From The Desk Of Camper Van Beethoven’s Jonathan Segel: “The Trichordist”

La Costa Perdida (429) kicks off Camper Van Beethoven’s 30th-anniversary year amidst an orchestrated (if deserving) surge in recognition for the group—everything from Paul Rudd donning a vintage Camper concert tee in the film This Is 40 to glowing quotes from members of R.E.M. and the Meat Puppets. The LP is CVB’s first album since 2004’s New Roman Times and was mostly recorded at multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Segel’s Oakland home studio a year prior to his move to Sweden. “The process was similar, perhaps, to the recording of Camper’s third album, in that we could experiment and had time to work on things,” says Segel. “The first two CVB albums were recorded in a weekend.” Segel will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on the band.

Segel: The Trichordist is a blog I was turned onto by David Lowery, who has been writing a bunch about artists’ rights in the internet economy. There are occasional guest editorials by Chris Castle. I actually even wrote one piece for them, mostly about the history of artists’ control over their own economics. But David has really taken this thing by the horns and gone more for the All The President’s Men approach, which is to say, tracing where the money actually goes.

It’s pretty obvious that people do not spend money on music much these days. However, they do spend an awful lot of money on the things that allow them to hear music, like computers, iPods, headphones and, of course, their ISPs and phone companies. And further, it’s become pretty obvious who makes money off of music being available on the internet, being searched for, being streamed, etc.: the advertisers. And most of that comes back to Google.

So why doesn’t any of this income go back to the musicians? Well, greed begets greed, basically. Where there’s money to be had, nobody wants to let go. I think it’s evident that a great deal of musicians aren’t actually in it for the money, rather for the fact that they must be musicians by nature, so these are the first to be taken advantage of. The few that are in it to make money aren’t really making “music” so much, are they? But so many “fans” are so quick to say, “If they were good enough, they’d make money,” or, “If they’d just hustle their butts to advertise themselves, they’d be successful.” This is the same as the “blame the victim” mentality that so many Republicans espoused vis-a-vis rape and its consequences this past year. It’s insane! If the only music that is successful is made by hustlers, it’s probably not what I want to be hearing. And if it were really up to what was “good” or not, we’d be basically upside down with respect to popular music.

I am grateful for the fact that there existed people who fought for artists to be heard within the “evil record companies” in the past. Many people whom I consider to be great musicians are social misfits. I can’t imagine Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, for example, hawking his own wares. And Radiohead had believers at Capitol who kept marketing their early singles after their expiration dates, simply because they thought the music needed to be heard. Without these people, Radiohead could not have developed into the beautiful and odd thing that they became.

The entire pirate-party/anti-copyright brigade comes off as a bunch of teenage boys, in the end; non-empathetic, self-involved and they simply want what they want right now with no consequence. The fact that the “direction of music” is being controlled by these people, e.g. Daniel Ek, is really too bad. The companies that exist now for people to hear music, like Ek’s Spotify, are not about music at all, they are about money. They simply use music as something to use to make the money.

See, for example, Damon Krukowski’s article on Pitchfork also.

Video after the jump.