I don’t know if it’s quite that pat. I think lots of people get into the business end of the recording industry, not just out of greed, but because they do care about music. I mean, Albini himself was involved in the “business” end of the industry, right? I don’t think that we’d generally speaking accuse him of being a “corporate shill” despite the fact that he had a hand in creating albums that frankly became “radio friendly unit shifters” for the mainstream industry. He was still working with more purely “indie” artists, too. And of course, being “indie” doesn’t mean that exploitation can’t be involved. There were plenty of commercially oriented indie labels, especially in the 90s. Compare Epitaph with Dischord, for one. I’d argue that Epitaph was much more of a commercially oriented label, while Dischord was most certainly not.
I guess I’m sort of questioning that old punk binary of either being truly independent or being a poser sell-out? I like Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of how the culture industries actually function, which is more of a field rather than a top-down binary of corporation vs. exploited artist. There is most certainly exploitation in the recording industry, but it operates on a kind of different level than just corporation drones being greedy exploiters.
