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Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Business Too Much Joy, Not Enough Royalty $
Posted by Dave Segal on Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 10:41 AM
This is the most retweeted link in my Twitter feed today. Tim Quirk outlines his band Too Much Joy's struggle to extract royalties owed to his band from Warner Bros. I read the piece, which is funny and exasperating, with a combination of schadenfreude and a disgust that I should know better to harbor for a business that's always been shady. Read it as a cautionary tale, if you're in a band striving for major-label status, or just out of morbid curiosity for how the biz works. (Strangely, I don' t ever recall intentionally listening to Too Much Joy, and I listened to a helluva lot of music in the '80s and '90s.)
1
This is another in a long line of descriptions of the one-sided-ness of almost anything to do with the record industry.
More important is the human toll. How many of us take incredibly crappy jobs simply because we are going to be on tour for a couple weeks here and a month there? and after 5-10-15 years of slugging it out, even with moderate success (which is rare), you generally have little in the way of assets or marketable job skills to show for it.
More important is the human toll. How many of us take incredibly crappy jobs simply because we are going to be on tour for a couple weeks here and a month there? and after 5-10-15 years of slugging it out, even with moderate success (which is rare), you generally have little in the way of assets or marketable job skills to show for it.
2
I used to love Too Much Joy. Played the hell out of Seasons In the Sun, Drum Machine, That's A Lie and others. There's some pretty hilarious stories surrounding their performance of That's A Lie back in the early 90s.
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