TELL OUR STORY IN A DIFFERENT WAY
A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID LOWERY OF CRACKER
“Being a university instructor is actually quite compatible with being a touring musician,” states David Lowery. Lowery is an incredibly talented musician, a senior lecturer at the University of Georgia, and has become sort of a spokesperson for artists for fair pay in the streaming service era of music.
His band Cracker achieved huge success and tons of airplay, especially on college radio, in the ‘90s with songs like “Low”, “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)”, and “Euro-Trash Girl”. Their upcoming release, Alternative History: A Cracker Retrospective, consists of re-recordings, live tracks, demos, outtakes, and collaborations. Lowery believes this retrospective has more special meaning than a greatest hits record, as he says, “Typically, the greatest hits record is built like an algorithmic playlist. If you go to Apple Music or Spotify and click on the artist, it will recommend a bunch of songs, and it tends to be like that. We have these alternative rock hits that became, what would they say in the old days, ‘we’re current.’ They would just keep getting played. They’re part of the alternative rock oeuvre. That skews those algorithmic playlists for what it shows as being representative of our career. When actually to our hardcore fans, not to say they’re unimportant songs, but they’re not as important as the algorithmic playlists make it seem. By doing this, we’re able to go, ‘here’s a fan favourite. Here’s a fan favourite. Here’s a fan favourite that maybe didn’t get on ‘90s radio play, so it isn’t embedded in these like ‘90s playlists.’ This better represents our career… We’ve got like 35 years of making albums. This is the better way to do it. What we were trying to do with this retrospective was ‘tell our story in a different way.’”
Another reason why Cracker did a retrospective was because of licensing. “We were gonna have to license some songs from the Universal Music catalogue or Concord catalogue, and our first sort of initial foray into that was that they were just asking for unreasonable terms,” highlights Lowery. “We started just going through and going, ‘what recordings do we control?’ We actually re-recorded a bunch of songs, so when they got licensed for commercials, we got all the money… We had quite a few recordings that we controlled so we ended up really only having to license a few things. There’s a really famous long-running German television show called Rockpalast, and those were really the only recordings we actually had to license.”
Lowery had a fun time working on the retrospective. “Going through all the tapes and files and looking to see what we had and occasionally just randomly discovering something that we had forgotten about,” he notes, was very enjoyable. “One of the most interesting things was I found a little demo that I did of something that became the Cracker song “Merry Christmas Emily”. For that one, we were like, ‘oh, we should redo it this way.’ It’s just a totally different approach. A completely different vibe to the song. Makes it sadder. The main character is sort of an unreliable narrator. They’re telling you their truth, but you can tell it’s not quite the ‘right truth.’ So it makes it even more that way.”
For those that did not grow up in the ‘90s, then you probably came across Cracker while watching the cult classic The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which featured their song “Low”. “It produced a bunch of additional sales and streams for us,” states Lowery. “That song got embedded in a lot of playlists because of that. From a commercial viewpoint that was really good for us because it added a bunch of streams that still happen every single month for us now. When I saw the movie, that was one of the best placements of our music. It set the scene, the vibe, and the party. And it’s a really long clip. Usually, you get like twenty seconds or something like that. It’s nearly two minutes that the song plays, and it’s kind of key to the development of the story.”
PRE-ORDER ALTERNATIVE HISTORY: A CRACKER RETROSPECTIVE
Along with Cracker, Lowery is in Camper Van Beethoven and does solo stuff. “Sometimes I write a song, and I try it with one band, and it works better with the other band,” he comments. “The majority of the time, Camper songs are written collaboratively…. Cracker tends to be less collaborative in that [Johnny] Hickman will write a song, and I’ll write a song… My solo stuff is absolute ‘clean palate.’ I can do whatever I want. I can collaborate with whomever I want. It’s the most ‘free form’ part of my writing.”
Lowery is very critical and outspoken about the lack of pay artists get from streaming services. He has testified to Congress and written many pieces such as Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss?, on the subject. Furthermore, Spotify and Napster have settled class action lawsuits which Lowery filed concerning unpaid mechanical royalties. “The first problem with the pay is the songwriter pay, which is actually set by a board of three judges in the copyright office every five years and determines what songwriter pay should be,” he remarks. “Like all sorts of things in the federal government, they’re prone to manipulation by money interests. Basically, the tech investors, the tech industry, got that panel to set our royalties very, very low. That system should be disbanded. Like we don’t have a choice over what our royalties are… The second thing is that in these big agreements that the labels and major distributors have there’s sort of no incentive for the streaming services to not give your stuff away for free. Those services are advertising-supported. A lot of listeners are just listening for free, and it’s advertising-supported, especially YouTube. The agreements that the major labels and even the indie distributors have with the big streaming services is that they artists get a sort of prorated share of the revenue coming in. So, a subscription stream pays you a lot more than a free advertising-supported stream. I think Congress should kind of step in and put a floor on what streaming rates could be to discourage the platforms from just doing advertising supported. It’s literally like you get ten times as much per stream if it’s a paid subscriber versus an ad-supported subscriber. You don’t have to throw out streaming. You just have to change the economic incentives, which are actually screwed up.”
“The other problem with streaming is, and nobody talks about this is, when you sold physical products or even downloads, you got all your money upfront. Physically, the customer is buying all the streams that they’re gonna do over their lifetime… You, as an artist, get your expenses back right away, but with streaming, you get paid over a period of five, 10, 15, 20 years.”
Lowery also has a doctorate and teaches at the University of Georgia. Originally, the university was looking for somebody to teach a class, and he restructured and redeveloped it, and it became quite popular. They eventually offered him a full-time position, and he is now a senior lecturer in the music business program at Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. “A lot of them are students who are in like, Accounting, Marketing, or English,” he mentions. “A lot of times I find is that the students who are the most interesting, the most engaging, are people who weren’t trying to be in the music business. But maybe they knew they have some other expertise or experience, and they suddenly discover that they have a skill set that would make them successful in the music business… They get super interested in it, and they go on to become successful in the music business. After fourteen years I have a ton of students that are very successful in the music business now. It’s interesting. A lot of times, they didn’t start out trying to be in the music business.”
Alternative History: A Cracker Retrospective drops November 22. Lowery also has more music and exciting news upcoming. “In May, I have a 3-vinyl disc 28-song set of solo songs… In the summer next year will be the 40th anniversary of Camper Van Beethoven’s first album [Telephone Free Landslide Victory], and we’re re-releasing it… Pretty excited about that, and we’re gonna do a few 40th anniversary shows.”
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Photo Credits: Jason Thrasher
