I think both of them are fed up with that business model, and rightly so. Online music consumption has radically changed the need for all of that, but the same old unnecessary infrastructures are still kicking around and continue to intrude on creativity now, even more than they ever have.
Look, a good label should find artists with a potential audience, and bring the audience to those artists. That requires a leap of faith - an investment - a risk, on the label's part. If the artist doesn't sell enough to avoid incurring a net cost, that's the label's fault for either not marketing it right or hiring someone that no one wants to hear. However, this all too soon turns into a simple formula: "this is what will sell, so we'll find a hundred others just like it." So the stakes are raised, because on the whole, most bands on the same label are held to a standard of profit. And if you don't fit in to that and aren't selling as much as Linkin Park or whoever, you, the artist, are made to feel
ashamed because your work is judged inferior for failing to fulfill the money-making formula.
The music industry's attitude of
shaming artists - holding THEM responsible for compromising someone else's profit margin - has been a bee in Rog's bonnet since at least "Have A Cigar" (and possibly "Cymbaline"), but it really has become intolerable to be on a record label nowadays. The paranoid climate of looming bankruptcy has destabilized everything in the record business, at the price of real artists' sanity. And for what? Keeping a few people employed at record labels for a few months longer, while they teeter over the edge of irrelevancy.
This wasn't always the case. Rog & Rezzo's mutual producer Bob Ezrin, for one, has
a word or two to say about that. Oh, and by the way, it did occur to Trent how much price-gouging is going on when it comes to his fans at least, and
he gave his label hell for it.