What's the bigger surprise: That Warner Brothers records is duplicitous at worst, callously ambivalent at best, or that Too Much Joy has an active web site?

For me, it was the latter. No knock against the fellas in TMJ; just haven't heard about them in a decade or more. I was surprised, then, to see a link to the band's blog where leader Tim Quirk shares the band's most recent royalty statement to highlight the laughable digital sales tally listed. And not just a month, or a quarter or even a year, mind you. But five years' worth. The total: $62.

The New York indie joke rockers signed to Warners for three albums in the late 1980s, and as is clear from the royalty statement, they never came close to making money on the deal. -- they still owe the label $395,000 17 years after the release of their last for the label, Mutiny! So it's not as if Quirk and Co. are looking for a late payday. They simply want an accurate accounting of things.

What makes this all the more sad/funny is that Quirk works for Rhapsody, so he knows exactly how many times the band's songs have been streamed and downloaded, and from his, um, accounting of the matter, it's clear that Warner's is lowballing this to a tragically comedic level.

As Quirk points out in the blog post, consider this a digital-age addendum to Steve Albini's famous anti-major label screed for the Baffler back in the 1990s.

Labels: music, record labels