The Embarassment of Riches

For today's independent artists, integrity can be financially rewarding. Can punk rock and alternative comics make peace with entrepreneurial capitalism?

Brian Doherty from the August/September 1997 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

That doesn't mean that making the money was your main goal, which is the distinction important to MacKaye--and he is definitely sincere. "Rock 'n' roll is an insidious collision between art and business," he tells me. "I'm in this parallel but valid industry and I'm self-sufficient. I just feel much more comfortable doing it this way. It makes more sense, and I understand the air here."

MacKaye proudly describes how he grew up in D.C., a town the record industry ignored, and built a thriving company off his own band's efforts and savings. As a young man in his first band, the Teen Idles, he was "disgusted by the way the rock 'n' roll industry worked. It was all packaged and had no organic aspect. Then I came across punk rock, and I felt comfortable here. Profit isn't the final motive in punk rock. People's ambitions were much more creative. It's not to make money, it's to play with ideas. Making money is an addiction that is very tedious." Of course, making money can make "playing with ideas" easier, and spread those ideas farther, as Hughes, the Gainesville record store owner, tried to explain to the amateur record-label owners.

Despite his concerns over the addiction of money making, MacKaye is--as he should be--comfortable with his own money. "I'm confident that I'm responsible and am doing things that are useful and reinvesting in things I can believe in," MacKaye says. Fugazi's success allows him to support other local D.C. bands on Dischord that only sell 3,000 records.

Ms. magazine cover girl Ani DiFranco is the current sensation of the radically indie philosophy in music. She told The Washington Post that the music business is "dehumanizing and exploitative"--and "not much different from any other big business," so she sells her records through her own Buffalo-based label, Righteous Babe Records. Forbes, praising her business savvy, reports that she pulls in an average net of $4.25 per CD sold, with 260,000 sold in 1996. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, who mused publicly about going totally indie after his acrimonious split with Warner Brothers, but instead now runs his own NPG Records through a manufacturing and distribution deal with EMI/Capitol, said it best to Forbes: "I love Ani DiFranco. She's making $4 a record and the superstars are making $2, so who's got the better deal?"

And the superstars are doing a lot better than smaller-sales artists like DiFranco could realistically hope to on major labels. Typical new artist royalties amount to around $1.30 per unit, says New Jersey musicians' manager Gary Waldman, who was vice president of MegaForce Records in the '80s. And those royalties only kick in after, on average, 300,000 units sold, because big labels charge all recording fees, advances, production costs, and most promotional and touring costs against artist royalties.

On a major label, an artist can easily sell as many records as DiFranco and still not see a penny past the initial advance. The Buffalo News writes that DiFranco is about "talent, art and integrity winning out over the usual record business pitfalls of hype, money and conformity." DiFranco is a nonconformist. But, says Waldman, "Ani DiFranco is making a much better living than she would through a major label." The truly cash-minded, greedy musician would do well to nonconform along with Ani. And with her leading the way, it is increasingly possible that some superstar on the Prince level will take the financial risks of going indie to reap the possibly greater rewards. (The risks include both the upfront money the artists would have to pay for recording and manufacturing, and the less-than-perfect distribution and promotion system for indies--though the more superstars go that route, the better the distribution would become.)

I ask Dischord's MacKaye whether, given the realities of major label financing, he thinks Fugazi could conceivably do better financially with a major--whether his business decisions not only fit with his independent sensibilities but make good financial sense as well. "That's too hypothetical a question," he responds sharply. "I don't give a fuck. I don't spend my time trying to compare relative incomes of various possibilities." He then goes on to explain how Dischord began from his pure motive to do what he wanted to do. Granted. But as much as I respect MacKaye for sticking to his principles, it seems strange that he is so reluctant even to discuss the financial benefits that follow his principles. Those benefits are an integral part of small-business capitalism, even if MacKaye's punk rock background doesn't encourage defending that dirty word.

The tension between entrepreneurial reality and anti-capitalist ideology is becoming increasingly apparent in indie art. Since the early '80s, the 'zine Maximum Rock 'n' Roll has been the Bible for young punks--the main ideological enforcer of the anti-money, anti-corporate line in amateur punk rock and the place where younger fans learn what it means to be properly punk. The Berkeley-based 'zine used to run a column by Lawrence Livermore, former operator of the indie punk label Lookout! Records. When Lookout! artists Green Day hit it big, and the company began making millions (though Green Day left them for Warner Brothers), the MRR crowd turned on Lookout! with such ferocity that a weary Livermore sold his interest in the label and left punk rock behind, announcing his defection in a column in Punk Planet, a rival 'zine founded in 1994. By contrast, Punk Planet sees Lookout!'s success as a triumph.

"They made money by putting out good records. I don't think they should be faulted, they should be heralded," Punk Planet's editor, Daniel Sinker, insists. "Now their employees have health insurance and the bands are getting paid well. The difference between them and the majors is that the majors don't exist to put out good music--they are just arms of major corporations to make money for it. They wouldn't care if it's records or microwave ovens."

Sinker believes in companies that care about music over money. (He refuses ads from major labels.) But he recognizes that the business of selling music, however small-scale and independent, is, well, a business. Punk Planet ran a long March/April cover story analyzing what Sinker calls the "lie of punk"--the notion that punk rock exists in a Platonic realm of purity, in opposition to the dirt and greed of capitalism. "You have to bludgeon people over the head with the idea that making and selling records is capitalist, and that's what punks do," Sinker says. Punk Planet, with its more realistic attitude toward commerce, has risen in sales from 800 copies of its first issue to 7,000 now. (MRR sells 13,000.)

Often in indie pop culture, people try to disguise business realities. But acknowledging it can encourage institutions that protect artistic control without eschewing commerce and, in turn, expand the opportunities to create art. Peter Bagge draws the popular alternative comic Hate for the small publisher Fantagraphics. While he doesn't self-publish--he doesn't want to cope with all the necessary business details--artists who work for Fantagraphics do retain ownership of their characters and art. (This is true of many newer, smaller comic book publishers.) Fantagraphics pays its artists purely royalties based on sales and retains a small percentage interest in merchandising, though the artist has approval over merchandising deals.

For a long time Fantagraphics didn't run outside advertisements in its comics, assuming that its sensitive artists would object to this invasion of commerce into their realm. That wasn't always true. "When I found out I could get more pages in my comic and keep the price steady by running ads, I said, absolutely!" says Bagge. "If I knew I stood to gain, I would have done it from issue one." Now Bagge's comic book features more pages, but with the same cover price. He uses those extra ad-driven pages to run backup features by other artists, thus exposing them to his larger audience. Many of his fellow Fantagraphics artists have followed suit on the ad question, although some are still holding out.

Bagge has been on the receiving end of shouts of "sellout!" from purist fans for changing his comic to color from black-and-white, for running ads, for adding UPC codes to the cover. He expects more such carping if he seals the deal he's working on to sell a cartoon based on his characters to a cable network. "If I tell my next door neighbor, who doesn't care about the comic book world, he'll say, `Great!' He'll be disappointed if it doesn't happen," Bagge says. "But among the comic book people, I'll hear all sorts of nasty comments, and almost to a man people criticizing me will be doing it from resentment."

More than just resentment is at stake, though. Advocates of independence often believe in the propriety of what they do on an ideological level that goes beyond just business sense. For example, a leading small comic publisher, Caliber, and a leading indie record label, Simple Machines, both issue pamphlets explaining step-by-step how individuals can manufacture comics or records themselves. This is not usual corporate practice, to say the least--actively instructing your customers on how to compete with you or do without you.

Audiences for smaller-circulation music and comics often feel special because of the pop culture they choose, set apart from the thoughtless throng. This attitude can be self-indulgent, a way to prop oneself up at the expense of the herdlike masses. As a reader of indie comics and a producer and consumer of indie rock music, however, I know there are often-important aesthetic distinctions between small-company and self-produced pop culture and the larger mass pop culture. Without getting into extended aesthetic arguments, music outside the limited range of commercial sounds available on contemporary rock radio is just more interesting and exciting. When SST Records, a 1980s indie rock powerhouse and early home for such bands as Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Soundgarden, and the Meat Puppets, sold bumper stickers reading "Corporate Rock Sucks!," they meant it for both business and aesthetic reasons.