Market failure: Punk economics, early and late

Thompson, Stacy

Introduction: Punk Merchandise?

In the early 90s, a line of tee shirts emerged in both independently owned and chain record stores. The shirts claimed, on their fronts"This is not a Fugazi T-shirt." The producer of the tee shirts assumed that fans of the punk rock band, Fugazi, were aware that its record label, Dischord, refused to market its bands. On the backs of the shirts appeared the lyrics, "You are not what you own," from the Fugazi song, "Merchandise." Dischord allowed for the possibility of such shirts when it refused to copyright its bands' names in a conscious attempt to eschew the commercial impulse to create intellectual property. What the shirts represent, however, is Dischord's lack of control over its products within the marketplace: in this instance, a tee-shirt manufacturer who might or might not run an independent business successfully mobilized the anti-commercial impulses of Dischord to integrate his or her own product into the commodity market.

Punks and punk businesses have, at best, a conflicted relationship with commodification and capitalism, around which aggregates of anxiety coalesce in material form as punk `zines (fanzines), songs, liner notes, and activism launched against what punks perceive as the encroaching realm of capitalism. What I propose is that, after 1979, both in response to the initial "sell out" of punk's late 70s English scene and in order to preserve control over their field of production, punks adopted economic strategies for resisting capitalism. In fact, the attempt to oppose commercial music in economic terms became crucial to the definition of punk in 1979 and has remained so through the present. However, punk has failed and continues to fail, even on a relatively small scale, to overturn the dominant mode of economic production that is proffered it-the commercial practices of the major record labels. Punks are unable to absent themselves from commodification and small-scale capitalism; but, in their attempts to resist these economic forms, they fail commercially, which is a sort of punk success after all. In their continual effort and failure to establish a zone of exchange that is qualitatively different from late capitalist commodity exchange, punks testify to the need and desire for such a zone and refuse to abandon the possibility of creating one.

Punk: A Provisional Definition

One of the most difficult tasks that mapping punk demands is that of formulating a working definition of the term from which to strike out. I want to begin by acknowledging that I will not offer a history or genealogy of punk here. However, I do want to advance three propositions in order to narrow (and, perhaps, broaden) the field that I will be investigating. First, there are several major genres of punk textuality: music (recorded and performed), style (especially clothing), the printed word (including `zines), film, and events (punk happenings); together, these texts make up what I will term the "punk project."

Second and more importantly, two vectors constitute punk. From punk's birth in 1974 in CBGBs (a small nightclub in New York City's East Village) to its present multiplicity of"scenes" that literally span the globe, punks have always mounted aesthetic and economic forms of resistance against commercial music as well as other forms of commercially produced cultural texts. Because punk's forms of resistance have radically changed over the past twenty-six years, it is impossible to establish a trans-historical definition of punk aesthetics or economics; consequently, the best attempts to describe punk aesthetics have focused not on punk as a whole but on one of its six major scenes: the New York City scene of 1974-76, the English scene of 1976-78, the California hardcore scene of the early 80s, the Washington, D.C., straight edge scene of the mid-80s, the New York City second wave straight-edge scene of the late 80s, and the California pop-punk scene of the early 90s., On the other hand, punk's economic modes of resistance have never been well-documented, and it is to this task that I turn in this article.

My third proposition assumes that the conditions of the first two have been met. For punks to consider a text "punk," they must identify it as such themselves. In short, a band, zine, film, etc. that both aesthetically and economically resists commercialism does not automatically qualify as "punk," unless punks recognize it as such and understand it as contributing to the "punk project."2

Early Punk Economics

The economic history of punk can be divided into two unequal parts: early punk economics, from 1974 to 1979, and late punk economics, from 1979 to the present. 1979 is a logical year to posit a break, because until that year the economic vector of punk's negation took a back seat to its aesthetic vector, while the "selling out" of the English scene (which I will describe below) in 1977 marks the moment at which punk begins to move underground economically, and its economic vector subsequently becomes at least as important as its aesthetic one.

The most thorough account of the early economic situation that birthed punk is Simon Frith's Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock `n' Roll (1981). The baby-boomer generation's capacity to consume begins to flower in the 70s, Frith writes, and large amounts of capital circulate through the rock industry, which produces the boomers' music of choice. This increase in capital results in a division of labor in the rock music industry and a consequent surge of not only professional musicians but specialized promoters, managers, publicists, distributors, producers, technicians, advertisers, etc. (1981, 137).As the expense of producing a rock album grows, the major record labels begin to dominate the industry by creating or purchasing the full range of the necessary means of rock production: they obtain their own manufacturing facilities; they establish their own distributors, which distribute primarily their products; they become major music publishers, purchasing the back catalogs of earlier music producers; and they invest in and give widespread distribution to the newly available technological processes for producing home sound systems as well as electrical instruments (141). By becoming vertically integrated and thereby expanding their control over the full range of the various branches of production, the major record labels can, through competition, drive smaller producers out of business or envelope them, which is exactly what they do. Frith found that "by the end of the 1970s . . . the majors in the USA (CBS, RCA, WEA, MCA, Polygram, Capitol) accounted for more than 90 percent of the record market in terms of both volume and sales; the 'independents' had a smaller share than at any time since the beginning of the 1950s" (138).

However, the majors' domination of the music market came at a price. According to Frith's argument, the Big Six never successfully manipulated, that is, rendered entirely predictable, rock consumers' tastes, and, consequently, they gradually developed an extremely expensive system of overproduction and promotion, whereby only about ten percent of all the records that they released earned any profit. That ten percent, however, in addition to the money made from investments in other areas of the music industry, could sustain the labels between hit records, because the massive promotion and distribution budgets paid off in the form of immense sales when albums succeeded. However, the high costs of overproduction and promotion ensured that only the majors controlled enough capital to be able to afford to lose money on ninety percent of the records that they released (1981, 148). Specifically, Frith notes that by "the end of the 70s the average `rock `n' roll album' cost between $70,000 and $100,000 in studio time, and any rock `sweetening' (adding strings [stringed instruments], for example) could add another $50,000 to the bill; promotion budgets began at around $150,000 and rose rapidly" (147).

Frith argues that, in reaction to the prohibitive costs of producing commercial music, frustrated musicians who felt shut out of record-producing rebelled and were responsible for an "explosion of independent rock musicmaking production" in the mid-70s (1981, 155). The result was punk rock, which became possible as the means of producing music became cheaper and access to them became more widely available. While the majors' costs of recording and promoting technologically sophisticated albums were rising, punks reverted to "front-room studios" and recorded their music relatively cheaply, using four-track tape recorders (156). Independent record labels emerged in England to release punk rock, and soon "independents sold enough to establish a viable 'alternative' record business, with its own network of studios, shops, clubs, [and] charts" (156). An "independent" label, for Frith, is one that does not have a distribution deal with the majors (156). In the US., however, the majors effectively absorbed punk, rendering it ineffective as an economic force, and hard on the heels of the majors' envelopment of American punk came their takeover of English punk as well. Ultimately, for Frith, punk must be understood as an "unsuccessful musicians' revolt" (84), because the "new sounds, disco and then punk, came from independents, and were, in their turn, standardized and co-opted into new record company divisions" (155).

A contradiction arises here that is not unique to Frith: he locates punk rock's potential power as an economic force in the moment when it seems capable of establishing an "independent, economic alternative" to "multinational record companies," yet its failure, he argues, lies both in its absorption into the Big Six and in its inability to maintain in England, or attain in the US., national but independent financial viability. He reads punk's economic failure as its broader cultural failure. I intend to argue just the opposite, that its economic failure is, in fact, a "punk success" of sorts. Writing on the English punk scene, Mark Sinker comments that "[all punk codes were always intended to fail" (1999, 136), and, although he is referring specifically to aesthetic codes, the same logic applies to economic ones. For punk to succeed, especially economically, would mean succeeding in the very realm-as Frith acknowledges-that it positions itself against, even if it succeeds independently of the majors. Such a "success" would amount to a profound betrayal of punk's commitment to economic resistance.

In Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons's The Boy Looked At Johnny, the coauthors, writing three years before Frith, invoke the same contradiction that Frith does. They comment upon the irony of punk rock beginning to obtain "Capitalist Corporate Structure Commercial Viability" (1980, 35) in 1977, and they bitterly observe that "[a]s soon as any ostensibly dangerous new musical phenomena appear in the sweaty clubs giving a righteous finger to the status quo, it [sic] is enticed in from the cold by the same old dangled carrots of sex/drugs/cash/fame and run through the mill of commercial assimilation. What were once sharp, angry fangs are rendered soft, ineffective gums" (88). But they also harangue the Ramones for failing to achieve chart success in England or the US. in the late 70s and the Damned for "failing to make the Top Twenty in 1976" (50). Similar arguments appear in Gina Arnold (1993) and in the majority of the articles/chapters in Sabin (1999).

Late Punk Economics

Frith, Arnold, Burchill and Parsons, and Sabin et al. declare punk dead at the moment that it slips beneath the radar of corporately controlled media outlets, but punk's success lies precisely in its commercial failure, especially when it is willfully induced, as is the case with the contemporary band, Fugazi, whose situation within punk I will turn to below. Punk for itself is never commercially successful, by definition. According to the logic of late punk economics, the moment that a "punk" band succeeds commercially, which for punks means working with a major label, it ceases to be punk. For example, in 1994, when the pop punk band, Green Day, signed with Reprise Records, which is owned by Time Warner, the band ceased to be punk; however, Green Day's early albums on Lookout! Records, which is independent of the majors, continue to be punk, although they have been tainted retroactively by the band's "sell out," resulting in the dilemma for punks of deciding whether or not to purchase music that hovers in an indeterminate zone between commercial viability and punk.

After 1977, what remains punk to punks is the network of bands, stores, labels, distributors, and venues that consciously align themselves with punk and that continue to operate outside the reach of the major labels, outside of commercial music. It was in 1977, by which point the Sex Pistols seemed to have succeeded commercially3 and other nominally punk bands such as The Clash and "X" had signed recording deals with major labels-- deals granting the labels large degrees of control over the bands-that punks began to redefine themselves in economic terms. Beginning in 1979, a rapid shift in method and emphasis occurred within punk attempts to engage in economic resistance. For early punks, economic concerns were secondary to aesthetic ones and accompanied punk's early aesthetics almost as a byproduct. Resisting the commercial market largely meant producing music, often out of necessity, independently of the major record labels, then the Big Six. What the English and New York scenes' subsumption into the music industry demonstrated, though, was that aesthetic forms of divergence from the popular rock sounds of the late 70s would no longer guarantee that bands were economically resistant.

Dischord Records and Fugazi

In the late 70s and early 80s, a new wave of US. DIY (do-it-yourself) punk institutions emerged with new economic strategies for avoiding commercialization. For punks, "DIY" refers to producing commodities and performing without any financial support (for recording, manufacture, distribution, or publicity/advertising) from the major labels (the Big Six until 1998 and the Big Five since then). The terms "DIY" and "independent" can be used interchangeably, where "independent" means "independent of the major labels." The most prominent of these new DIY institutions are Dischord Records, based in Washington, D.C., and Fugazi, a band which releases all of its albums on the Dischord label. In 1980, before going on to found Fugazi in 1988, Ian MacKaye established Dischord with Jeff Nelson in order to release eight songs by the Teen Idles, a hardcore punk band in which they both played at the time. Dischord and later Fugazi, in which MacKaye plays guitar and sings, became the paragons of an important strand of punk economics in the 80s and have maintained that status up to the present.

In 2000, Dischord and Fugazi remain the most prominent examples in the US. of a punk record label and band that have attempted to free themselves from the commercial economy by wresting control of the means of production from the music industry in its major label guises. One strategy that Dischord began to employ in 1980 and continues to employ today, in direct contrast with the majors, centers on eschewing the division of labor that overtook the music industry in the 70s. Frith explains that as the majors entered the world market, they discovered a newly global demand for U.S. rock products (1981, 150), and, to meet it, they required a web of interlocking professionals in "order to produce records, mount shows, manage careers, and orchestrate sales appeal" (137).

In contrast to the majors, Dischord, which MacKaye continues to coown and help manage in 2000, distributes and sells its recordings via mail order or direct sales to record stores whenever possible, although Southern Records, an independently owned distribution company,4 handles the majority of Dischord's distributing needs. In an interview in the May/June 1999 issue of Punk Planet, an independently produced punk `zine with international distribution, MacKaye brags that he and his bandmates in Fugazi "manage ourselves, we book ourselves, we do our own equipment upkeep, we do our own recording, we do our own taxes" (1999, 38). The band also controls all of its own touring, recording, production, and engineering (Fairchild 1995, 28).

Forgoing the usual commercial division of labor, Dischord avoids the vertical integration of the majors that would establish ownership of the means of production for the label. Rather than investing in its own recording, production, and distribution facilities and processing the bands on Dischord through them, MacKaye and Nelson do not place bands under contract and, consequently, cannot dictate where they record their albums. The Washington Post quotes Guy Picciotto, one of the singers and guitar players for Fugazi:

A major-label contract, by definition, makes you an employee of the record company. No matter how good a contract you negotiate, you do not have complete creative control. This is a fact of the record business. This is a fact about Dischord: It does not sign contracts with bands whose recordings it releases, and it allows them total artistic control. (Brace 1993, 24)

Frith's understanding of the recording industry concurs with and expands upon Picciotto's synopsis. He explains that the record company does not just act as the record publisher. The standard recording contract makes it clear that record companies, who are the legal owners of the finished product, the physical recording, expect to exercise the right of their ownership, controlling what music is issued, how it is produced, when it is released. Companies may decide what songs will be on a record, in what order, with what packaging; they are at liberty `to determine arrangements, accompaniments, etc.'; they can organize an act's performing schedule, as an aspect of record promotion. Companies have the final power to decide whether a song or sound is of sufficient quality to meet the artists' contractual obligations-they are thus able to prevent them from recording elsewhere. (Frith 1981, 109) Dischord forgoes all of the above privileges by refusing to claim control of its bands' products. It does not even reserve the right to cancel a record or CD release if a band does not record the sort of sound in the studio that initially attracted the label's interest in the band.

In addition to avoiding divisions of labor wherever possible, Dischord refuses to develop the "multimedia sales techniques" (Frith 1981, 150) that Frith finds the majors advancing in the mid- to late-70s. The label never nationally publicizes record releases or concerts for Dischord bands through corporate media outlets, preferring to advertise in independent `zines, through word of mouth, and over the World Wide Web. Although label employees initially silk-screened Dischord tee-shirts and hung them on clotheslines to dry behind the company's headquarters (MacKaye's mother's house) in D.C. (Connolly 1995, 165), they quickly discontinued this form of promotion and have not engaged in tee-shirt or sticker promotions since the early 80s. At most contemporary punk rock shows, the "merchandise table," at which audience members can purchase records, CDs, stickers, patches, shirts, and `zines, remains a ubiquitous fixture, but Fugazi never operates one, although Dischord does not prevent bands on its label from operating their own tables.

Many Dischord bands, and Fugazi in particular, also attempt to disengage themselves from what they perceive as a system of commercially motivated cross-marketing. Believing that music, and especially its performance, should not be marketed in conjunction with alcohol, Fugazi, for example, only plays shows in all-ages venues, thereby preventing bars or arenas from exploiting the bands and audiences for alcohol sales. A 1999 (20 December) show in Nashville took place in an old warehouse that had been converted into a club; the club did not sell any alcoholic beverages the evening of the show, although it usually does. In an effort to avoid overly exploiting their audiences, Fugazi tickets never cost more than seven dollars, and, in their hometown of D.C., Fugazi and several other Dischord bands often play for free, unless they are playing benefit concerts designed to raise money for specific causes.

Fugazi's success at consistently filling large venues and selling records and CDs over the past twelve years has led to multiple offers from the Big Six, and it is precisely the majors' interest in Fugazi and the band's dismissal of their offers that have cemented its position as the standard-bearer of late punk economics. In short, Fugazi and Dischord stand as exemplars of a band and a record label that could sell out and become commercial but chose not to, and therein lies what punks recognize as economic resistance.

Lookout! Records

Following Dischord's example to some degree, Larry Livermore founded the Lookout! Records label in 1987 in Laytonville, California, before moving it to Berkeley in 1989. As in Dischord's case, Lookout! initially attempted to avoid some of the commercial practices of the Big Six: it had little division of labor; the label was not vertically integrated; and it endeavored to allow its bands some autonomy. In its early years, the label did not sign contracts with its bands. John Goshert (2000), guitarist for the now defunct band, Monsula, comments that when Monsula agreed to release music on Lookout!, the label never demanded that the bandmembers sign a contract and did not dictate the terms of the band's recording or touring. In addition, the label did not have sales quotas that bands had to meet in order to remain on the label; consequently, the release of Monsula's second album, "Sanitized," on Lookout! in 1992 did not depend upon the sales of the first album, "Structure," which was released in 1991.

According to Goshert, the band's members have received sixty percent of the price of each copy of "Structure" and "Sanitized" that the label has sold since the records recouped the amounts that Lookout! initially invested in them (2000).This initial investment included the money the label paid the recording studios that the bandmembers (not the label) chose to employ as well as production and distribution costs. (Lookout! has a distribution deal with Mordam Records, an independent record distributor that handles the products of thirty-four independent labels.5) Sixty percent is a remarkably high royalty rate. Frith estimates the average rate in the 70s at between twelve and fifteen percent for commercial acts, with incredibly lucrative performers earning as much as twenty-two percent (1981, 83). In the mid-90s, the rate fell to an average of seven to twelve percent (Krasilovsky and Shemel 1995, 4). What was "punk" about the early business practices of Lookout! was that the label not only paid a high royalty rate and therefore did not seem to be out to exploit the bands but also invested capital in punk bands such as Monsula without using its investments as the tool that would render bands beholden to the label as the owner of the means of production.

Current Lookout! business practices differ from the label's original ones most notably in that it now signs bands to contracts. In 1998, Livermore sold the company to Chris Appelgren, who continues to own and operate it today. Even before the sale, George Tabb, the singer for the pop-punk band Furious George, and a columnist for MaximumRockNRoll (MRR)-consistently the most widely read and influential internationally distributed punk `zine since its inception in 1982, with a current circulation of roughly 25,000-published an account of his business dealings with Lookout! in the February, 1997, issue of MRR. He and the other members of Furious George signed a contract with Lookout! to do an EP,6 and Tabb claims that he had an oral agreement with Lookout! that the label would follow the EP with an LPG and give the band a merchandise agreement as well as tour support. The label reneged on everything but the EP Lookout!'s changing policies,Tabb's public attack on the label, and the public support that Tim Yohannon, the founder and publisher of MRR, granted to Tabb's claims against Lookout! have combined to place the label in a median zone between indie and major labels, for punks.

The Failure/Success of Dischord, Fugazi, and Lookout!

My attention to Dischord, Fugazi, and Lookout! should not be read as a testimonial to the radical or subversive nature of independent (DIY) punk bands and labels. Doug Henwood, publisher of the politics and economics newsletter Left Business Observer, comments in a recent issue of Punk Planet:

In a practical sense, a lot of independent operations screw their employers and customers over as much as anybody else does.You could say that there's often something other than the logic of profit maximization at work in independent operations, but you can't be sure of that.There are lots of scum bags and frauds everywhere, including independent music labels and publishers. (Henwood 2000, 47)

Although Dischord, Fugazi, and Lookout! do not (or did not initially, in the case of Lookout!) seem to be composed of scumbags, in Henwood's sense of the word, it is the labels' and the band's failings by commercial standards and by D.LY standards that constitute punk's highlighting of the problem of establishing an independently-run sphere of exchange qualitatively different than the commercial sphere.

Punks' attempts at economic oppositionality exhibit three interrelated failings, the first two of which, when inverted, can be turned to punk "successes," while the third cannot be wholly recuperated by punks. First, Dischord and Lookout! fail in the broad terms of the commercial commodity market: the D.LY approach to production, when mobilized within punk through these labels, fails to pose any real threat to the majors in terms of market share. According to a special issue of The Nation ("The Media Nation" 1997) on the music industry, twenty years after the period that Frith addresses, a new Big Six (Time Warner, Sony, Philips Electronics, Seagram, Bertelsmann AG, and EMI) control 79 percent of the music market in terms of sales, leaving 21 percent for the "indies"8 [independent labels] ("The NArAin Naric" 1997 25-28). Janine Jaquet, a senior researcher for the Proiect on Media Ownership at Johns Hopkins University, finds that rap accounts for at least half of the indies' 21 percent, leaving non-rap indie labels with roughly the same 10 percent of the market that they owned twenty years ago. Although, according to Jaquet, no one tracks sales for the indie labels (1997, 10), The Nation lists over twenty "important" indie labels, of which only two are punk: Dischord and Crypt Records ("The Media Nation" 1997, 28).9

In short, even if punk D.LY production is assumed to be qualitatively different and, hence, a viable alternative to commercial production, a point which I will contest below, it has had little effect on the music industry at large, failing as it has to carve out more than a tiny slice of even the indie market. This "failure" to become competitive with the major labels serves as a measure of punk success, though, because punks understand their lack of market dominance, and the conscious avoidance of it in Fugazi's case, as a guarantee that an economic logic ("profit maximizing," for Henwood 2000) does not govern their production.

Second, in terms of individual punk musicians, few of Dischord or Lookout!'s musicians derive a living from their music. This is true not only of these specific labels but of punk bands generally: few of them generate enough revenue to meet the band members' basic needs, and most punks work at non-music, or at least non-performance (such as record store), day jobs in which they are exploited to a greater or lesser degree than they are when they work as musicians. Here, the failure lies in the DIY punk community's inability to absent its members from the commercial sphere. Again, it is this exact failure to make a living from punk that punks read as a success of sorts. Punk should create neither profit nor "careers" for its practitioners, and the inability of punks and their businesses to make profits is often read as a badge of authenticity and an inverted form of success, because "making a living" denotes a form of economic and capitalist success, a form-however small-of "selling out." Punks often consciously divorce themselves from punk as a "career," where the concept suggests "the manner in which a person is willing to exchange his or her labor in order to survive economically." This intentional distancing of punks from profit marks a failure in commercial terms and a success in punk terms.

Dischord and Lookout!, as well as other DIY punk labels, have also failed to establish a mode of producing rock music that is qualitatively different from the majors' mode. It is this third failure, which cannot be inverted into a punk success that renders visible the problem inherent in punk's attempt to free itself from the sphere of commercialization. As Frith claims, "independence" for punks seems "to refer primarily to the question of artistic control" (1981, 159), and he might have added: "for a small group of producers, composed primarily of musicians and label owners." Despite his attention to who benefits from punk production, Frith still privileges the recording and distribution of rock music at the expense of the means, outside of the punk field, by which music is mass-produced and distributed. Regardless of how "independent" a punk record label endeavors to be, it still makes capital available to bands, which allows them to rent recording studio time and engineers and employ factories and printing facilities to produce their compact discs, records, CD liner notes, jewel box cases (for CDs), and record sleeves. However, Dischord and Lookout! employees do not work in those factories, in which the workers exchange their labor for wages as they would when producing any non-punk, commercial commodity. In the sphere of manufacturing, the only difference between producing punk products as opposed to others is a difference in the sheer number of people exploited in relation to the number that could be exploited. Dischord and Lookout! refrain from accumulating as much capital, hence surplus labor, as the Big Five and do not exploit the labor power of as many workers as the majors.

The labor of the bandmembers must not be neglected, either. Although they do not have to sign away their "creative control," as they would with major labels, bands on Dischord and early Lookout! bands are and were still tacitly expected to tour the US. and sometimes Europe in order to promote their records. Touring means playing the same songs repeatedly in city after city. In short, the musicians' labor becomes repetitive, the songs become units of exchange-value rather than use-values, and, as Marx writes, "[a] s use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-- value" (1990, 128). In the sphere of touring, the bands' music loses much of its use-value to its creators, as they play it less and less for reasons other than its exchangeability, and it enters the market, as a punk rock "show," more and more as a commodity and faces all other commodities as a price, rather than as a unique form of labor with an immanent and non-quantitative value of its own.

Summarizing punk's complicity with commercialization, Frith writes: "`independent records: made by do-it-yourself companies [remain] commodities" and notes that "the most enterprising punk company [in England]-Rough Trade-was . . . based on a shop" (1981, 159). Today, Lookout! Records runs its own label-store, as do several other punk labels including Dr. Strange. Frith reads Rough Trade's shop- (consumerism-) based business practices as symptomatic of an "'alternative' production system that both paralleled the established industry (alternative shops sell records made by alternative record companies and featured in the Alternative Charts) and was integrated into it" (159).That integration continues in 2000 and is especially apparent in chain record stores, where Dischord and Lookout! products appear alongside the products of the Big Five. The distributors that the chains most frequently employ- often "one-stops," such as Pacific Coast, that carry the products of myriad corporate labels-might not carry Dischord and Lookout! products, but stores can still order directly from even the tiniest labels and bands or establish relationships with independent distributors, such as Southern or Mordam, that carry exclusively independent bands.

Dischord and Fugazi's attempted independence from and resistance to commercialism also suggest less a move toward a new mode of production than a nostalgia for an earlier one. MacKaye, especially, combines the role of musician with that of label-owner and manager, embodying an idea of entrepreneurialism that hearkens back to a romantic notion of classic capitalism, of a perhaps nonexistent bygone era, that attempted to satisfy real needs with the best possible commodities. He seems to have entered the music industry for a non-commercial reason: because he is wholly invested in it as a performer and artisan and wants to make it a more just and fair field of production for other musicians and not simply because he saw an economic opportunity in it. Nevertheless, he operates as a small-scale capitalist.

I fear that the most seductive aspect of Dischord and Lookout!'s economics lies less in their actual business practices than in the publicity that those practices garner, even in the major label-controlled magazines to which most Dischord bands will not grant interviews. But concealed beneath the punk labels lies the same economic base that underlies commercial music-the labor theory of value-and therein lies the most serious failure of punk. This final failure raises the problem that punk highlights but cannot fully resolve: can a sphere of independent mass culture production ever establish a zone for itself that is qualitatively different from the commercial zone that it opposes?

Testing the Margins

In the Grundrisse, Marx writes that workers confront capitalists as both laborers and consumers. In the workers' moments of consumption, the capitalist "searches for means to spur them on to consumption, to give his wares new charms, to inspire them with new needs by constant chatter" (1993, 287). Against the background of the commercial forces in music, punk figures strangely as the mass culture form that does not attempt to "inspire new needs." Instead, punks repeatedly play to the old needs, because they have not yet been met. If the relation between capitalist and consumer is the relation upon which, for Marx, "the contemporary power of capital rests" (287), then punks' refusal to "chatter" and their distancing of themselves from music producers who do guarantee that punk will never succeed commercially Punk relegates itself to the margins of the music business; it is composed of punk producers who do not sign with the majors, regardless of whether or not they are asked.

Mark Sinker finds early English punks aesthetically negating the ideas about community that their time period proffered them, in order to preserve the possibility of a potential social organization that did not yet exist. For him, the aesthetics of punk behavior attempted but conspicuously failed to over-turn a dominant "economy of desire" but thereby rendered its logic visible and suspect. In this article, I propose that punk economic strategies attempt a similar overturning of the literal "economy of music." Although punk fails in this attempt, it continues to explore the margins of commercial music production and thereby holds their logic up for scrutiny. Punk has also established, and continues to establish, itself as a set of economic strategies within late capitalism. Punk never escapes or transcends the economic conditions in which it is mired, but its attempts to do so attest to a continuing cultural desire for "something else."

Notes

1 Because punk stretches over twenty-six years, so far, and includes a series of differing scenes, the most informative histories have focused on single scenes. For a history of the first punk scene, see Heylin (1992) and McNeil and McCain (1996). For an account of the first English scene, which has been written on frequently, refer to Savage (1992), Marcus (1989), and Hebdige (1979). Belsito and Davis (1983) provides a good history of the first California hardcore scene, while Connelly, Clague, and Cheslow (1995) document the Washington, D.C., first wave straightedge scene. Lahickey (1997) interviews prominent members of NewYork City's second wave straight edge scene, and the interviews serve as a loosely structured history of that scene.There is no good history of the punk scenes that have emerged after the late 80s.

2 It is worth noting that there are more people who self-identify as punks, more punk bands, and more punk labels and businesses now (in 2000) than there have ever been in the history of punk. I make this assertion with my definition of "punk" in mind.

3 Although Malcolm McLaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, brags, in The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle (1980), a semi-documentary account of the Sex Pistols' rise to fame, about how much money the Sex Pistols made, both Jon Savage's and David Huxley's accounts of the complicated financial wrangling around the film's production suggest that most of what the Pistols earned disappeared into the film's production. Savage claims that the film cost 343,000 pounds and left the Pistols with 30,000 pounds in total assets (1992, 533). For a full account of the film's production, refer to Savage (1992), and Huxley's chapter, "`Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Cheated?' Anarchy and Control in The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle" (1999). Despite how little the Sex Pistols and McLaren made, no doubt Warner Brothers, a subsidiary

of Time Warner, has consistently earned money from its release of the Sex Pistols' only official full-length album, "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols," which was produced in 1977.

4 According to Mark Powell, of Southern Records, Southern is unconnected to and not underwritten by any of the major labels.

5 According to Ruth Schwartz, who founded Mordam Records in 1983 and remains the sole proprietor, Mordam has no corporate backing and does not sell or represent any labels that have any backing from the current five major labels. However, Mordam does sell to many stores, chains, and distributors with all types of backing, corporate and otherwise.

6 An EP can appear on either a vinyl or a CD format. It is longer than a 7" but not as long as an LP (see the following note). EPs can spin at 45 or 33 rpms (rotations per minute), and one side plays for from roughly seven to twelve minutes. The term "7"" has replaced "45.... as a description of the vinyl single format in punk, because T's no longer spin exclusively at 45 rpm; many now spin at 33 rpms. One side of a 7" plays for roughly three to seven minutes.

7 The "LP" is a long-playing, or full-length, record album. One side, spinning at 33 rpms, will usually play for roughly fifteen minutes.

8 It is worth noting, however, that The Nation defines "indie" more loosely than punks do. The magazine's researchers define it as music "[distributed independently of the major music companies. However, some independent distributors (ADA, RED) are owned in whole or in part by one of the Big Six; the Big Six use indie distributors for some releases, and some indies use the Big Six to distribute a particular label or artist" (Jaquet 1997, 28). For punks, these acknowledged connections with the majors disqualify labels and bands from "indie" status, and punks do keep track of the music industry and who owns it. In 1994, MRR published diagrams that charted the major corporate record companies. Flipside, also an international punk `zine, released its own set of updated diagrams (for the Big Five) in its May/June 1999 issue. It is worth perusing MaximumRocknRoll's advertising criteria here, because the U.S. and international punk community, even when individuals or factions within it disagree with the `zine, reluctantly acknowledge MRR as the arbiter of what can and cannot be considered punk in economic terms. MRR's policy reads, "We will not accept major label or related ads, or ads for comps [compilations] or EPs that include major label bands" (2000, 1). "Related ads" include those for bands that appear on indie labels but are distributed by major labels or their affiliates. This policy does not apply exclusively to ads; MRR also refuses to publish reviews of, interviews with, or articles on major label-connected bands. In short, according to punks' definition of "indie," the amount of sales for which indie labels account, and punk labels as a subdivision of indie in this case, will be less than The Nation's figures.

9 Several developments have occurred in the music industry over the last three years, but, in 2000, it seems likely that the percentage of indie control over the market has remained near 1997 levels. The Big Six no longer exists, having been consolidated into the Big Five; in 1998, Seagram's purchased Polygram Music from Philips Electronics. In 2000,Time Warner has agreed to purchase EMI, which means that soon the Big Five will be the Big Four. Although Time Warner's acquisition of

EMI is ongoing, making it difficult to calculate the exact sizes of the new major labels, Andrew Pollack and Andrew Sorkin, writing for The New York Times, estimate that Warner-EMI will soon account for eight billion dollars a year in world sales and twenty-five percent of all U.S. sales, while Seagram's Universal Music Group makes six billion dollars a year, or roughly nineteen percent of the US. market. The other two remaining major labels are Sony and Bertelsmann AG (2000,12). Although exact market share figures for the Big Four are difficult to estimate and constantly shifting, what is clear is that the current Big Five continue to "dominate the world business" (1).

Works Cited

Arnold, Gina. 1993. Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana. NewYork: St. Martin's Press. Belsito, Peter, and Bob Davis, eds. 1983. Hardcore California:A History of Punk and New Wave. Berkeley: The Last Gasp of San Francisco.

Brace, Eric. 1993. "Punk Lives!" Washington Post 1 August, G1+.

Burchill, Julie, and Tony Parsons. 1980. "The Boy Looked At Johnny": The Obituary of Rock and Roll. London: Pluto Press.

Connolly, Cynthia, Leslie Clague, Sharon Cheslow, and Lydia Ely, eds. 1995 Banned in DC: Photos and Anecdotes from the DC Punk Underground. Washington, D.C.: Sundog Propaganda.

Fairchild, Charles. 1995. "'Alternative' Music and the Politics of Cultural Autonomy: The Case of Fugazi and the D.C. Scene." Popular Music and Society. 19: 17-35. Frith, Simon. 1981. Sound Effects:Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll. New York: Pantheon.

Fugazi. 1991. "Repeater." Dischord Records. Goshert, John. 2000. Personal interview. 10 Jan.

Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Henwood, Doug. 2000. Interview. Punk Planet 35 (January/February): 44-47. Heylin, Clinton. 1992. From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk History for a PostPunk World. NewYork: Penguin.

Huxley, David. 1999. "`Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Cheated?': Anarchy and Control in the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle." In Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk, ed. Roger Sabin. London: Routledge.

Jaquet,Janine. 1997. "Indies' Reservations." The Nation, 25 August-1 September, 10. Krasilovsky, M.William, and Sidney Shemel. 1995. This Business of Music. NewYork: Billboard Books.

Lahickey, Beth. All Ages; Reflection on Straight Edge. 1997. Huntington Beach: Revelation.

MacKaye, Ian. 1999. Interview. Punk Planet. (May/June): 34-43.

Marcus, Greil. 1989. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital, Vol. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin. - Grundrisse. 1993.Trans. Martin Nicolaus. NewYork: Penguin.

McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. 1996. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral history of Punk. NewYork: Grove.

"The Media Nation: Music." 1997. Project on Media Ownership at Johns Hopkins Univ. The Nation, 25 August-September, 25-28.

MRR (MaximumRockNRoll). 2000. March, 1.

Pollack, Andrew, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. 2000. "Time Warner to Acquire Control of EMI Music." The New York Times, 24 January, Al+.

Powell, Mark. 2000. Personal interview (internet). 31 January.

Sabin, Roger, ed. 1999. Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk. London: Routledge.

Savage, Jon. 1992. England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Sex Pistols Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. 1980. Dir. Julien Temple. Performers Malcolm McLaren, Steve Jones, Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Paul Cook, and Helen of Troy. Hollywood: Warner Brothers.

Schwartz, Ruth. 2000. Personal interview (internet). 1 February.

Sinker, Mark. 1999. "Concrete so as to Self-Destruct: The Etiquette of Punk, Its Habits, Rules,Values and Dilemmas." In Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk, ed. Roger Sabin. London: Routledge.

Stacy Thompson

Thompson recently received a Ph.D. in English from Purdue University and is presently a visiting lecturer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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