"Major labels didn't start showing up really until they smelled money, and that's all they're ever going to be attracted to is money-that's the business they're in- making money"
About this Quote
Major labels enter the room the way landlords do: not when a neighborhood is alive, but when it’s profitable. Ian MacKaye’s line lands because it refuses the romance the music industry sells about “discovering talent.” He frames label interest as a late-stage reaction, a kind of predatory after-party where the people with the contracts arrive only once the risk has been drained out by the scene itself.
MacKaye’s intent is less to whine about corruption than to clarify incentives. The blunt repetition of “money” isn’t poetic; it’s forensic. He’s stripping away the industry’s preferred costumes - taste, vision, artist development - and naming the underlying mechanism: capital follows proof, not possibility. In that light, “that’s the business they’re in” reads like a cold shrug, an anti-myth. If you keep expecting caretakers from institutions built to extract value, you’ll keep getting disappointed, then gaslit.
The subtext is a defense of autonomy, the ethos that made Dischord Records and the DC hardcore scene matter: build your own infrastructure, control your means of production, don’t confuse attention with alignment. Historically, MacKaye is speaking from a moment when punk’s DIY networks were repeatedly mined, repackaged, and sold back to kids as a lifestyle product. The quote works because it turns cynicism into strategy: once you accept what labels are designed to do, you stop pleading for validation and start designing an alternative.
MacKaye’s intent is less to whine about corruption than to clarify incentives. The blunt repetition of “money” isn’t poetic; it’s forensic. He’s stripping away the industry’s preferred costumes - taste, vision, artist development - and naming the underlying mechanism: capital follows proof, not possibility. In that light, “that’s the business they’re in” reads like a cold shrug, an anti-myth. If you keep expecting caretakers from institutions built to extract value, you’ll keep getting disappointed, then gaslit.
The subtext is a defense of autonomy, the ethos that made Dischord Records and the DC hardcore scene matter: build your own infrastructure, control your means of production, don’t confuse attention with alignment. Historically, MacKaye is speaking from a moment when punk’s DIY networks were repeatedly mined, repackaged, and sold back to kids as a lifestyle product. The quote works because it turns cynicism into strategy: once you accept what labels are designed to do, you stop pleading for validation and start designing an alternative.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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