Someone asked me the other day who I thought was the one artist that record labels have lost the most money on over the years. It was a great question and one that really got me thinking.
My first instinct was to say Sparks, who, to be honest, I adore to this day. After all, their career has been filled with one misguidedly optimistic record deal after another, for which they received numerous large advances, recording budgets, tour budgets, etc. Add in the cost of manufacturing, distribution, and stocking albums that largely went unsold and you have what amounts to millions of dollars lost.
Thing is, there was at least a brief period (1974-1975) when they were selling absolute shitloads of albums and singles throughout the UK, Europe, and Japan. This began with the release of Kimono My House, which spawned the UK Top 10 novelty hits "This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both of Us" and "Amateur Hour" and continued with the release of Propaganda, which featured two Top 20 UK hits "Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth" and "Something For The Girl With Everything".
Capitalizing on their success, the band left Island Records for a big money contract with CBS/Columbia, obviously convinced that the bigger the label, the more successful they would become.
By 1976, however, their streak of hits came to a screeching halt and the two albums they recorded for the label Big Beat and Introducing Sparks yielded no hits.
As a result they got dropped, but along came Richard Branson, whose Virgin Records imprint was used to taking chances, and, again, a new contract was signed and a new advance check was deposited by the brothers Mael.
This M.O. has been repeated time and time again over the ensuing forty years, during which time the duo has signed one deal after another with just about every major label in existence, and some that went under for obvious reasons, yet few have managed to achieve the necessary chart success to make back whatever investment they put into the band.
Even so, the amount of money lost over the years on this act is nothing compared to the cash squandered by propping up the career of one James Osterberg, a.k.a. Iggy Pop.
Quite ironically, his major label career began at roughly the same time as Sparks and has followed a similar trajectory (if one can call it that) over the span of six decades.
Unlike Sparks, who have a handful of UK Top 40 hits, Mr. Pop has but three to his name, the biggest being 1986's "Real Wild Child", a synth-pop ditty that was quite out-of-character for him at the time and, thus, quickly disowned.
The other two singles, ""Lust For Life" and "The Passenger", became hits almost 20 years after their initial release and the album on which they appeared (also entitled Lust For Life) would reach #28 in the UK, but fail to hit the Top 100 in America, leading him to be dropped by his label at the time, RCA. Only by being used in UK TV commercials in the late '90s did the songs finally become "commercially successful" pop hits.
Sadly, the remaining 20+ albums in his musical canon have not fared as well, yet Pop has been signed to Elektra, Columbia, RCA, Bomp!, Arista, Animal (launched by Blondie's Chris Stein), Virgin, A&M, and Fat Possum.
Amazingly, each time Pop has signed a new deal, or made a new album, he has received a sizable advance, which, over the years, has been his sole source of income. Meanwhile, the labels have also picked up the tab for all recording, touring, and marketing expenses, which, as you can imagine, can quickly run into the millions, if not ten of millions per album.
Multiply that by 20 or so albums that failed to make a profit and you quickly come to the same conclusion that I did: Iggy Pop is, without a doubt, the biggest money pit in modern music history.
Keep in mind that this writer is a longtime fan of Iggy Pop (and, for that matter, Sparks too.).
Even so, I can't help scratch my head in dumbfounded wonder at how Pop has been able to game the system for so long when other more dependable artists got only one or two shots at the brass ring before being summarily dismissed to the proverbial no-zip sorting bin, never to be courted by a major label ever again.
Let's take a look at a band like The Knack, who, quite frankly, made their record company a boatload of money their first time out. Their debut album, Get The Knack, was recorded live-in-the-studio on a shoestring budget and gave way to one of 1979's biggest hits in "My Sharona".
As if that weren't enough, "Good Girls Don't" was also a Top 20 smash, helping to make Get The Knack a highly profitable title for Capitol Records. In fact, that profitability continued through the release of the band's second album, ...But The Little Girls Understand, which had largely been recorded during the same sessions that had produced the band's first album. In other words, Capitol got two albums for the price of one. Sure, the second album didn't move as many units as the first, but, for such a minimal investment, they had every right to be ecstatic.
Yet, after the failure of the band's third album, Round Trip, the band was dropped. We now know that singer Doug Fieger was neck deep in a serious heroin addiction at the time, but, even so, many artists careers (namely, Iggy Pop) have continued unabated despite heavy chemical abuse, yet Fieger and Co. couldn't get any label to take them seriously even though they had a proven track record as hit makers.
Why did the Knack get so few chances and Iggy Pop (and Sparks) so many?
I can just hear my hipster friends saying, "Because he's Iggy fucking Pop!", but think about all the artists that didn't get signed over the years, either because labels chose to sign Iggy instead, or because the amount of money not recouped on Iggy's records led them to tighten their belts. Sure, maybe they'd signed Bang Tango or Trixter instead, but maybe, just maybe, they would have signed a band that would go on to change the world.
Now, of course, we'll never know, because somebody somewhere thought we needed an Iggy Pop synth-pop record (Blah Blah Blah) more.
Tags:
iggy not so pop