Practicing What You Preach

And by that, I mean how to use your illusion. The New York Times has an utterly fascinating look at the story behind what writer Jeff Leeds calls the music industry's "most notorious white elephant," the fabled Chinese Democracy album from Guns N' Roses. Leeds got as many as 30 people associated with the project in the past decade to speak to him about it, and boils it down nicely into the piece. Despite the fact that there's got to be enough material in the story itself for a heck of a tell-all book.

The take-home message? Goddamn, I gotta learn how to use ProTools, as one cost analysis documents along the way pegged the project as paying $25,000 a month for a "recording software engineer." And I really, really want to know what the piece of equipment was that set them back six figures over two years and, allegedly, only thirty days of use in that time.

Seriously, though, read the article. I think there's an angle to this story where you look at how much leeway the labels gave Axl Rose, and how incredibly foolish Geffen and Interscope look as a result, but at the same time, had the album done the numbers some expected, it still could have worked. Which, in a nutshell, contains much of what's wrong with the major-label music business right there.