Ian

American Hero

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly 14 years since that strange and amazing day I got to spend a few hours hanging with Ian MacKaye at the 2010 Future of Music Policy Summit in Washington, D.C. I’ve been thinking about it lately because Ian’s role in the Summit was a fascinating conversation with Wayne Kramer of The MC5. Sadly, Wayne recently passed away. That’s the only time I met him, and it seemed that his character and generosity matched his amazing talent. After the talk a friend introduced me to Ian, and I ended up hanging around with him while he drove around D.C. in a loaner mini-van from the repair shop.

A quick aside, and one of the true highlights of my professional life. A client of mine, a Bon Iver side project called Gayngs, had a show in town at The Black Cat that evening. After our hang, I asked Ian to drop me off at the Black Cat so that I could catch Gayngs’ soundcheck. Of course he’d played the venue many times, therefore he knew to drive me down the back alley to the stage door. When we arrived, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and several band members were standing around in the alley. We pulled up and Ian jumped out of the mini-van to introduce himeslf to each member of Gayngs. “Hey, I’m Ian. Nice to meet you.” They all just stood there in stunned silence as Ian drove off, then turned and looked at me as if they were seeing me in an entirely new light. “Holy fuck,” was all Justin managed to utter. I don’t think the reaction would have been all that different if it had been President Obama driving me around in that mini-van.

You see, Ian is a hero to practically every independent or independent-minded musician. Founder of Minor Threat and Fugazi, and co-founder and co-head of Dischord Records since 1980, he is one of the most revered, respected, and emulated individuals in underground music. His musical legacy is incredible and enduring, but he’s probably equally well-known as an innovator in the music business. As a student of the business and a great admirer of Ian’s since my teenage years, it was such a pleasure and privilege to get to talk to him about his life in music.

I’ve talked about this in other recent writings, but to briefly recap, the hardcore punk business had a big influence on the indie rock business. These genres are rare in that the deal structures have long been artist-friendly, even when deals in other genres and with major labels were very company-friendly. The basic “indie” deal structure has long been the 50/50 net profit split and license, a structure I still see regularly in indie deals. I’d always understood that Dischord, along with Touch and Go and a few others, pioneered this informal deal structure that has become the standard.

According to Ian, that isn’t true. He told me that Dischord has always operated on the principle that all of the money after basic overhead operating costs should go to the bands. He’s always been in an enviable position of having his 2 main bands the biggest earners on the label; but Dischord has had many successful releases. To this day he still hand-writes a royalty check to each band on the roster not matter how small the amount. If any band on Dischord wants to sign with another label or otherwise reclaim their recordings, they’re free to go. Nobody signed a contract. Everything he had to say about the label and music circled back to the same fundamental idea: the business supports the bands in a culture of trust and equity.

Someone asked me recently what the most artist-friendly deal structure a company could possible sustain, and I described Dischord’s model. It could work for a non-profit perhaps, but in most cases it isn’t really a sustainable model. Capitalism is based on incentives for business and investors to make money from all the risk, scarce resources, and effort that goes into commerce. Maybe Dischord’s model only functions if the owner/operators of the label (Ian and Minor Threat drummer Jeff Nelson) make substantial profits to sustain their families’ livelihoods from their earnings as artists on the label. The point is that they could keep a lot more of the money (such as the 50/50 model) and still be considered objectively “artist-friendly” by our industry’s business culture. Instead, they take a very strong ideological, activist position that is against the grain of every conceivable culture within the music industry. I don’t think it makes sense for most businesses to emulate their model - in many ways, the financial incentives drive their ambition and risk tolerance. It’s important to understand the ideal; but it’s MORE important to embrace some form of the ideology behind the model.

What I take away from Dischord’s extraordinary business model is that it should be in our collective DNA to serve the needs and goals of artists. The work creative musicians do is the lifeblood of our industry, and the business should serve and incentivize that creativity. That’s an old notion, so old in fact that it’s codified in our Constitution.¹ Anyone in the music business who considers themselves more important or valuable than the artists needs to get the out of the way. Anyone who extracts value from artists without at least contributing equal or greater value is a drain and should find another way to make a living. More than ever, popular artists have power. Anybody who doesn’t acknowledge this fact is delusional.

Ian is a hero to me (and should be to you), but I’m not talking about making business decisions exactly how Ian would. I do, however, think about his ideology and the way he prioritizes the creative community which he’s a part of in what he does on the business side. Hardcore punk set up a parallel industry that rejected the standards and structures of the mainstream industry, which has a very long, sordid history of ripping off artists. Dischord’s structure is a radical approach to fairness from a perspective that has helped realign the industry. If we in the business all practice a mindset of prioritizing artists, then fairness will happen. As the industry is reinvented in real time, it’s the perfect time to rethink these priorities.

1. I’ve referenced this before, but it’s bedrock to my philosophy of how we should work in creative fields. Article One, Section 8 provides that “Congress shall have the power to promote the progress of….useful Arts by securing for limited times to Authors exclusive rights in their respective Writings….” My reading of that is we’re able to protect creative works to provide an incentive to create. If a company secures exclusive rights by contract, the intention is that they are providing incentives for artists to create.