‘Everything is Free’: The last great song to rail against the music industry?
There’s no topic more relatable to the general populace than the concept of being screwed over in your job; underpaid, underappreciated, forced to do more for less. When you’re a recording artist in the world of music, though, airing those grievances can be a slightly more delicate exercise.
For one thing, there are very few people clamoring for songs about why it’s hard to make money singing songs. The record label certainly isn’t encouraging it, and even loyal listeners can find the subject matter a bit petty and self-serving when it’s coming from an artist who seems to be objectively successful and “making it” in the biz in an enviable way.
They do say “write what you know,” though, and popular musicians used to make a habit of pouring their frustrations with the music industry into their songs. Think Pink Floyd’s ‘Have a Cigar’, Elvis Costello’s ‘Radio Radio’, The Smiths’ ‘Paint a Vulgar Picture’, and Prince’s ‘Slave’, just to name a handful.
In 2001, maybe the last classic example of this genre came not from a millionaire, arena-filling rock artist, but from the humble Americana-folk team of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings—a duo better known for painting stark character studies from a sort of uncanny version of Appalachia.
Welch’s third album with Rawlings, called Time (The Revelator), is arguably the best of her career and among the most revisitable records of the 2000s as a whole; existing completely outside of that glossy time period in terms of its production and most of its subject matter. One notable exception, of course, is the track ‘Everything Is Free’, which was written as a direct response to what was then a new phenomenon in Welch’s career: the rise of Napster and illegal music downloading.
Because Welch was recording on her own indie label Acony, she wasn’t expressing her gripes against the major label machine in quite the same way that a lot of artists before her had. Nor was she being hamstrung creatively or forced to put out work against her own best interests. Instead, ‘Everything Is Free’ is written as a sorrowful lament about what she perceived as the collapse of an entire cultural institution; the idea that artists could make a living in the same way any other tradesperson could, by being respected for their work and getting paid for it.
There is certainly an undercurrent of anger in the song, as Welch expresses her obvious disappointment with the failures of the industry and the government to curb the stealing of music, as well as the shrugged shoulders of a largely unsympathetic listenership.
Even many of the high-minded, NPR-listening Gillian Welch fans of 2001 would have to admit that they heard ‘Everything is Free’ for the first time via a ripped MP3 file; a sort of shameful irony that drove home the point of the song even stronger.
“Everything is free now,” Welch sings. “That’s what they say / Everything I ever done / Gonna give it away. Someone hit the big score / They figured it out / That we’re gonna do it anyway / Even if it doesn’t pay.”
During a time when a lot of the attention in the Napster vs. Record Industry battle was being diverted toward the likes of big time artists like Metallica, who weren’t going to be financially devastated one way or another, it was really indie artists like Gillian Welch who stood to lose the most from the death of physical media. And indeed, the bad deal Welch foresaw in this song hasn’t changed much in the quarter-century that’s passed since, despite the various contracts that the recording industry has struck with the likes of Apple and Spotify. In the end, small and medium sized recording artists have been forced to rely almost entirely on touring to make a living, as pennies roll in from their album sales.
As no coincidence, quite a few well known indie artists have covered ‘Everything is Free’ in recent years, including Phoebe Bridgers, Father John Misty, and Flock of Dimes. Overall, though, it doesn’t seem like we’re hearing as many new protest songs aimed at the record industry as we used to. It is, perhaps, another example of the death of the monoculture and the rise of a new generation of artists who’ve never known a dynamic any different than the current one. With no presumption of fairness to begin with, songwriters are perhaps less motivated to hop on a soapbox and decry “the system.” Everybody already knows it’s a racket.
“If there’s something that you wanna hear, you can sing it yourself,” Welch threatened in ‘Everything is Free,’ suggesting that screwed-over artists could rebel by exiting the game entirely. But, of course, that was never really an option either. The whole reason the game has stayed rigged for all these years is that the tech companies and record companies could always count on the vulnerability of musicians seeking a connection with an audience. If one walked away, someone else would always take their place.
“I’m gonna do it anyway. Even if it doesn’t pay.”
