This is very true. I can think of numerous examples of acts who started out on indie labels, graduated to the majors and had the stuffing knocked out of them by the experience.

Majors do have better distribution - although, as you say, that isn't so crucial a factor nowadays with the advent of the net - but they often arm-wrestle acts into spending so much money on production costs, packaging and promotion that they end up with no more money than they would have made on a smaller label. I remember Bob Mould talking in an interview about how Husker Du's financial situation barely differed after they signed with Warner Bros for this reason.

Then of course if the band ends up in debt to the record company, the only way out in some cases can be for the band to split up. A good example of this is Rollerskate Skinny - uniformly posistive live reviews, one excellent debut album, then a deal with WEA, followed by an ignominious disappearance off the commercial radar. I believe the Beta Band also split because they owed Parlophone more money than they could ever realistically hope to recoup.

Many thanks for these downloads btw - although I bought all the Creation albums first time round, I haven't been able to listen to "The Poison Boyfriend" or "Tender Pervert" for years due to having bought them on vinyl and not having a record-player anymore. They've certainly help up pretty well over time, despite the occasional '80s inflections in their production that you mention in your blog.

I recently wrote a song with a vocal bridge that I knew I'd plagiarised (albeit unconsciously) from somewhere, but couldn't remember where. Now I know - it's the end of "Situation Comedy Blues"! I'll be sending royalites your way in the unlikely event that I ever get signed. Have you ever done this yourself? I was listening to Francoise Hardy the other day and I noticed some melodic similarities between "Il N'ya a Pas d'Amour Heureux" and "Hairstyle of the Devil".

Hairstyle uses a "cycle of 5ths", which is an extremely common figure in french pop -- and goes back to Bach and baroque music. There was a famous court case in which Cat Stevens sued Pet Shop Boys, thinking It's A Sin was plagiarised from his Wild World, but it was thrown out -- both songs merely used cycles of 5ths.

Hairstyle's chord pattern owes something to Aznavour's Hier Encore (Yesterday When I Was Young), but only on the verses, and it's a fairly standard "cycle of 5ths" progression.