Contractual protections are only enforceable by the application of money, lawyers, courts and time, and record companies have such an advantage in all these areas that they may simply ignore their obligations to bands, while stringently enforcing the bands’ obligations. Such a contract is essentially worthless to the band that signs it, but remains an important coercive tool for the record company. I’m sure you can see parallels in the software and web worlds, but the disparity was most obvious to me when watching my peers navigate the music scene.

So that’s it. A contract is meaningless unless you have the wherewithal to enforce it, and can endure the time (sometimes years) it takes a dispute to wind its way through the courts (during which time you will be earning nothing). – Steve Albini [via SVN]