Creativity Quote by Melissa Auf der Maur

Trust a working musician to say the quiet part out loud: the record business is not built to serve the people making the records. Melissa Auf der Maur frames it with plainspoken clarity, and that directness is the point. By saying "intentions" rather than "outcomes", she shifts the critique from occasional bad deals to structural mismatch. It is not that labels sometimes fail artists; it is that their incentives start somewhere else entirely.

The subtext is older than streaming and newer than the CD era she came up in: musicians are asked to treat art like a calling while companies treat it like inventory. "From the musician's perspective" is a deceptively soft qualifier that actually sharpens the blade. She's not claiming labels are evil in a comic-book way. She's implying that even when executives are polite, even when the marketing is glossy, even when the A&R person is a fan, the business model still prioritizes ownership, leverage, and scalability over the slow, expensive work of making a life in music.

Context matters here. Auf der Maur's career spans scenes where authenticity is currency (alternative rock, indie credibility) while the machinery behind it runs on contracts, recoupment, and control of masters. Her phrasing also nods to the emotional whiplash artists experience: you enter a partnership expecting shared belief, then discover the relationship is closer to a loan agreement with a soundtrack.

The line works because it refuses melodrama. It sounds like a sober field report, which makes it harder to dismiss and easier to recognize.