“And that was the position that we found ourselves in. You have people who didn’t get our subculture. People that were from a different ethical and business perspective, and people that certainly wouldn’t appreciate the kind of openness and handshake relationships that we were used to. And so if they expressed any interest in us whatsoever, it was clearly misguided. So I just didn’t entertain those at all.”
“So I was never tempted to go into business with any of those people. They always just seemed like they were completely out of their element. And one way or another, we would have ended up in a horrible misunderstanding, and no one would have ended up enjoying the relationship. So it just wasn’t even worth entertaining a conversation.”
Albini has advice for up and coming artists who may be interested in following a similar path. He emphasizes why he thinks up and coming artists might consider adopting his first principle of making do with what you have. “Let’s assume we’re talking about someone in the music scene. But it doesn’t really matter if it’s music. It could be painting, it could be dancing, it could be bass fishing, it doesn’t matter what it is. If you’re doing something that is enjoyable for its own sake, like playing music or painting pictures, or play acting, or ballroom dancing — it doesn’t matter what it is — if you’re doing something that is enjoyable for its own sake, then you have to expect that society will undercompensate you for that on a professional level."
“Because people will do it for nothing. If playing music, singing songs, telling stories, telling jokes — not just performing arts; basically anything that’s creative, anything that involves the creative mind — all of those things are satisfying to do as an individual. Just accomplishing the thing makes you feel good. So the professional market for those things is going to be very, very small. It’s going to be exceedingly small.”
“That you can find a job doing something that is seen as reward enough by lay people, playing baseball, playing gold — anything that you would do for its own sake — is going to be really fucking difficult to make a living at. The corollary to that is that if you’re doing one of those things, you should be doing it principally because you enjoy doing it. If you’re only doing it for as paycheck, you’re going to be bad at it. Like if the only reason that you’re a circus clown is that’s the only way you can think of to make money, you’re going to be a terrible circus clown.”
“If the only reason that you’re a fiddler is that you can’t conceive of any other way to make a living, then you’re probably not going to be a very good fiddler. But if you’re driven to play the accordion, and that’s the thing that animates you, and the thing that makes getting up in the morning worth doing, then you’re going to be obsessive about it. You’re going to do it on a scale where other people will appreciate your enthusiasm, and you will probably get some compensation for it.”
“I can’t promise you you can make a living at it. But you’ll be able to keep doing it, that’s for sure. So the first thing is to appreciate that if you’re doing something that is seen as enough reward on its own, it’s really difficult to expect people to pay you to do that as well.”
Albini also encourages artists to consider his second principle of including everyone — to a point. He encourages seeking out those who want to help, not exploit, the artists’ work. “The second thing that I would say is, if someone is offering to do the parts of your job that you don’t like — like if a manager is offering to do your booking or your bookkeeping or your scheduling or whatever in exchange for a percent — like OK, if you give me a cut of your money, I will do the mundane part, and you can just do the fun part — you can expect that that person is taking advantage of you. I think there’s basically no other way to look at that.”
“If you have a manager or an agent who is doing some aspect of your business for you, then that person is probably being overcompensated for those mundane aspects of the business. And I’ll give you a classic example. A lot of bands have a booking agent that will book their tours for them. And these booking agents typically receive 10 to 15 percent, typically 15 percent of the fee from a show.”
“So if your booking agent looks on your schedule, and he sees that there’s an open day, and let’s say you’re in Boston, and he can get a show for you in Pennsylvania, and that show in Pennsylvania pays $500. Then if he makes a phone call and books a show, he’s just made himself $75. So he’s just made himself $75 with that one phone call. Now you have to pack all your shit up in the van, drive whatever it is, five hours to the gig in Pennsylvania, find yourself a hotel for the night if you can’t get an indulgence from somebody and crash at their place. And the travel expenses between one city and the next including the hotel might very well be