Pitchfork interviews Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman, the founders of Sub Pop, on the 20th anniversary of the opening of the label’s office in Seattle. (Pavitt is no longer with the label and the pair were interviewed separately, which is why there is a disconnect between their comments.)

Lots of interesting details about the scotch-tape-and-staples financial arrangements the label had to finagle to survive. But first, about Nirvana….

Bruce Pavitt: … By ‘88, selling 5-10,000 copies a record was considered doing very good business. The idea of selling millions of records was almost inconceivable… I remember Bleach in its first year selling 40,000 copies, which was amazing.
Pitchfork: It’s platinum now, right?
Bruce Pavitt: Bleach is almost double platinum, yeah. And it cost $600 to record, so…I would venture that, just from a business point of view, the return on investment from Bleach might make it the most profitable record in the history of the world. $600 for two million in sales, that’s pretty unusual.

Pavitt doesn’t mention that the band had to pay that $600 itself. Sup Pop did pretty well with Nirvana, considering the initial outlay of zero dollars. (My source is Heavier than Heaven, Charles Cross’s Cobain bio; he says the band borrowed the $600 from a friend … and never paid him back. In the indie world of the 1980s, every great fortune was based on a petty crime.)*

On the other hand, there’s this:

Jonathan Poneman: To give you an example of the sort of choices we had to make: A lot of the bands in Sub Pop’s early years went on to have early success and attract the interest of larger labels. In the early 90s, bands got scooped up by larger labels in this belief that “alternative music” was going to be the soundtrack to a generation, yadda yadda yadda. So a lot of bands we would work with for, you know, budgets of a thousand or two thousand for an album– and that’s the high end– would end up signing quarter-million, half-million dollar record deals with larger labels. One of the decisions that we had to make along the line was: We have two thousand dollars. Do we either pay that as a retainer to a business attorney who helps legitimize our business, or do we turn around and put out three or four singles? More often than not, we would make the latter choice, because that allowed for the momentum to continue. There was so much great music at the time—first and foremost, we wanted to document this music that was vital. Then somewhere along the line we also had to start taking care of the business of being a legitimate operation.

That’s a fair comment, excusing even the Sub Pop singles club, an entirely unnecessary scene accouterment. (The interview also has a lot of interesting background on the label’s selling 49 percent of itself to Warner.)

Pavitt goes out with a shot at the sellouts of today:

Pitchfork: The rise of indie culture and how it’s more visible now—is it comparable in any way to the grunge hysteria of the 90s?
Pavitt: [pause] It’s different. It’s matured into a really…it’s a cool scene, there’s a lot of a diversity. You look at the festival you’re putting together, there’s a lot of diversity there and a lot of people going to see it. I don’t think it has the insane buzz of what was going on in Seattle. At the same time, there’s so much material out there and it’s a really healthy industry, people have jobs selling records and making records and promoting them. Because there is so much material, I don’t think it’s having the same cultural impact as the late-70s punk rock scene. If you walked into [Chicago record store] Wax Trax in 1978, 79, the whole vibe was so against the grain that it was revolutionary. Indie rock is very healthy, there’s a lot of diversity and a lot of creativity, but it does not have the revolutionary spirit of the late-70s punk scene in regards to design and politics and fashion and stuff like that. I really miss that, and I’m looking forward to a youth musical cultural scene that’s a little more revolutionary, where indie bands aren’t vying for McDonald’s commercial spots.

Emphasis added—the Shins, one of Sub Pop’s biggest latter-day successes, of course, did a McDonald’s commercial. Poneman, who still runs the label, rationalizes things this way:

Pitchfork: What went into that decision of pushing artists toward licensing?
Poneman:  Well, we didn’t really push them that way. We said, the choice is yours. We understood that there was an ethical dilemma. If you’ve read Fast Food Nation, which I did at the time, you’re going, “Eww, McDonald’s.” But on the other hand, there’s a couple of other things to consider: First, the nature of radio play, which up to that point had always been the holy grail. Radio essentially is the same thing– you’re padding the advertising with music. The music brings people to listen to the radio, but the reason why advertising and radio stations themselves actually want people to listen to the radio is not so much for the music, but for the advertising because that is what pays the bills. This was put on its side to a certain degree, or seen a different way. This was kind of the same premise, but the artist gets cut in more directly on the revenue side.

The other thing is, as formats change—through CD burning, through music being made available through different means, and the channels of music distribution loosening up—a lot of the revenue that was coming from sales is actually…more bands are relying on the revenue derived from film and TV licensing than ever before. It also comes down to where the music is positioned in the culture, because there was a real feeling that the music was sacrosanct, back in the 1960s. “How dare you use this Jefferson Airplane song to market blue jeans or cosmetics or whatever.” But now, while I totally understand and respect those feelings, as a practical matter there’s so much cross-pollenization of media at this point anyway, that it just seems to me to be another facet of that. If that makes any sense.

It doesn’t, but whatever.

* Bleach has probably sold a lot more overseas, as well. The only other record I can think of in the same realm as Bleach’s profitability is the Offspring’s Smash, which has supposedly sold over ten million worldwide. It too was recorded at the height of the DIY days, but since it wasn’t the band’s first album wasn’t put together on quite so much of a shoestring.