think that’s one way to look at it. The really serious and talented musicians are in a better position today—and in general musicians are in a better position. I work with a lot of frustrated musicians who see their peers blow up in one album, meanwhile they are on album four, getting a pittance. And I think those frustrated musicians are a little bit wrong in how they think the hyped bands are doing. They aren’t getting a ton of money either.

It’s tough, man. Dog eat dog. Nobody’s entitled to it. If that sounds unsympathetic, it’s important for artists to just understand that fact. And labels, too. The music industry is not fair. It’s subjective and it’s fashion. You have one band who’s king of the world one moment and the next one flops. And it’s all about how you roll with those punches. Some people resent leaking, piracy… all of it. The happier, healthier industry people I know—rather than taking that curmudgeonly, old-man vibe—if you can survey the reality and make it work for you, you’re going to be happier. You’ll be having fun, rather than living in this weird fiction.

Leaks are a necessary part of the thing now. Some albums leak too late! We could leak them ourselves, but that feels too weird. You want to perceive that fan and blog chatter. You don’t want it to be too early, where the album feels too old by the time it’s released. Some bands don’t want it to leak, but we explain to them that the leak is important. That leaked record has become part of the ecosystem.

That said, there is definitely the hope on our part that these things will be purchased. I also buy, share files, and have two subscriptions on eMusic. I buy liberally from iTunes and I buy tons of vinyl. Part of it is a sense of duty. I want to support it. I want to be part of the consuming end still—I just think it’s important. There’s nothing I enjoy more than filing my records or listening to them with friends. I haven’t truly enjoyed a record until I’ve put it in the sleeve and put it away. People strive for high-quality experiences and vinyl feels like the return to a very high-quality experience. You sit in a chair, read the lyrics, look at the artwork and hold it…. There’s still that desire among consumers for depth, but you have to fight for it. You have to earn it. And you have to pay for it.

I was seeing a rock show at a small club here recently. I was watching a cluster of fans enjoying the shit out of this band. And I looked over at these fans and thought, “They’re not thinking about a critique on the industry or what the digital revolution means—they’re just watching three gods on stage making magic.” I think that experience for a fan is what this is all about, and it’s a constant pursuit to not be jaded or take it for granted.

I feel that jadedness when I see the blogs where all they do is post the album art thumbnail and a link to a free Mediafire download. I think that’s scummy. They’re not adding anything to the process at all. Critics, for instance, they’re not buying music but they’re adding something. Those types of blogs want to participate in rock culture in some way but don’t add anything to it. I find that annoying. That said, I still download from their sites.

Another thing that annoys me is some pirates’ false revolutionary vibe—this anarchy vibe. If those people disappeared, that’d be awesome. To me, as long as you’re adding something to the culture, at least that’s some argument as to why you should be allowed to put up these links to free albums. But to say that labels and musicians don’t deserve to be paid because everything is just ‘free’ now? That is not much of an argument.

It’s easy for people to incrementally justify selfish actions, rationalize things by creating degrees of separation between you and the creator. What they don’t realize oftentimes is that there’s a great deal of collaboration between the record label and an artist. It’s not just funding. Having label support behind you allows artists to focus on being creative, not just shilling with a day job. The creative process usually flows way more smoothly when funding is in place. We share a great deal of dialogue on these projects—we are a team. Oftentimes, the label is actually in the inner circle of creative brain trust with the artist. It’s the same thing for book publishers. The publisher is supplying an editor, and that may be the difference between a good book and great book.

The argument is kind of dumb. Go dine and dash—“This restaurant is exploiting the farmer!” Stealing is stealing and I assume the only people who would actually try to make that argument are of weak character. Whether someone thinks that starving artists make better art—it’s none of their business! What if it was their family member or them struggling? What if their employer paid them less because they thought hunger made workers more desperate and made them work a little harder? It’s arrogant. Either you want it or you don’t. And if you want it, you can steal it or pay for it. For people of low character, the deciding factor is whether you’ll get caught and that’s what the Internet allows. Everyone has their rationalization for stealing—either you want to be a part of the culture or be a parasite upon it. Do you want to contribute or not?

These same folks should keep in mind that 98 percent of bands lose money on tour. They are either losing money and subsidizing it with savings or a day job—they are sacrificing time going on road—or it’s being funded by a record label. One of the reasons they can tour is tour support. Only about two percent of bands have a strong enough audience to break even or make something on the road—that’s just the truth. It’s revolutionary to go on the road and not lose money, because it costs a lot. Also, a lot of bands are making less money and want to be on tour more, which creates a glut in the market. Some big bands who you think are making money actually lose money.

In the future, some musicians will have careers, but there will be room for fewer of them. How much room there will be is dependent upon more people paying for music than are paying now. It will depend on people paying for digital subscriptions—casual listeners spending $15 a month rather than $15 a year.

Things are definitely changing. Bands started to be okay with car commercials ten years ago. I’m not sure why. Maybe the music supervisor for an ad or film used to be a Replacements fan. Maybe old punk rockers got jobs at these companies and used their tastes and improved the products and presentation. Maybe ads became less gross and as tastemaker bands did it, it didn’t feel so taboo. At the same time, the DIY universe no longer needed to distinguish itself by the need to be poor. It was no longer a punk rock thing of rich-versus-poor, but more of an aesthetic distinction. Indie was no longer “independent,” but based on aesthetic context or listener experience. I mean, Nirvana was the punkest band ever and they didn’t compromise their work. Through them, punk was co-opted but everyone saw that it didn’t compromise Nirvana’s work. Pre-Nirvana, we’re talking about ‘sellouts.’ Post-Nirvana, people realize that some art is more durable than that.

Now, the sentiment is like, “Yeah man, go make some money.” People would rather see Neon Indian on a billboard than Fergie. Now, we realize that we can control our culture. We’re not outsiders anymore.