I realize that I've never sold more than a few hundred albums and things are totally different, blah, blah, blah...the economics are all the same, having a tour bus paid for by your record label isn't anything special, I've interviewed little mall metal band playing 500 capacity clubs who have tour buses. They'll never see a penny of their royalties because they used it on the bus.
That is exactly true. I just stumbled on all this talk about money- and as anyone who has played in bands and put out records at any level will tell you, you don't become a musician to get rich. If that's the goal, sit home and play the lottery every week, because no matter how talented you are, the business side of music does not reward based on merit (in fact, the opposite is usually true.) For mid-level artists that hope to sell 50-100k records, being on your own label is really your only shot at making any money from a record. Even then, you have to be willing to put up with all the business BS that comes with it, which many musicians aren't. Being on his own label doesn't make Jay a "hypocritic capitalist", it makes him smart, because he's probably sick of previous labels sucking every last penny out of everything he's ever done so the execs can go do blow with their million sellers.
The reality is, the economics suck for 99.99% of musicians, and anyone who sits around "waiting by the phone" for ANY musician-employer to call is hopelessly naive. I don't know anyone from SV or UT personally, but I can see that the Boquists and Eric Heywood do session work and tour with other musicians. From an artistic standpoint they might be "waiting by the phone" if SV was really special to them, but clearly they do not depend on Jay for their livelihood.
As for SV breaking up, again I can't speak to the facts. But my suspicion is that Jay simply wanted to move in a different direction or play with different people. It clearly disappointed certain fans, but I don't think many artists really expect every fan to love everything they do. However the bottom line with anything creative is that if it doesn't speak to your soul as an artist, for most it's simply not worth doing. All the sacrifices that come with being a professional musician mean that it can be absolute hell to live on the road if you don't get the creative/artistic buzz from your bandmates every night.
All this SV vs. JF solo stuff is stupid to me, because no one wants to make the same record over and over again, and fans would tire of it anyway. Of my favorites, some have grown in a direction I like (the Jayhawks), some haven't (Wilco). That's just me. My point is, if the time comes that you don't get off (in an artistic sense) from the people you're playing with, it's usually time to move in a different direction. That is the right and privilege of any musician, whether it's the bandleader/employer or the sideman.
-Andy