Some musicians you meet want to get signed to a major record label. I usually ask them if they have read Steve Albini’s The Problem With Music. If they haven’t I ask them if they have ever seen the Wizard of Oz.

It still confounds me how otherwise intelligent people dream of having their artistry mollycoddled by strangers. Business will take your Art out in the alley and kick the living sh*t out of it and then ask it if it wants some more. The f*cked up thing is, some people still say yes.

Here is a part of an Onion A.V. Club interview with Steve Kudlow from Anvil.

AVC: Are you still trying to secure a major-label deal?

L: We’re kind of not sure what we want to do with that. There are offers, but I don’t know, man, you’ve got to ask yourself why you’re giving somebody 80 percent of your intake. For what? It’s ridiculous when you stop and think about it. They’ll give you $1.50 for every sale. And we were selling the CD for $20! It only costs us 80 cents a CD to manufacture. So there’s basically $19 as opposed to $1.50. The whole reason a record company does that is because they’re paying for promotion. Why do I need promotion when there’s a movie and I’m in every magazine and newspaper from here to Timbuktu? [Laughs.] It doesn’t make sense. The PayPal thing for the album has been an endless flow in selling. If you get $50,000 or something to record an album, you don’t have to sell that many records to pay it back, at $20 a pop. The other way, you have to sell 50,000 records to start seeing a profit.

Are YOU one of those people who are dreaming of a big record deal?