Wealth & Money Quote by Ian MacKaye

MacKaye draws a bright, punk-era line between theft and community: commerce is the problem, not copying. The first clause is bluntly transactional - if someone is selling downloads of our songs, they are siphoning labor into profit, turning a band into a revenue stream for a stranger. But the pivot matters: trading, the old tape-swapping economy, gets a moral pass because it’s about circulation, not exploitation. He’s defending a gift network that helped underground music survive when mainstream channels wouldn’t touch it.

The quote works because it refuses the clean binaries the music industry loves. MacKaye isn’t performing the “piracy kills music” script, but he’s not romanticizing free culture, either. “I like to sell a thousand” is a quietly stubborn admission that ideals still need infrastructure: studio time costs money; pressing records costs money; touring isn’t free. The subtext is that artists deserve consent and sustainability, not just “exposure.”

In context, this is classic MacKaye: Dischord’s DIY ethic, Fugazi’s famously low ticket prices, the suspicion of middlemen. He’s not pleading for sympathy; he’s staking out a model of ethical exchange. Trade the music to build a scene. Don’t monetize it as a parasitic side hustle. It’s a pragmatic moral stance dressed in conversational shrugging - “obviously” doing a lot of work - making the argument feel less like policy and more like common decency.