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Comment by breput | Hacker News Reader

"I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it's worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There's no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn't be able to sleep."

[0] https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/nirvana

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It's fascinating how in certain genres producers have elevated themselves, rightly in my opinion, to positions that are almost equal to the artists they're recording. In pop and hip-hop, people really care about who produced what, often because the producer has an enormous role in the overall sound of the music. Those producers would probably disagree with Albini right away. It's less a thing when you're dealing with a band or people who play an instrument, but I can also think of some metal producers who have very distinct sounds and who usually leave an "imprint" on the recording (Colin Marston and Kurt Ballou for examples). Albini, though, seemed to really believe that his role was to just be a kind of neutral technician, manning the switches and ensuring the band and their music gets on the record through a series of indifferent tubes with no other input.

Outside of his position on royalties, he was one of the best and harshest critics of the music industry:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music

He actually came around later in life on being the harshest critic and also addressed the "producer role" in this[0] article:

"As he kept working, making hundreds of records across many more sessions, Albini became more comfortable stepping aside. Experiences like the Plant and Page record reminded him he was just a cog, there to enable someone else’s expression. These days, once Albini has agreed to record an artist, he begins by asking them to state their expectations, what bands they’re into, how they’d like to sound, how they’ve been disappointed in previous sessions. (The process is not unlike starting with a new therapist.)"

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/aug/15/the-evolution-...

steve certainly didn't hold back his contempt for the concept of a "producer", but I don't read him as disagreeing they have significant influence over the finished product. if anything, that's the core of his objection: someone other than "the artist" diluting the work, and hence why he asked to be credited as "recording engineer", if at all. the irony is that, despite his insistent denial, everyone else seems to think there is a signature "albini sound".

what has changed since he wrote that piece is that the concept of "the artist" has been heavily blurred by mainstream music that predominantly features synthesized instruments. if I'm singing words written by one person to a melody written by second over a track composed of thousands of different samples sent through various filters by a third, who is "the artist"?

Those (hip-hop) producers are musician-songwriters. They’re more in the Brill Building/Phil Spector mode.

Steve Albini recorded the songs you brought in with you. Just a different thing.

I'm trying to reconcile that 'plumber' against George Martin with the Beatles. He was paid like a plumber for the first couple years, and... EMI treated him with such disdain that he ended up leaving. I'm sure the money was much better after he left, but... had EMI just been slightly nicer to him, they'd have owned him for many more years.

That said, I think his relationship with his bands opened up areas for him to contribute to the core product more than Albini perhaps did (Martin played piano on some tracks, scored out any classical parts for other musicians, etc).

Martin may have been the middle ground between the 'producer-as-top-billing' and 'paid like a plumber' spectrum Albini seems to identify.

Martin was so involved in the creative process he was closer to a 5th bandmember, and was sometimes called such by the Beatles. He had more involvement in the creative product than most producers, including writing and arranging the strings, brass, and winds parts that are all over later Beatles records, and appeared as an instrumental performer on over 25 Beatles tracks.

So much that EMI have been fixing his work for 60 years now, in particular his decision to split the Beatles tracks arbitrarily between the two speakers for all the stereo mixes, despite the Beatles personal involvement in the mixing process for the mono mix downs which sound infinitely better.

That was how everything was mixed in the early days of stereo. Beatles actually got away from it sooner than many.

Radio was all AM, which is mono.

Everything wasn’t mixed like that actually. It was a poor decision seen through to its end.

There just wasn't much focus on stereo until the late 60s. Most acts back then have stereo mixes that are not much more than an afterthought.

It's not hard to reconcile: Albini didn't want to be George Martin.

i was once in a debate about capitalism and labor, and this letter was cited. this letter doesn't show the nuance of how he ran his business. here's an article with more insight about his ethos: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brick-by-brick/20150...

> “Think about it this way: My business is a business of the first type, where everyone involved feels like they’re working on a common project. Everyone involved feels like we are equally valuable. When our clients come in, and they don’t see that there’s a power structure or a hierarchy; nobody has the big office or anything. Everybody is working together as comrades on this project.”

> “The remuneration is very equitable. Everybody gets paid the same. I make the same amount of money in a month as the newest employee that we have. So there is a fundamental difference between that and virtually any corporate structure. But you can’t expect people who feel like they are less valuable to a corporation, who feel like their effort, their input, and their opinion means less than someone else in that corporation. You can’t expect those people to jump in and all be pulling for the same results, team players. Because you have defined for them that they are not all pulling for one thing, that they are not team players. You have defined their role for them as subordinate.”

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