This week (the 2nd week of April 2024) Dave Hawkins, B.O.B and I got to enjoy some satisfaction, and a bit of closure, after having finally bundled together the ancient Smoking Section demo tracks and released them to the digital airwaves.
It had been a long time coming. When the Smoking Section broke up in 1991, unsigned, our three demo tapes were all we had to show for our work: out of the band’s couple-dozen original songs, only nine of them remained listenable, smeared on slowly deteriorating magnetic tape, transient and un-distributed. The rest of our catalog was of course instantly memory-holed: never recorded, and as far as we know never to be invoked again – poof.
Almost 35 years later, when we pressed GO on publishing our remastered DAT rips, making Smooth & Nasty readily available to the general public this week, it felt like a miracle on many levels. We’d rescued a decent-sized chunk of our collective work from the abyss, and released a solidly legitimate album of original, soulful and sassy dance music. We even rescued an additional 10th track, “My Lips,” which we’d forgotten existed, albeit in a not-quite-finished state (but close enough). And it all happened in the blink of an eye – practically an Instant Album.
It turns out to have been a miracle in more ways than the above.
We are fortunate enough to have a lot of fans who rejoiced this week, and shared reminiscences with us about the other unsung bands we shared the scene with back then, including the Limbomaniacs, Fungo Mungo, and Psychefunkapus. Primus, of course widely-sung, managed to become superstars and are still writing their chapter in alternative and San Francisco music history, and have put out a dozen or more full-length albums and counting. Each of the others had put out at least one or two albums as well. Of the bands from that era, Smoking Section was the only one that had not signed a deal and released anything on any label.
But aside from Primus, the other three bands seem to be absent from general streaming availability. At least right now, if you try to listen to them on Spotify or Pandora or Apple Music… you basically can’t1. This is surprising, because unlike the Smoking Section, each of them eventually signed contracts with major labels (e.g. if memory serves, Psychefunkapus signed to Atlantic; Fungo Mungo released at least one album on PolyGram, and the Limbomaniacs recorded with Bill Laswell for Relativity). Their fates were ultimately pretty similar to ours, but at least they got records out before hanging it up. Why aren’t they available now? WTF?
It’s easy to guess, and if you have a guess it’s probably on the right track.
In any case, I have a little bit of insight into this. Streaming music services started to appear in earnest shortly after Engine 88 dissolved (which was in 1997), and a few years later it dawned on me that even though we no longer existed as a band, it wouldn’t hurt to try and hustle our music into the modern era. We’d been signed to Caroline Records, and our first two releases were still theirs, but our last record, Flies & Death ‘n’ Stuff, belonged solely to us. So I uploaded it to CDBaby and they’ve made it available for streaming since 2008 or so.
Our other two albums, Clean Your Room and Snowman, took some more doing however. It took at least a year (or two or three or more) of cajoling and nagging, on my part, for Caroline to finally prioritize making them available to stream. I distinctly remember haranguing Nick Clift, our A&R rep at the label, to explain to me why it was taking so long, and the answer amounted to something like: the people at the department that dealt with that stuff just couldn’t really prioritize the time and effort it took to do it. But finally they did it, and as a result all three of Engine 88’s full-length albums have been available on all the services ever since.
I guess I sort of assumed that getting Engine’s Caroline releases out there had been part of a larger effort to deliver everything from that corner of the label’s catalog to the streaming services. I mean, why not? No more manufacturing and shipping physical CDs, just FTP some XML to a few drop boxes over the internet and let them take it from there – it’s basically free money, dust your hands off and walk away.
That assumption popped in 2022, when Chris Prescott, the drummer from Tanner – another defunct but absolutely awesome band from San Diego that Engine traveled with and, importantly, were literally our labelmates on Caroline – contacted me and asked how we had managed to get our stuff online. It turns out that on behalf of Tanner, Chris had more recently started to do what I did back in the early 2000’s, i.e. trying to get the streaming delivery ball rolling with the owners of our content – which at this point was now Universal Music Group (UMG).
Unfortunately, where I had succeeded earlier, Chris had been running into a brick wall. Apparently in the interim, the content provider’s position with regard to this segment of the catalog they acquired had essentially calcified, and UMG had no intention of delivering it to the streams, nor of releasing the rights to the artists… not without a compelling (legal) reason, anyway. Chris said he persisted for a time, but after a while the replies amounted to: The more you persist, the more likely it is that we will ignore you, so maybe STFU.
So now it appears that Tanner has been effectively, and undeservedly, memory-holed until further notice.
Fast forward to this week, and the fate of those other bands that Smoking Section trucked with starts to make sense, if unjustly so: they’d been signed and recorded and distributed many years ago, had been less-than hugely profitable, and now seem to be in a category of holdings that’s tagged with, “Take no action.”
Tanner and Engine 88 are in the exact same place, and the only reason you can actually listen to Engine 88 now is that we were fortunate enough to wrangle our content onto the streams at a time when it was still possible to convince the right people to do so.
And if the Smoking Section had been signed back in 1990, barring any major success we probably would not be celebrating like we did this week, because we’d be in the same boat as the Limbos, the Puss, Fungo Mungo, and Tanner. Unlike so many other artists in that demographic (signed + 1990s + non-meteoric), regardless of our having missed the market altogether, we own our content outright – all because we never got signed, or at least never got signed to a label that became absorbed by a monolithic conglomerate like UMG.
To add insult to injury, it sort of seems like this gap might be specific to the particular era that these bands existed in. For a quick example, take a look at Wire Train or Translator or Romeo Void, three San Francisco bands from just a little earlier – early to mid-1980’s – each of which enjoyed moderate success, though nothing label executives would write home about. In any event, all of them are fully-represented in the streaming services to spin whichever way one pleases. Interestingly, between these three there are a wide variety of monthly listeners: Wire Train at 20k, Romeo Void at 110k, and Translator at a modest 5k, which actually shocked me to learn (Engine 88: 468 monthly listeners lol).
To be completely honest, I don’t have a good example of bands from the immediately-following era that could have slipped through the cracks. It’s possible that my theory about this depends on the idea that everything after the 1990s landed after a cutoff, and has been easy to include in providers’ streaming catalogs because the mechanisms were established by that point; whereas prior to the 1990s content was so much more selectively distributed that the catalogs from that era were small enough to grandfather into streaming without much of a fuss. This is just my theory.
In any case, it’s tempting to make a qualitative assertion about this, something like, “Success speaks for itself,” but we all know that taste and success are uncomfortable partners in this game. However, regardless of the quality of the artists in question, it’s an objective fact that streaming services will ingest and make literally ANYTHING available to spin, as long as content providers provide it. It costs the streaming services very little to do so. Aside from outright spam and sound-alike spin thieves, there really is no gate-keeping on quality of any stripe from the streaming services’ standpoint.
This perspective comes from someone who works for a living in the streaming technology biz, aka me. To be fair, viewpoints about the content providers’ side of things – Sony, UMG, Warner, etc. – require someone who knows what their side of things really looks like, and anything I say about what they do is just an educated guess, filtered with a bit of bitterness… but also based on having been proximal to the music industry for the vast majority of my professional life.
From here, it looks like the expense to get legacy music onto the streams lies in the labor it takes for content providers to make the content available, which for older material like the artists’ in question, literally means grabbing audio from CDs, typing up some information about the album and tracks, and submitting it to whatever DDEX formatter application the provider has on hand for the content they produce currently.
It’s routine work, and it’s literally why nieces, nephews, and interns exist. There’s really no barrier for entry other than organizational and executive laziness, or stubbornness, or both. The only other thing that makes sense is OOOOHHHH right.
Streaming services have been looking at “streamlining” payouts by erecting a threshold of spins per year to qualify to receive earnings. That’s…. insane, but when you look at the administrative effort it takes to pay each artist for each spin, it sort of makes sense… if being a capitalist is important to you. But in the streamers’ defense, they’re only catching up to the model that has kept the music industry afloat for the entirety of its existence on the earth: a shell game.
My pet theory has been that the game is: “It’s too difficult for us to figure out how to pay all of you. We say we have it all detailed in our ledgers, but honestly we don’t, which is embarrassing, but in any case we don’t know and we already paid ourselves and there isn’t anything left this cycle (or the next or the next). It’s frankly much easier to give a cut to the artists that are making us the most money, so we do some of that. But otherwise, whoever has the most effective combination of popularity and legal support gets paid, and the rest of you are simply added into the ‘losses’ column. So. Can I get you a La Croix?”
Ironically, the streaming companies DO know. That’s the whole point: every spin shows up in the record. Streaming revenue then gets dealt to the providers, who, I cynically assert, play the above shell game on the artists.
Regardless of that dark corner, it doesn’t make sense that an artist like the Limbomaniacs, whose music is literally physically on most streaming services’ media servers ready to be played, can’t be allowed to spin on-demand. The stroke of a pen could solve it, followed by a quick routine redelivery of rights – it happens all the time. I am sure any associate A&R rep at any of these labels would say, “BS, it’s not really that simple,” and I’m sure they’re right. But I doubt it’s a whole lot more complicated than that either. It could be done in bulk – release this entire segment of the catalog to on-demand streaming.
In the case of Tanner, last I heard UMG is essentially sitting on their content (including an amazing album called – get this – Ill-Gotten Gains) with no discernible intention of ever making it available to listeners. That’s a choice. They could do it, but they aren’t doing it, probably because of the labor it would cost them to run the reports to surface this content – an intern, a few temps, some data entry – to daylight an unknown number of artists who put their lives into the work that the providers are squatting on. OR: they could cut these artists loose, along with their content. It’s not doing the labels any good to hang onto it. But it would take some administrative work to make that happen, and since they don’t expect to see much revenue in return, for the little it would cost to do it, they “can’t afford it.”
Capitalism, in other words.
So. All this is to say, Smoking Section got really lucky. Actually, both of my bands did, in different ways; but they were both able to avoid, or climb out of, the memory hole. Today I feel blessed and thankful and celebratory, and amazed that we were able to release an instant album on our own terms – 35 years later, with all the unknowns (Tony, if you’re out there I hope you’re well), and with tempered expectations. It’s all worth it because finally the music can speak for itself.
I just wish this was something that every amazing band that landed in that gap could feel too. It sucks to be stuck in the memory hole, and it isn’t right.
- The assertion that, “You cannot listen to these bands,” is basically true, but it’s a little bit nuanced and complicated. It all depends on the terms set by the label and content provider, the deals they have in place, the service in question, and what kind of listening we’re talking about.
For example, on Pandora the Limbomaniacs and Fungo Mungo are both available for Radio-Only spins, but not On-Demand; Psychefunkapus’ content has never even been delivered to Pandora. On Spotify, both the Limbos’ and the ‘Puss albums are visible, but can’t be played – perhaps unless it’s under the auspices of some kind of algorithmic playback akin to radio. Fungo Mungo’s PloyGram album doesn’t appear on Spotify.
Tanner’s music is completely unavailable on either of these platforms. ↩︎