The Bastards and the Beancounters

Bill Hobbs links to a sordid little story from the music industry's past, in which a young country singer was shot, and a young researcher murdered, before they could reveal to the world that the industry-rag "Cashbox" was a corrupt piece of shit.

See folks, those are the cats that presided over the "golden age" of rock and roll (and country, and R&B...). Old-school song pluggers, gangsters, and used-car salesmen with a little extra capital who would think nothing of dangling you off a building, breaking your legs, signing you to a contract so crooked that your corpse is scheduled to do live appearances, or in the case of George Jones, kidnapping your family every time you try to kick cocaine, because your management are also your dealers.

What they did NOT do was scrutinize quarterly balance sheets, worry about balanced budgets and projections, manipulate share prices, or employ teams of lawyers analysts to defend "their" intellectual property from Benelux to Boise. That all happened when the neighborhood gentrifed and the beancounters took over.

So ask yourself: who's worse-- the bastards or the beancounters?

(Extended parenthetical statement: I've worked in the music industry, and I know this for a fact: the beancounters are firmly in charge almost everywhere. Leaving aside the legions of noble-minded smaller labels whose numbers are tiny compared to the whole, the music industry has shifted emphasis far away from "music" and placed the emphasis squarely on "industry."

Granted, A&R guys are still allowed to be hairy and weird, and artists are still coddled while being bled white, but the focus is almost totally on the health of the parent company's bottom line. Accounting & control run the joint, while Legal Affairs runs interference. While this means that people don't get dangled out of windows anymore-- except in the rap world-- the music is now subjected to microscopic scrutiny by the money-people and its sales potential projected out for years to come. Ears are secondary now, and demographics, marketing and finance are king.

All this is by way of saying that the music industry has always been a filth-pit, and even though the means may change, the criminals remain the same. )

(Second parenthetical note: I'm not pleading for sympathy for the RIAA. Buncha vampires.)

(Third parenthetical note: Read "Hit Men," linked below, for the story of how the bastards and beancounters came to work together. Tasty!)

Article Author: John Owen

John Owen is a music writer, multi-instrumentalist and music industry veteran based in coastal Massachusetts.

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