Art & Creativity Quote by Steve Albini

Albini doesn’t dress this up as a cautionary tale; he spits it like a dirty truth everyone in the room already knows. “By now” is the knife twist: if you’re still naive, you’re not innocent, you’re careless. The line assumes a history of exploitation so routine it should have evolved into instinct, a kind of scene-level street smarts. Calling them “wise enough” flatters bands just long enough to shame them into vigilance.

Then there’s the deliberately ugly phrasing, “music industry scum.” Albini isn’t aiming for nuance because the relationship he’s describing isn’t nuanced. It’s adversarial. “Scum” collapses a whole ecosystem - labels, managers, lawyers, A&R, marketers - into a single moral category. That’s the rhetoric of a musician who came up in and helped define underground rock’s allergy to corporate mediation, where authenticity wasn’t a vibe but a defense mechanism.

The intent is practical: don’t sign what you don’t understand, don’t confuse access with respect, don’t let “opportunity” become a leash. But the subtext is bigger than contracts. Albini is framing the industry as a machine that rewards compliant artists and punishes the ones who insist on agency. Suspicion becomes a survival skill, not paranoia.

Culturally, it lands because it matches what rock mythology keeps confirming: the dream is loud and romantic; the paperwork is where you get robbed. Albini’s genius is refusing to separate the two.