Photos courtesy of Matt Pincus
The offices of Songs Music Publishing look like your typical New York media offices—Fiji water in the lobby fridge, framed photos of artists the company deals with on the walls. A large shot of The Weeknd sits on the floor of the hallway, waiting to be hung up. And the CEO’s office looks like the one you would expect the head of the company to have—corner view of midtown Manhattan from the 21st floor, hardcover books on the coffee table. There’s one thing on his wall that seems notably out of place among the pop regalia, though: a framed copy of the seminal 1988 hardcore record Bringin’ It Down by JUDGE.
“My staff got me that a couple years ago when our discography came out. They had it framed for me,” says the 42-year-old Matt Pincus. A lifetime ago, when he was only 17, Pincus joined JUDGE as a bassist. He was just a junior in high school, but the decision effectively mapped out the rest of his life. “I was not happy as a kid,” he says. “Like, really, really, really not happy as a kid. I got into all sorts of trouble. Got arrested, doing drugs, all that stuff. Hardcore and straight-edge cleaned me up and put me on the right path.”
Though his musical career lasted two short years—accounting for just one record and two US tours—he was fascinated by the business that was going on underneath all the stagedives and head-walks. His bandmates all went in separate directions after the JUDGE’s breakup, leading completely different lives. Guitarist John Porcelly became a yoga instructor while frontman Mike Ferraro, for years, seemed to disappear off the face of the earth.
“I thought about whether I wanted to have a career as an artist, but I didn’t write songs, I didn’t sing, so I felt like it was a limited career path,” says Pincus. “But at the same time, I was really interested in the business side of it—our record deal, marketing the record, and guarantees at shows.” From his stint in the golden era of DIY punk, Pincus is no stranger to booking his own tours and stuffing his own mail orders.
So shortly after graduating from Columbia and dipping his toe into the music industry, he started Some Records with fellow mainstays of the hardcore scene, Sammy Siegler and Walter Schreifels. Their first acts were bands they knew personally—Six Going on Seven, Errortype 11, and Hot Water Music. But after four years of grinding it out at the label, realizing that the punk rock record business was not going to be a viable career path, he went back to school to get his MBA.
Eventually, he founded Songs Music Publishing, again starting with rock bands. One of their first artists, Chiodos, ended up selling 400,000 copies. The business has since expanded and specializes in contemporary artists, getting their songs on records or licensed to films, television, advertisements, and video games. Their roster now boasts an impressive lineup of Grammy-winning artists like Lorde, Diplo, and DJ Mustard.
Things have come full circle for Pincus lately, starting with JUDGE's run of reunion shows in 2013. One day recently, while talking to Jordan Cooper, who runs Revelation Records, the label responsible for the release of JUDGE’s output as well as a long list of other seminal New York hardcore records, Pincus realized something was off. “Jordan said, ‘You know, I don’t think any of the bands on the Revelation catalog are earning any money from streaming service other than what I pay them,’” recalls Pincus. “So for shits and giggles, I started looking around at whether classic punk and hardcore records were registered with PROs.” Artists need to be registered with societies like ASCAP and BMI in order to collect money for their music being streamed or publicly broadcasted. “Almost none of them are. Some of the biggest names in punk and hardcore, not one of them.”
So what happens to the money a band earns from their song streams on services like Spotify or Pandora or Apple Music when their work is not properly registered? According to Pincus, when a streaming service doesn’t know who to pay out, it ultimately gets paid out to other artists. “It goes into a pot, and after a certain period of time, they pay everyone else out pro rata,” he says. “So the irony of it is that a guy who played in a late 80s hardcore band of note, if he’s not registered, it gets paid out to say, Katy Perry.”
Pincus started reaching out to some old friends from his JUDGE days who played in these now-defunct bands to see if they’d like help registering their catalogs, bands like Gorilla Biscuits and Youth of Today, whose albums are iconic but had gone unregistered all these years. Seizing an obvious opportunity to take money for nothing, they took Pincus up on it and he started doing it for them on a non-profit basis. This led him to start Know Your Rights, a gratis service which seeks to modernize punk and hardcore’s classic, pre-internet age.
“We don’t know how much money this is ultimately going to amount to for a hardcore band, it could be a small amount of money over a long period of time, but it’s still their money,” he says.
More than simply making sure the rightful owners of music are being financially compensated, Pincus says he feels a responsibility to save these classic albums from obscurity for future generations. “There’s a punk and hardcore canon, probably 100 to 150 albums that every kid who’s really into this kind of music has at least half of them, from Crass, through Stalag 13, through Minor Threat. So beyond just paying those people, I want to make sure that stuff gets preserved.”
Know Your Rights continues to bring the albums of yesteryear into the modern era and Pincus hopes that eventually all the artists from his heyday will get paid for their music being played digitally, especially now that the internet is helping a new generation of hardcore kids discover these bands.
“The guys who put out these records are now in their 50s and 60s, what happens when they’re in their 70s and 80s? This music has lived for 30 or 40 years, almost,” he motions to the framed JUDGE album on the wall. “What happens to this music when there’s no one to look after it anymore?”
Dan Ozzi is on Twitter - @danozzi
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