Streaming Music Isn't a Free Market. It's a Regulated Monopoly.
Rock legend David Lowery draws on his decades in the music industry to explain how government-imposed licensing fees and price controls helped streaming platforms flourish while eroding artist rights and income.
Today's guest is David Lowery, the legendary frontman of the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, digital copyright crusader, and longtime Reason reader.
He dives deep into his sprawling, deeply personal new record Fathers, Sons and Brothers and the postwar California dream, talks about how the music industry broke, and suggests ways to maybe, just maybe, fix it.
He's sued Spotify and other streaming services, teaches business at the University of Georgia, and he's dropped what might be the best one-liner about selling out since The Who.
If you care about music, creative freedom, and getting paid for your work, this one is for you.
0:00—Intro
0:52—Lowery's Reason connection
2:34—Fathers, Sons and Brothers
15:25—Lowery's musical inspirations
19:25—Camper Van Beethoven
28:31—What it was like being indie in the '80s
35:48—Cracker and alternative rock
42:26—What does it mean to "sell out"?
48:56—Streaming music and artist compensation
58:01—Lowery's class-action lawsuits
1:01:07—Royalty rates and copyright protections
1:07:30—Has the DTC model improved the music business?
1:15:50—Optimism for the future of music
Transcript
This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Nick Gillespie: So, David Lowery, it is a pleasure to be talking to you. Thanks for talking to Reason.
David Lowery: Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.
And you have told me in a different conversation, when you were a wee student at UC Santa Cruz, you had a roommate or a dorm mate who was a Reason reader. Can you remind me about that?
Yeah, well, there was a couple of connections to that. But yeah, I had a—he wasn't really a roommate, but he lived in the same building—was a guy that we just called Scott the Anarchist. And that was sort of where my introduction to the magazine came from. And then I later, when I was in college, I worked at a farm, which is detailed on this solo album. And the owner was just a full-blown anarcho-capitalist, I would say.
Did that mean you had to pay to leave the job every day or something like that? That could be a brutal regime.
Right. That's my description of him. We got along actually pretty well. But considering Santa Cruz was so lefty, my calculation is that I probably found the two libertarian anarchists in the whole county, right? And they sort of were influential to me in a lot of ways.
Well, it's always good, when you're in any kind of monoculture, to hang out with the people who are not quite fitting in.
Absolutely, absolutely.
We're going to talk about your experiences with Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker and the music industry more broadly, especially issues about IP as music shifted from kind of record stores and analog needles dragging through vinyl to streaming. All kinds of the interesting IP battles and the way that record labels went from being villainous for one reason and then for other reasons. We'll talk about that in a bit.
But first, I want to talk about the new record Father's Sons and Brothers, which is a musical memoir, a musical autobiography that you've released on vinyl as well as online. And you're writing a Substack where you explain the background of each song. Can you explain what you're trying to do with Father's Sons and Brothers and why now?
Right. So, I started this shortly before COVID. I sort of felt like there were some people in my life that deserved their own song or a little explanation or something like that. So, that's sort of a memoir-ish type thing. At the same time, I'd had several people urging me, like, "Now's the time of your life when you do the autobiography." But there's definitely a formula to doing these sort of rock autobiographies, and I didn't have a lot of the elements there, in my opinion.
I didn't struggle. The first album Camper Van Beethoven puts out is played on the BBC. So, there's a lot of tension that isn't there.
There's no airplane crash that wipes out half the band or anything.
That's right. I didn't have the parents that shipped me off to some sort of indoctrination camp because I became a punk rocker or something like that. None of those things happened to me. Everybody was supportive. I got lucky all the time. So, the shape of the written autobiography, to me, wasn't there.
Also, too, you write all the time, that's a very different skill than writing music. I only have to worry about five minutes. I just felt like this was going to be a whole new skill I was going to have to learn, to write an autobiography. So I thought, "Well,why don't I just do it with— I'm already checking some boxes, writing about some people that I need to write about. I'll just start recording CDs" essentially, and "I'll be done when I'm done. I'm recording these songs"
So, that's how it started.
Then, the other element of it, though, was interesting to me, because for me, it's easier for me to write music than it is to write lyrics. I know it may not sound like that, but it's hard to find things to sing about. I keep a little notepad file in my phone where I write down titles or an idea or something, just because I need those.
And this was easy because I'd be like, "Ok, talk about my sister now. I want to talk about my grandfather on my mom's side when I talk about this." It was a good plot device for me to do this. And then it matched the COVID shutdown where the music business sort of went away.
About a year into this, we had the COVID shutdown, and then it's like, "Okay, well, this is really personal." It's just me sitting with my little tiny digital eight-track recorder.
The opening song recollects your first memory or something close to it. But you write—you're in Georgia now, you've spent time in Virginia—but fundamentally, the musical space that you seem to occupy generally, but especially on this record, to me anyways, is California.
Can you talk a little bit about California? Like you mentioned in a song, a super bloom of a certain kind of flower or weed in the Coachella Valley. Talk a bit about that. What does California mean? Because California, in rock music, California is the backdrop for a lot of stuff. It seems like things very quickly left Philadelphia and New York—and being up on the rooftop in New York or being real hot in the city or something like that—to this California, which can mean a lot of different things. But what does California mean to you, and what does that super bloom represent to you?
Yeah. So, the super bloom was doing two things. The super bloom is the late-winter, early-spring burst of wildflowers that you will get in the desert if the conditions are right. Not every year. Sometimes it skips 10 years. And it's this explosion of life.
So in one way, I'm talking about the explosion of life in that it's my age—I'm like 14 years old, boys are growing, you're sort of getting elements of being an adult, and stuff like that. It was also California at that time, which had gone through kind of a super bloom. Everybody that was around me where we lived in California—my father was in the Air Force, he got stationed in California. Was in an area called the Inland Empire, which is right next to a separate area called the Coachella Valley. It had exploded with people, mostly immigrants from other parts of the United States, specifically a lot of people from the South, from Texas, from Oklahoma.
You had this wild blossoming not just of life but of the economy and culture and things like that. Most people tend to focus on San Francisco and Hollywood, at that time, or coastal LA, but the same thing happened inland in the deserts.
My grandparents came out there, and cousins came out there basically to work in the agricultural industry, and then shifted to servicing the rich people on the golf courses and the Hollywood celebrities in Palm Springs and stuff like that. It was just a really fascinating time—a good time to be alive in California. I have a more positive spin on it than, say, Joan Didion.
The dreamers of the dream and…
I have a more positive take on it than she does.
Yeah, talk about that. Because the Grapes of Wrath, of course, ends with the Okies leaving the Dust Bowl. Then you kind of skip ahead and get to Joan Didion or, before her, James Cain and hard boiled that—or Nathaniel West. California, particularly Southern California, is kind of the asshole of the country, and all of the bad people get shaken down into there. And it's a hard, grubby, déclassé life of endless yearning and dissatisfaction. You have a different view of that.
Well, yeah, my family came out of such poverty in Arkansas and personal tragedy as well too, which I go into on the record. My grandfather didn't read or write. He signed his name with an X. He basically took care—he was like horses, farming, agriculture. Figured out how to service people's pools—a little side business for him.
Swimming for a cement pond. Right.
Yeah. The cement pond. And for them, this was a wonderful life. They made decent money. They bought a house again. Eventually their children and the grandchildren heard about the wonderful life in California, and they all followed them out there. At first, they really were literally in the fields picking fruit. Picking dates was a big thing to do.
Amazing.
It's dangerous work. And then, eventually, I don't think nobody ever got rich—although my uncle was the marshal of Riverside County at one point.
And you had a couple of cousins who got—
Who were on the other side of the law.
Yeah, that's right. You know, the album, though, is not some kind of super feel-good album. There's a lot of darkness and tragedy, but also hope in it. It reminded me a lot of another California transplant—who it didn't end up as well—Gram Parsons. But there's a touch in this album of what he used to call "cosmic American music," which is very rooted in Americana tradition, particularly blues and R&B and country, and what used to be called "hillbilly music". It's both uplifting and sad at the same time.
Does that resonate with you? It seems to me there's a whole vein—Brian Wilson died recently—and the Beach Boys, on the one hand, they're the happiest band on earth: they're upbeat, they all look good, have white teeth, blue eyes, and blonde hair. And yet there's something unbelievably sad and depressing about their music, I find. The Byrds are like this too. I don't think this album is not depressing, but it has that mix—it's upbeat, it's yearning, it's positive, but it's also deeply kind of riven with sadness and tragedy.
Yeah, so the song that probably does that the most is "Piney Woods," which discusses this area of Arkansas, Louisiana, and East Texas. I have a song that's kind of a study of the area. But specifically, if you listen to the melody of that song, it is almost totally major-key, almost straight-up melody. It's a very positive melody, but the subject matter of it—it got better and better the more I dealt with the details of the song, which is the suicide of my dad's brother.
That was the contrast that really made that song work. It's almost so folky, it harkens back more to the Celtic roots of the American forms. It's almost there. It's so folky. That's part of it. A lot of my perspective is an Inland California perspective, which is much more—Bakersfield, obviously—but it's much more infused with the Southern and the country rock music, whereas the Beach Boys have less of that in what they do. So that's a bit of it as well.
Who do you count as your musical icons? Because it was also interesting listening to this record—Neil Young during COVID, who, Canadian by birth, Californian by choice, I suppose—he released a bunch of performances as well as songs during COVID that were somehow set in a psychic California. That can be both upbeat and downbeat at the same time.
And I was thinking, you're like occupying the Riverside County—or, the Inland Empire version of Neil Young's Northern California. Who are your musical heroes that guide you?
Well I think I'm probably pretty influenced, honestly, by the classic rock artists and stuff like that. But if you want to talk specifically about this sort of little niche I've moved into, I would say the biggest influence probably was Kaleidoscope. With the American, with David Lindley…
One song of theirs I know well, I believe, is "The Sky Children."
I don't know if I know that. There are two Kaleidoscopes. There's a British Kaleidoscope, and there's a Southern California…
Oh, okay, so this may be the other one. But talk about Southern California Kaleidoscope.
So California Kaleidoscope—they were also from the Inland Empire. It was David Lindley, who's a fiddler, guitarist—he played with everybody from Jackson Browne, did television themes, all kinds of stuff. But this was his '60s psychedelic folk band. They all played different instruments. They all play fiddle at some point on the record. I remember I started Camper Van Beethoven, and I gave a tape to Ray Farrell from SST, and he goes, "Oh, so you guys loved Kaleidoscope growing up?" And I was like, "Who?" "From your neighborhood, how do you not know them?" Right?
So in a way, that's the big Camper Van Beethoven influence.
And then from there, I suppose, I had to retroactively discover stuff. I had to discover Bruce Springsteen in the mid-2000s. Things like that would happen to me just because, I don't know, I had some impression of what he was about, and it was wrong.
So in a way, there's some of Bruce Springsteen's "Ghost of Tom Joad" in this album. In fact, to the point where I accidentally took a chord progression. But the progressions aren't copyrightable.
Well, give it time.
Give it time, yeah. So it's kind of all over the place. But for this record, I'd point to those two—literally Kaleidoscope and… I know Bruce Springsteen is sort of playing characters, and then telling their stories. In this, I'm not playing a character, but sort of his randomness where he'll talk about really specific things—like a woman's shoe, he ties her shoe, as he fits her for a shoe. Really small details that makes the song come to life. So I've got to say, there's some of that in there as well too. I could go on and on listing…
Let's talk about Camper Van Beethoven, because they were a band—I wrote for the American version of Smash Hits, which was, if you ever wanted to confess to a murder, that was the magazine to do it in because nobody read it. But I remember coming across Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. I reviewed it. I gave it a thumbs-up—or we might have used two fingers up or three fingers up because we were cheeky and different.
But Camper Van Beethoven was one of the archetypal indie rock bands of the '80s, when that mattered. And there's an irony that is infused in that music that is—you know, I don't know how to describe it. Can you talk about where that came from?
And one of the songs on Father, Sons, and Brothers, you reference "Take the Skinheads Bowling," which became this mass hit. That was life-changing for you because that made the band popular in a way that meant you were going forward in the music industry. Can you talk about where the ironic sensibility of Camper Van Beethoven came from, and then how "Take the Skinheads Bowling" being popular changed the direction of your life?
Yeah, so Camper Van Beethoven was a reaction to the seriousness of hardcore punk rock—which hadn't started that way, by the way. Hardcore West Coast punk rock and post-punk British stuff—everything was heavy. And there's a little bit of the punk rock spirit that always forces you to talk about whatever the status quo is.
In our case, our status quo had become punk rock and the post-punk rock scene that we all grew up in. I remember our demo tape at some point got reviewed by the punk fanzine Maximum Rocknroll—
Oh wow, yeah.
—where they just said, "Hey, these guys don't sound punk, but they're absolutely the spirit of punk," in a way. So that encouraged us.
It was us being ironic or tongue-in-cheek while still trying to be serious—maybe the way that Kurt Vonnegut writes. There's some humor, or non-seriousness, in his serious writing. That's also a very postmodern sort of thing. We're of second order. There's a second-order meaning in the songs.
We really don't want to play lacrosse in the song "Club Med Sucks". It's tongue-in-cheek is what we're saying. That just worked for us immediately, and we felt like, "well, we could be a serious band." The Beatles did that sometimes. Kinks did that a lot. So it just didn't frighten us away.
Why do you think punk got so serious? Because when it started—and it's useless to get into strict definitions of punk, etc. It started as a burst of energy and a reaction to prog rock or over-serious mega productions done by hippies, let's say. And it was fun and exciting. And it was short. Then it itself became really serious, especially the Southern California punk scene. It seemed to, you know—like with Ronnie Reagan and everything was serious and political. Why did that happen?
I'm not really sure. But I mean, there is a tendency, when you belong to a group, to want to dress the same or with a similar sensibility, and that gets more and more refined. There's a Substack and long-running blog called Punk Turns 30—which I think now it's probably Punk Turns 45 now. I believe it's Teresa Karyotis and Pleasant Gehman who still run that blog.
They have a lot of photos—Tracy was a blogger and she photo-documented it. And there's a point where like the '78—the way people looked in '78 in the LA punk rock scene, what they were wearing—it was a wide platter of styles. It narrows down over the next few years. I assume something like that also happens with music. It sort of the building of a community out of something anarchic causes that.
And that's what Camper is reacting to. It's like, "Okay, let's do that. Let's wear the hippie clothes. I'm going to wear a poncho—punk rock." That's us trying to take it apart again.
So "Take the Skinheads Bowling." Talk a little bit about how you came to write that song and then how it was successful.
Yeah, so it's kind of the same—it's part of that impulse. So that's when a lot of us— say '83 or something like that— are noticing that some part of punk rock had become very dogmatic. You kind of got the skinheads, and they'd got their look. Not all of them were—there was just a kind of moral panic about nazi skinheads. I never saw any, but they were sort of seen as a bad part of the movement.
So this is us kind of mocking them at first, in a song, in a single line, that doesn't really mean anything. And because it didn't mean anything, it became a little project of mine to take this song idea we had come up with and just make it so that it didn't make any sense, didn't say anything, and didn't mean anything—in reaction to everything that came before us.
So I'm like really carefully with each line going,"Okay, I'm going to say something now, and it seems like I'm going somewhere. Now I'll say something else and it doesn't lead you anywhere." It was just completely an absurdist impulse or something like that.
But that song being so much that way and being so different, and also just having a catchy hook on the chorus. When we mailed it out, and this is us really mailing it out to BBC DJs, I think it just stood out. I think it just really stood out. They looked at it and they saw that title on the record they were like, "Well, what is this?" Then they put it on the turntable and like, "Oh, this is catchy. We can play this."
There's nothing else on that record that is as catchy and also as a fun chorus. So, my take on all of this is: the fact that, that went on the record—and it's kind of buried on the record; it's like track seven or something like that—the fact that that song took off really changed our trajectory.
I could have easily seen us— we were a very hyperactive, creative group of people, not always on the same page together—but the fact that we kind of had this single, we had to go around and play that song, as well as our other songs, focused our mind. I think in a lot of ways, without that song, we wouldn't have gone on to do— we might've made a couple of records and then wandered off and done other things. That song really made it so I was, me at least, I was at least on a professional musician-songwriter path. From on the first record I think, "My life is different." And that's kind of what I talk about in that song.
You were saying earlier that you don't have the ingredients of the classic kind of Behind the Music documentary biography. But on Fathers, Sons and Brothers, you do have a song about the end of Camper Van Beethoven, which takes place on ferries and going to Sweden and whatnot. So, there's a little bit of that.
What was it like to be an indie darling in the '80s, though, as that concept was— When you go back and look to the '60s, nobody wanted to be a boutique indie artist in the '60s. They wanted to be on Top of the Pops, or the Top 40. Even through the '70s, when you think of somebody like Bruce Springsteen, he doesn't matter if he's not on CBS Records or something, or he matters less.
In the '80s, with the rise of what was called college rock—and we'll get to the high point of alt music in a bit—being an indie artist where you could be quirky and inventive and offbeat and get compensated for it, that seemed like you were living the life, right? I mean, what did it feel like to be like that? And what kind of pressures go into maintaining that, as opposed to doing the same thing over and over again?
Yeah, so you actually hit on something. There is an economic component to this '80s indie rock, '90s indie rock thing. The reason that folks in the '60s and '70s—you may have been underground, but you were trying to rise to the top of the charts was because that was where the money was. You needed money to keep the whole thing going. Even if you're driven by an intense artistic vision, you do need that.
In the '80s, the independent music systems kind of blossomed and came of age. Indie music was called "indie" at first because of how you organized your band business. You went through independent distributors, your records were sold at independent record stores, and you were probably only on college radio or non-commercial radio.
Suddenly, you could make a decent living. Maybe you weren't rich, but you could be a middle-class artist off of the system—and we were. We bought a car. I didn't buy a house—it was Santa Cruz, California—but that was one element of it.
But it also began to have a lot of rules that went along with it. I didn't feel like it had those rules at first. But eventually, sort of, rules developed. I remember there was a backlash to the fact that Camper Van Beethoven covered Status Quo's "Pictures of Matchstick Men" and kind of had a hit with it. A lot of critics grumbled at us on that album because, "Hey, you're doing a cover song that's not even your own song."
So there were odd pressures like that. I remember a couple years later, Cracker's first album, an ad agency came to us and they wanted our song for a beer commercial. It was Coors, actually, I think. Which, at that time, seemed to be a real no-no. But it was so much money, we were like, "Take it. Take it."
There were literally op-eds in the music trades about whether we should have taken that commercial.
And both because it was a commercial to begin with, and then because it was Coors, which was associated with—Coors went from being cool when Paul Newman drank it in the '60s and '70s, before it was available nationally, to being a dangerously right-wing beer because the Coors family somehow were funding the Contras against the Sandinistas or something.
Well, it was something like that. And so, we kind of stepped in it. But we were like, it was so much money. You get record advances, but you have to spend the record advances on the record. Sometimes some of that money goes to touring, too. You might get additional advances for touring.
The pressures of being an indie artist—it's not that you're totally free of pressures. It's a different set, right?
It was a different set of pressures. And then I think the music sort of became stylized. At first, what was "indie" was all over the map because it literally was, it was just describing a separate economic system for distributing and selling records. That was based on punk rock methods.
It wasn't punk rock anymore.
That's much more do-it-yourself, you record the records, you produce the records or, go to the record pressing plant, get it out, and then literally are mailing it out to smaller record stores and things like that.
Or using an independent distributor to do that. We used Rough Trade, which was a vertical stores, a distributor, and a label as well. Eventually, we sort of had a deal with them exclusively for a while.
And then did Camper Van Beethoven sign with Virgin?
We signed with Virgin, which at first was the largest independent in the world.
It has an interesting history. Richard Branson's an interesting, charismatic figure in the music business—before he was known for his other ventures.
A guy who became a major record label owner by doing Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, right?
Yeah, the soundtrack to The Exorcist and selling it out of the trunk of his car. Us signing with him—even though he was basically considered part of the major label world when we signed—was to us like, "Well, here's the bridge." This guy is the bridge between worlds. And literally, I talk about it in one song on Fathers, Sons and Brothers.
I remember at some point trying to give a theory of our album, our upcoming album, Camper Van Beethoven's Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, to one of the executives there, who was the president at the time—Jeff Ayeroff—who immediately was just like, kind of didn't have time for me but didn't want to be mean. It was just like, "Look, look, don't worry about it. Just write songs. You'll write a hit."
That's the old-school music business, right? Throw 10 records against the wall, see what sticks. "Just give us a bunch of songs. Don't stop writing. Don't stop recording. Give us a bunch of songs. We'll worry about everything else." That was a great time to transition into the major labels because there was still that approach to creativity. Not everybody, but there were still a lot of people like that in the business.
And then as Camper Van Beethoven ends at the end of the '80s and you transition to Cracker—can we talk a bit about, by that point, alt music or alternative music became to the fore. And it seemed as if not just in the music industry but more broadly that things like rock music were fading in their cultural hold, and stuff was opening up.
The labels—this happened to the movie studios certainly at the end of the '60s, and it continues to happen with publishing houses, etc.—where they realize they no longer understand their business, or they don't understand their audiences. And they either get rigid and say, "No, we're not doing anything different," or they go all in on trying all different types of things.
But it seems like when you look at the early '90s music scene, so much is going on. And you came into it with Cracker in a really good position, right? Because you kind of got to punch your own ticket economically within the mainstream, which was desperately trying to appeal to something known as an "alternative nation." Can you talk a little bit about what that was like?
Yeah. So Camper Van Beethoven had gotten onto MTV in regular rotation—not just on the special shows, although the special shows were hugely important. 120 Minutes was landmark. That introduced the underground to middle America.
We were on—not really heavily—but we were in regular rotation on MTV. There were also about 30 commercial stations, maybe 50 around the country, that were playing modern rock. I don't even know if it was called alternative rock yet, but they were commercial radio stations. And we were one of their bands.
When Camper Van Beethoven breaks up and I then I create this band, Cracker, with my friends, we put out a record. We sort of get the seat that Camper Van Beethoven had been holding, in a way. Even though we're different, we do kind of, you know—and what had happened was that those 30 to 50 stations with Camper Van Beethoven had now expanded to this panel of 200 or 300 stations, because rock radio—AOR rock radio—was dying, and they were looking for something else.
There was also probably the deregulation of the radio business, where you suddenly had chains of radio stations
Part of it was, we made good songs. We made good records. Plenty of people make good songs and good records and get popular. We were kind of in the right place at the right time. We were in this modern rock radio format. We were a core band. And it explodes nationally. That's really when we're in a pop star part of the music business, although we were alternative rock stars.
But then the center can't hold, right? The early '90s—it's fascinating looking back on it, and it was kind of evident—you have bands like you, Nirvana and the grunge sound coming up big. You have Guns N' Roses, which is obviously about to destroy itself.
There had been a kind of resurrection of straight-on American rock and roll, or whatever they were claiming to do. And then you had all this other stuff—in terms of rap and hip-hop really coming into its own. How did you navigate that, musically?
When you're playing in something like that do you become more experimental, or do you become more focused on what you are doing alone?
There's always the impulse to make sure—coming from management, from labels, and just you as an artist—you're like, "I've got to be aware of what other people are doing, what the audience wants," to a certain extent, while not pandering to it. And that's always a tricky line to walk.
So you hear on Cracker's 1996 The Golden Age, in a way, that's sort of the most alternative rock album that we make. But it's almost a year or two behind, by the time it comes out, it's almost a year or two behind what alternative rock had become. Alternative rock had become much harder. It was leaning toward metal, it was leaning toward metal rap.
The first two Cracker records are very Americana, roots-oriented, but they had songs that fit on alternative rock radio. Golden Age tries to lean into the alternative rock stuff a little bit. But we do clever things—like we hire Beck's dad, David Campbell, an amazing string arranger, to arrange a lot of this stuff. So it's cool and weird and angular strings on it and all kinds of stuff.
By the time we get to the fourth album, Gentleman's Blues, we're like, "Ok, alternative rock radio is going off someplace else. That's not the style of music we write. It's not our strength." And we just completely make, essentially, roots rock record.
Kind of coming into its own as well—or finding an audience.
Yes, jam bands were sort of reinvigorating that space or something like that. So in one way, yes, we did follow the trends a little bit. I mean, because we're like, "Hey, man, we're good musicians. We're good writers. We can write anything." We're not selling our soul by doing this. But we are following the trends a little bit—but it's really only for one record. And then we're like, "Ok, that didn't work."
These are kinds of conversations seem to have died, and I think that's generally a good thing—the idea that if you're an artist and you sell out…
I mean, The Who obviously have an album called The Who Sell Out from the '60s. And I guess The Byrds—"So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star"—talking about selling out to the company or whatever. We can go on and on. In the late '80s and certainly in the '90s, that seemed to be front of mind for many people. The main thing is man: "Don't sell out."
Did you guys worry about that—that you might be selling out? Or were you kind of like, "What the fuck does that even mean?"
Yeah, with Cracker especially, there's a little bit of, "We're just going to be iconoclasts." If selling out is uncool, we're going to do it. Or we're going to claim to do it—whether we are or not. You're kind of trolling people in a way. We didn't have that word then, but there was a little of that in our persona.
It even says in "Get Off This," the second, on the second album—I can't remember lyrics unless I sing them—but we talk about: "Is it true that you have sold your soul?" "I don't know, man. Lend me a quarter, I'll call my accountant," right?
I don't know if anybody can even tell what we're saying in that song. But we're playing with that. We're reacting against that.
Plus, a lot of the bands that were underground at one point and were deemed the coolest of the cool—like the Soundgarden and Nirvana and Pearl Jam—were selling tens of millions of records.
That's right.
So by that point, we're like, "I don't know what 'selling out' means." Exactly what you're saying. And that's kind of what kills it. By '94, you're like, "I don't know what selling out is."
Right. I mean, being true to your school—if you're not selling any records, that might mean that you're just not making good music, which is not necessarily true.
Right. Not necessarily true. You might be ahead of the curve.
Yeah. I mean, you can be Alex Chilton, but nobody wants to be Alex Chilton when he's 40 or 45 years old.
That's exactly right
And he fucked up his second bite at the apple, I guess. To talk about trolling: What went into the making of Tusk—your cover of what is one of the most controversial and kind of bizarre Fleetwood Mac records?
Yeah. So Camper Van Beethoven covers the album Tusk. It was partly because we had decided to get back together, but we thought it would actually be funny if we didn't really tell anybody.
I don't know why—this is just the high concepts that amuses us. So we released, first, this thing called Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead, Long Live Camper Van Beethoven, basically telling people that we got back together in the song titles—but nobody getting it.
There were some outtakes, there were some leftovers from the early career that we put on this album, but a lot of stuff was new that we created. We released a fake-out oddities album as our first record back together. Even though there are clues all the way through it—including a thing in Morse code which explains what we're doing on the record—nobody got it.
So they were like, "Ok, that was fun. That kind of worked." People were like, "Oh, there's a bunch of Camper oddities that were never released." We're like, "Ok, that's fun. So what should we do?"
"Oh, I know what we should do—we should release a cover of an entire album." I don't know who came up with the idea—it might've been Jonathan—but someone came up with it and said, "We should release a cover of an entire album, cover the entire album, and say that we recorded it back in the '80s and we discovered the tapes."
What would that album be? And of course, everybody goes, Tusk. Because we were obsessed with Tusk by Fleetwood Mac.
So in some ways, what we're doing with that album is also trying to rehabilitate that album, because—even though it's spotty, and there's some bad stuff on it that really doesn't quite work on that Fleetwood Mac album. There's a lot of great stuff on that album. And it's just really an unusual work of art.
Oh, and I mean, they owned the industry at that point. They could do whatever they wanted. And on some level, it is a monument to self-indulgence, and on another level, it's kind of rock. But why not do whatever the fuck you want when you're coasting off of Rumours, right?
So what we did was we re-recorded that album but had this fake press release that said we recorded it in 1986 in California, staying at a friend's parents' cabin. We got snowed in, so we decided to cover Tusk on a four-track.
So we tried to record it on a four-track. We were recording on professional equipment, but we tried to keep it to four tracks. We couldn't. The law of tracks just comes in, filling them all up. But we did use a drum machine from that year to sort of give it the feel of that year.
So we released this fake thing from our—this thing that wasn't really from our catalog—and put this album out. And it got everybody talking about that album. We did it in like three days, like we said, and got everybody talking about that album which was kind of the point of that album. We thought this was a great record, and it deserved its due so here's another look at that record. Maybe people will come to love the Tusk album, which I think we were part of. Yeah, we were imitating that album in the eyes of a lot of people.
Let's jump ahead to some of your criticisms and actual legal actions against streaming services and whatnot. Because you—and at various points, everybody in the bands you've been associated with—are incredibly tech-savvy. People have worked at places like Pandora and are computer programmers.
Your music is heavily, heavily indebted to technology and a knowledge and love of forward avant technology. You've been critical—particularly about 10 or 15 years ago—you were very critical of the way that streaming services did not compensate content creators. You pointed out in several interviews, I think, that for a million streams or plus of "Low," one of Cracker's best-known songs— it talks about a junkie cosmonaut in one line. And it is of the great rock lyrics that has stuck in my head forever, I'll probably say it on my deathbed. But for a million streams of that on Pandora, you would get paid as the writer and as a performer on it, something like $17.
So I think in that article I detailed that it's actually about $140 that goes towards the label, the publisher, the performers, and the songwriter. But my actual share of that, as being a band on a label, was $17. And I'm the major writer on that. I have the most writing on it. But I do explain that.
That is specifically with Pandora, which at that time was non-interactive streaming. So the royalties were very, very low on that. They're a bit higher when you get to interactive streaming.
This is one of the reasons it's great to talk about this on this podcast is that a lot of people don't realize this, but at least the songwriting part of the music business is highly regulated. For instance, in the digital realm, songwriters don't really set the price for their songs, nor do they negotiate with anybody.
There are these compulsory licenses. And the formula for paying those artists is set by an administrative law board in the Library of Congress called the Copyright Royalty Board. What happened was— always good intentions—in the '90s, the federal government saw the digital age coming and said, "What should we do about music and copyright with these new digital services that are coming? We'll make some compulsory licenses."
There's different ones depending on how it's being used, but I don't want to go on that. But effectively, those rates and the formulas determining the rates for songwriters, eliminated any sort of market for songs in the digital realm and also set the rates too low.
When you say they set the rates too low, what do you mean by that?
If I write a song 100 percent, and I own all the publishing on it—I don't sell any of it off to anybody—on a streaming service, on the best-paying streaming services, I might get a little under a tenth of a penny for each stream.
So take a five-minute song and you say, "Well, how long does this have to play for me to make a dollar? For me to make $12?" You end up with these enormously large—somebody's paying five bucks for three weeks of solid music or something. Maybe even three months, I can't remember what it was.
There's no free market, so it is hard to say what the value is. I guess that's a subjective opinion, but it doesn't seem right.
And the rates are certainly lower than they were for radio play.
Yes, but that's also—
But that's also complicated, yeah.
That's complicated in the sense that each stream is listened to by hundreds, maybe thousands of people, if you're lucky, on the radio. But you also have this real advertising business that has real money. Paying for radio ads is where the dollars were. Advertising supported streaming services, that's also a weird business, there's not very much money in that. I'm sure Reason needs subscribers, not just advertisers, because digital advertising rates are so low.
So, it's a subjective opinion that it's too low. But there's a lot of circumstantial evidence—when you look at other things and how things behaved in non-digital markets—that it is a lot lower.
That's one problem.
The other problem was just sheerly that when the streaming services launched, the way the law was written, they had to go through a process to actually get the federal licenses. And a lot of them just didn't do that. What ended up happening was, they didn't really know who to pay.
So there was a whole class of independent artists that were never licensed and never got any royalties—no matter how low. The class actions were aimed at that—not the low rates—but just the fact that these services were not paying a large class of songwriters.
That involved platforms like Spotify, probably most notably. I've seen different class action suits that you were involved in or really helped lead, calling for $40 million or $20 million or being settled. And that was for nonpayment of royalties.
And Spotify or the platform would say, "Well, we're happy to pay these very low royalty rates, but we have no idea who they are or where we wouldd send the payment to, so we're not going to do it."
How were those cases settled?
They were settled because we had them—hands down.
I'm going to say something that's going to surprise a lot of people here: it's not necessarily Spotify's fault. In the case of Spotify and a couple of these other services because they hired a third party.
But they were liable.
We started out intending to sue the third party. But we got to the lawyers and the lawyers were like, "Yeah, but they're not really liable. It's the services that are liable."
Yeah, it's a little crazy. You're like, "Hey, I'm an artist. I enter this digital age and there's this one dominant player—Spotify. And I'm going to launch a class action against them." That could be career suicide—or maybe not. I don't really know.
But all the services did effectively the same thing—to some extent or another. They were not paying a lot of the independent writers.
I think after everything was all said and done it was like $100 million that Spotify paid out. The other services were much lower amounts because they didn't have the market share.
But it did drive the Music Modernization Act, which gave us a better system for licensing, collecting, and distributing those royalties. So now we're back to the first problem—it's that the rates are too low—but at least we've got the money coming in.
So what it did, it drove a reform of the Copyright Act.
Before we talk about the royalty rates or modernizing those or changing those—out of, say, the $100 million, you always hear about class action lawsuits where they get settled and there's a big amount, but the actual claimants end up with pennies. Is that what happened here?
And I'm thinking back to the tax—which I have not bought a blank cassette or videotape in years—but they all have taxes on them, which are for a pool of money that's supposed to go to uncompensated creators.
Well, nobody signs up for that. So it's weird, though, if you did sign up for that, in the day when people were recording on blank cassettes, if you did sign up for those royalties, it ended up being fairly substantial because nobody was signing up for it. Mostly the labels were signing up for it, but on the performer side, nobody was signing up for those.
Kind of the same thing happened with our— well there's multiple class actions; they get split off in different ways, so they're all different.
But with the Spotify class action, that pool of money had to go to the writers that signed up for it. So people got substantial payouts, that signed up for it. I have all these weird little NDAs associated with this settlement, so I'm never sure what I can say.
But it was substantial. People talked about it like, "Wow, I actually got real money from a class action." So that was good.
But you talk about these class actions where—this is something people don't know about me—talk about these class actions where people don't get any money. I was actually the objector to a case that went to the Supreme Court on a class action that I looked at it and was like, "Hey, I'm in this class, and they gave all the money away to—."
Google basically gave all the money away—remeber when Google drove around and swept up everybody's Wi-Fi traffic—so it's one of the class actions associated with that. The settlement judges approved was essentially giving the money to all these NGOs that Google was funding anyway, and also universities that the attorneys were alumni of the law school there.
So me and this guy Ted Frank, attorney Ted Frank came to me—he loved me coming on because I was a leader of a class action and then I came on as his objector to object to these settlements. In the end, we moved the ball a little, but didn't really win anything.
But yeah, that's a huge abuse class action lawsuit where no money goes to the class. It just goes to the attorneys.
With the royalty rates for plays on streaming services—in at least one respect—they're better than for radio, right? Because the performers on streams get some small; they are in the pool of money. But what would make you feel like you were made whole? How would rates have to change as an artist?
Because part of the argument, and I'm thinking back to the old kind of copyright abolitionist position—which is that the idea behind copyright is to incentivize people to make music, or write books, or create stuff. And that's going to happen anyway, so maybe the royalty rates are not that important?
Yes and no. There are definitely bands that have built up economic models—you think of the Grateful Dead, you think of Phish—that are based on giving their music away largely and taking their revenue from live shows, basically. People who write songs will probably write songs.
The problem is the tail-off is when you get into more expensive things—like films—you've got to have some sort of copyright regimen to make films. But also with songwriters and performers, I feel like I made my best work once I got into my 30s, or maybe even now. I think at some point, you stop producing as many songs if you have to have another job.
So the effect in music is more felt out in album four, five, six, seven—which a lot of artists they never get there with copyright or not. But over and over, the classic great artists, they really hit their stride during those albums. I think that's where you'd see the effect on music, which can be made fairly cheaply—I'll give you that. I think it more that way.
But I also don't like the fact that it empowers freeloaders and platforms that seem to always end up being noncompetitive if you don't have copyright. Effectively, copyright is like the eminent domain cases where the government takes your right and gives it to a private entity. That's the way compulsory licenses work in the digital realm. That has a lot of unintended consequences that are not good.
Ok, so the rates, what would be the rates?
The first thing I would do is just remove the compulsion. Remove the compulsory licenses. Maybe move to something like, I don't want to get technical, there's something called extended collective licensing, where the first thing you would do is you would move to letting people have an opt out. Those who are happy with the system would stay in the system. Those who weren't would remove themselves from the system and be faced with the prospect of having to license their stuff outside of that system.
I guess what I'm getting at is, I don't know if there's a single price for every single song. What we have right now is that we have a price for every single song. I think all songs have different prices. I think they decay over time, I think the value of a song can decay over time. Some songs start out at a low value and become very valuable.I think you want to insert a lot more economic choice into the system. And I'm not an expert. There was a librarian of Congress who wrote about a system—Beth Peters, I believe it was her—who wrote about an extended collective licensing systems. Which would transition us back to more economic choice on these things. I would sunset the compulsory licenses, because that's the problem: I can't point to a market price for a song in streaming.
Right. And that's fascinating to think about happening at a time—this is slightly different, but related—as albums became disintermediated, through the rise of Apple Music and even Napster.
Why should all songs cost 99 cents or whatever?
I will confess to being a very active Napster user. It actually got me back into music because I used it as a sampling service, then I would go out and buy high-quality things. But when Napster became legal, and I was about to buy a song for a dollar, I thought, "Well, I don't want to buy 'Norwegian Wood' by the Beatles. Because it's like a minute and 58 seconds long." Then I was like, "Maybe I'll do 'Miracles' by Jefferson Starship—it's five and a half minutes long." I ended up buying "Dream Weaver" because it was even longer.
And I said, "What the fuck is going on here?" But the point is taken that different songs should have different prices. We're willing to pay different prices for them.
You're old enough to remember the record clubs, right? I mean, that was built on the notion that this album is 18 months old. It's got a much lower price now. And so what we're doing is we're bundling it all together with a bunch of stuff.
Part of what's interesting— in your written work, and I suspect in the business classes that you teach at Georgia—you talk about this. One of the things that the rise of digital everything gave us was this dream of disintermediation. Where, finally, buyer and seller—you cut out the middleman and you can market directly to your customers. Your customers can find you because they don't have to go through these gatekeepers of various values.
And we can set aside, for a moment, that intermediaries are essential to capitalism and good functioning markets. And they tell you what's out there.They do quality control, all sorts of positive things.
But for the purposes of this conversation, disintermediation did not seem to deliver the promises to artists, to musical artists, that we were kind of hoping for. In a way it's true, it's easier now than ever, if you have 5,000 true fans, you can make a living off of that. If you're a writer and you're on Substack you can go directly to people and that's good.
But in a 2012 address that was titled Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss, the thing that is still around is that somehow it's either Spotify, or it's Columbia Records or something—these big giant entities that end up collecting all the money.
I remember in the Senate hearings on Napster, listening to Roger McGuinn—the leader of the Byrds who had a good solo career, he was well known, he was in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—testifying that he had never received a royalty. On any of the records he was ever involved in because somehow they never paid back the advance.
It's like, "Wow." The commercial music industry has in some significant way been exploitative of artists, of the content creators, for its entire history. And it just seems to be able to continue to do that in new ways. Do you feel, is it that bad? Or is the scene better now—for people like you and people without your reputation and your track record?
Well, I wouldn't trade it for the old business, the business now for the old business. Who's going to put out an autobiographical record for a 64-year-old guy? Which label would have done that in the '70s? They would have to be somebody who would just want to take a chance on me.Creatively, there's a lot more control that's enabled by all these digital platforms. But it's definitely hard to get your money away from the free riders out there—which we've always had a problem with—or the platforms or the intermediaries.
I, fortunately, came up in the business in the late '80s and the '90s when there was a lot of money beginning to slosh around the business. It was really competitive for the labels to sign artists. It was a very competitive marketplace. We got pretty good contracts in that era.
By the '90s, we definitely got pretty good contracts because the artists seemed to have a lot of power in the business and there was a lot of money splashing around. But Roger McGuinn grew up in a different time where you have very low royalty rates.
The way the recoupment was counted was often— the way that calculation was made, you basically never saw any money. But the difference is at least you got advances in the old days, so you weren't financing the creation of the records out of your pockets, which is essentially what we do today if you do get advances they're much, much smaller. A lot of times for indie artists what you're doing is you're making the recording and then you're basically providing the music to the platforms— it's like, "We'll just pay you every time we use it."
The economic problem is the capital accumulation to make a record is pushed back onto the artist. And you're sort of financing these platforms. And that just seems like a problem to me. But there's all kinds of other ways of dealing with it, which everybody's gone back to selling physical products.
I remember the first time I downloaded Napster, I saw something downloaded on Napster, it was in my studio—in the control room computer. Somebody needed to hear a song and one of the interns is like, "Here, I put Napster on there, let me go get it for you." And I looked at that and I was like, "Wow."
And I was looking to see what songs were on there and I just go, "Ok, so we're gonna have a system where albums are either going to be $100 or free." Is this going to be up to the fan, some deluxe edition? And that's kind of what we have with vinyl. My CX set listing at about 80 bucks—or it's free, practically free on a streaming service.
Has it pushed back? I heard Rick Rubin interviewed Todd Rundgren sometime recently. And Rundgren, who is also somebody who's very tech-savvy and actually was on an early verge—like a precedent of Patreon in the late '90s—but talked about how what we're going back to is an older model for music, where it's really about performing. And that's where the money is going to be, because that's the thing that you can actually monetize.
Do you feel like something like that is true? And is it good or bad, or is it just different?
It's just different. And it might actually favor the top tier of artists more than the bottom tier.
You know, touring is a very low-margin business. In fact, you know, most of the time artists would kind of lose a little money on tour, and then you come home, and the record sales would sort of be your payment—your shots, or your royalties, or whatever—would be kind of your payment, or the record company would pay you to go on tour.
So it's a low-margin business. We're just on the other side of the line where we can make money on touring and kind of figure it out with Cracker. I don't think Camper Van Beethoven is. I think they're on the other side of the line.
So in a weird way, like, if I was just in Cracker, I would look at this and have a much more positive account in the world.
Also, we have hits that are recurrent. I mean, we have songs that are cataloged with Cracker—they're played 30 to 45 million times a year or something like that. That's a significant amount of revenue. And that, to me, I'm like, that's probably extra money that we wouldn't have normally got under the old system.
Whereas with Camper Van Beethoven—relied on album sales—there's a bifurcated system. It works for some business models and not for others.
Live music is low-margin. I think if you're a big enough star—or even if you can just do the soft tickets in the festivals, which is mostly what Cracker does—you make money off of it. But I don't think you do for Camper Van Beethoven.
So that's why you see people putting their music for sale on Bandcamp and not on the streaming service—where you have to buy it upfront. You pay for all your streams essentially and stuff like that. Where you sell CDs, or you sell vinyl albums.
It was only recently jazz labels went to streaming, because they were still… physical sales, holding onto the old system.
It's a mixed path.
To perhaps drive to a finish here, you're teaching at the University of Georgia. You teach courses about the business of music and things like that.
Are your students optimistic about the future? Is there still a music industry—or is even that just using the wrong terminology? How will people make money off music in the future, and are people optimistic about that?
Well, you definitely still can make money on the live side. My wife is an executive and promotes concerts and stuff like that. This year's not so great, but the last few years have been pretty good.
You can make money off of live music—you always can make money off live music. The jury's a little more out on recorded music—how that plays out, and the models that work.
Young people are naturally optimistic. They think they're going to crack the nut, so I don't have to. I just need to give them the tools, and they'll go out there and try to crack the nut, you know what I mean, like try to figure out how to do this.
And I feel like I have a lot of ex-students who are figuring it out. They may not be making the kind of living I did in the '90s—or even in the late '80s—but they're getting there. There's some sort of career there.
Many of my students are actually trying to be on the business side. And they're doing pretty well. They're almost always go out and work for management or get a job with a label. Whether they stick or not, they're going out and getting jobs. Most of them, if they do well in our classes, they mostly go out there and pursue a dream in the music business.
Now, they may only stay there for seven years and then say, "You know what, I did it. I'm going to go do something else." So I know I didn't quite answer the question there.
No, no, no—that answers it for me. I guess as a final question—and you kind of alluded to this earlier in our conversation—when you said you realized you were influenced by Bruce Springsteen years many after the fact and things like that…
One of the things that really comes through very strongly on Fathers, Sons and Brothers—and it's there in all the work you've been part of—is a really intense sense of tradition or genealogy.
And it's not in a hidebound, "We've got to play music exactly like they played in Mississippi, in 1952, on a porch" but being informed by that.
Could you talk a bit about how that seems to be, simultaneously, one of the things that is afforded by contemporary digital culture—is that you can find and consume any music that's ever been recorded. You can watch almost any movie that's been recorded. You can read any book. You know, there's so much more information.
And yet, it seems like people are less inclined to kind of figure out where they come from or how they fit into a particular tradition. And that seems to be important, because a lot of people are like, "I don't know who I am. I don't know where I'm going." And it's kind of like the tools are all here in front of you.
Could you talk a little bit about how you have done that? Because to me, that is written into the title of your album, but also kind of the body of your work.
It seems worth driving home.
Yeah, well, I got to do this experiment live with my career.
We did Camper Van Beethoven, where we would say, "Ok, let's play something that's like music from the Balkans played in a surf chorus." And we'd just go everywhere and do whatever—with the notion that we're not really going to get it right, and that's what's cool about it.
That's what we think is cool about listening to bands from the '60s who tried to do sitar music or something like that. They get it wrong. Right?
Eventually, with Camper Van Beethoven, we sort of discovered that, "Well, when we're playing stuff that sits more in the musical culture we've been immersed in—if we just sit back into that a little more—it seems to be more powerful."
By the time we get to Cracker, I'm leaning into that completely. I'm still going to do a little of this and that—there's a little postmodernism in there.
I'm trying to make a Chesterton's fence joke, but I can't quite figure out how to make it. It's not like we're sitting there trying to play traditional blues or traditional country or Appalachian folk music with Cracker. But we are sitting back more into the traditions we were raised in—where we just sort of intuitively know what we're supposed to play.
I think we're going to leave it there. David Lowery, thank you so much for talking to Reason. It's been a real treat for me.
Thank you, thanks for having me on.
- Producer: Paul Alexander
- Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser
