[Reader-list] Courtney Love

[Monica Narula]

Here is the whole speech by Courtney Love that was recommended in an 
email. Enjoy.
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Courtney Love does the math
The controversial singer takes on record label profits, Napster and 
"sucka VCs."

Editor's note: This is an unedited transcript of Courtney Love's 
speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, 
given in New York on May 16.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Courtney Love


June 14, 2000 | Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is 
piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any 
intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type 
software.

I'm talking about major label recording contracts.

I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, 
and do some recording-contract math:

This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 
20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war 
band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" 
math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying 
I'm positive it's better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the 
president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.

What happens to that million dollars?

They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band 
with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent 
commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business 
manager.

That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After 
$170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 
per person.

That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released.

The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a 
bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is 
another rant entirely, but it's based on any basic civics-class 
knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the 
antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us 
just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip 
Morris National Park Service.)

So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two 
videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video 
production costs are recouped out of the band's royalties.

The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable.

The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. 
You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; 
independent promotion is a system where the record companies use 
middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations -- the 
unified broadcast system -- are getting paid to play their records.

All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band.

Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the 
band owes $2 million to the record company.

If all of the million records are sold at full price with no 
discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, 
since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record.

Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable 
expenses equals ... zero!

How much does the record company make?

They grossed $11 million.

It costs $500,000 to manufacture the CDs and they advanced the band 
$1 million. Plus there were $1 million in video costs, $300,000 in 
radio promotion and $200,000 in tour support.

The company also paid $750,000 in music publishing royalties.

They spent $2.2 million on marketing. That's mostly retail 
advertising, but marketing also pays for those huge posters of 
Marilyn Manson in Times Square and the street scouts who drive around 
in vans handing out black Korn T-shirts and backwards baseball caps. 
Not to mention trips to Scores and cash for tips for all and sundry.

Add it up and the record company has spent about $4.4 million.

So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.
Of course, they had fun. Hearing yourself on the radio, selling 
records, getting new fans and being on TV is great, but now the band 
doesn't have enough money to pay the rent and nobody has any credit.


Worst of all, after all this, the band owns none of its work ... they 
can pay the mortgage forever but they'll never own the house. Like I 
said: Sharecropping. Our media says, "Boo hoo, poor pop stars, they 
had a nice ride. Fuck them for speaking up"; but I say this dialogue 
is imperative. And cynical media people, who are more fascinated with 
celebrity than most celebrities, need to reacquaint themselves with 
their value systems.

When you look at the legal line on a CD, it says copyright 1976 
Atlantic Records or copyright 1996 RCA Records. When you look at a 
book, though, it'll say something like copyright 1999 Susan Faludi, 
or David Foster Wallace. Authors own their books and license them to 
publishers. When the contract runs out, writers gets their books 
back. But record companies own our copyrights forever.

The system's set up so almost nobody gets paid.

Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)

Last November, a Congressional aide named Mitch Glazier, with the 
support of the RIAA, added a "technical amendment" to a bill that 
defined recorded music as "works for hire" under the 1978 Copyright 
Act.

He did this after all the hearings on the bill were over. By the time 
artists found out about the change, it was too late. The bill was on 
its way to the White House for the president's signature.

That subtle change in copyright law will add billions of dollars to 
record company bank accounts over the next few years -- billions of 
dollars that rightfully should have been paid to artists. A "work for 
hire" is now owned in perpetuity by the record company.

Under the 1978 Copyright Act, artists could reclaim the copyrights on 
their work after 35 years. If you wrote and recorded "Everybody 
Hurts," you at least got it back to as a family legacy after 35 
years. But now, because of this corrupt little pisher, "Everybody 
Hurts" never gets returned to your family, and can now be sold to the 
highest bidder.

Over the years record companies have tried to put "work for hire" 
provisions in their contracts, and Mr. Glazier claims that the "work 
for hire" only "codified" a standard industry practice. But copyright 
laws didn't identify sound recordings as being eligible to be called 
"works for hire," so those contracts didn't mean anything. Until now.

Writing and recording "Hey Jude" is now the same thing as writing an 
English textbook, writing standardized tests, translating a novel 
from one language to another or making a map. These are the types of 
things addressed in the "work for hire" act. And writing a 
standardized test is a work for hire. Not making a record.

So an assistant substantially altered a major law when he only had 
the authority to make spelling corrections. That's not what I learned 
about how government works in my high school civics class.

Three months later, the RIAA hired Mr. Glazier to become its top 
lobbyist at a salary that was obviously much greater than the one he 
had as the spelling corrector guy.

The RIAA tries to argue that this change was necessary because of a 
provision in the bill that musicians supported. That provision 
prevents anyone from registering a famous person's name as a Web 
address without that person's permission. That's great. I own my 
name, and should be able to do what I want with my name.

But the bill also created an exception that allows a company to take 
a person's name for a Web address if they create a work for hire. 
Which means a record company would be allowed to own your Web site 
when you record your "work for hire" album. Like I said: 
Sharecropping.

Although I've never met any one at a record company who "believed in 
the Internet," they've all been trying to cover their asses by 
securing everyone's digital rights. Not that they know what to do 
with them. Go to a major label-owned band site. Give me a dollar for 
every time you see an annoying "under construction" sign. I used to 
pester Geffen (when it was a label) to do a better job. I was totally 
ignored for two years, until I got my band name back. The Goo Goo 
Dolls are struggling to gain control of their domain name from Warner 
Bros., who claim they own the name because they set up a shitty 
promotional Web site for the band.

Orrin Hatch, songwriter and Republican senator from Utah, seems to be 
the only person in Washington with a progressive view of copyright 
law. One lobbyist says that there's no one in the House with a 
similar view and that "this would have never happened if Sonny Bono 
was still alive."

By the way, which bill do you think the recording industry used for 
this amendment?

The Record Company Redefinition Act? No. The Music Copyright Act? No. 
The Work for Hire Authorship Act? No.

How about the Satellite Home Viewing Act of 1999?

Stealing our copyright reversions in the dead of night while no one 
was looking, and with no hearings held, is piracy.

It's piracy when the RIAA lobbies to change the bankruptcy law to 
make it more difficult for musicians to declare bankruptcy. Some 
musicians have declared bankruptcy to free themselves from truly evil 
contracts. TLC declared bankruptcy after they received less than 2 
percent of the $175 million earned by their CD sales. That was about 
40 times less than the profit that was divided among their 
management, production and record companies.

Toni Braxton also declared bankruptcy in 1998. She sold $188 million 
worth of CDs, but she was broke because of a terrible recording 
contract that paid her less than 35 cents per album. Bankruptcy can 
be an artist's only defense against a truly horrible deal and the 
RIAA wants to take it away.

Artists want to believe that we can make lots of money if we're 
successful. But there are hundreds of stories about artists in their 
60s and 70s who are broke because they never made a dime from their 
hit records. And real success is still a long shot for a new artist 
today. Of the 32,000 new releases each year, only 250 sell more than 
10,000 copies. And less than 30 go platinum.

The four major record corporations fund the RIAA. These companies are 
rich and obviously well-represented. Recording artists and musicians 
don't really have the money to compete. The 273,000 working musicians 
in America make about $30,000 a year. Only 15 percent of American 
Federation of Musicians members work steadily in music.

But the music industry is a $40 billion-a-year business. One-third of 
that revenue comes from the United States. The annual sales of 
cassettes, CDs and video are larger than the gross national product 
of 80 countries. Americans have more CD players, radios and VCRs than 
we have bathtubs.

Story after story gets told about artists -- some of them in their 
60s and 70s, some of them authors of huge successful songs that we 
all enjoy, use and sing -- living in total poverty, never having been 
paid anything. Not even having access to a union or to basic health 
care. Artists who have generated billions of dollars for an industry 
die broke and un-cared for.

And they're not actors or participators. They're the rightful owners, 
originators and performers of original compositions.

This is piracy.
Technology is not piracy

This opinion is one I really haven't formed yet, so as I speak about 
Napster now, please understand that I'm not totally informed. I will 
be the first in line to file a class action suit to protect my 
copyrights if Napster or even the far more advanced Gnutella doesn't 
work with us to protect us. I'm on [Metallica drummer] Lars Ulrich's 
side, in other words, and I feel really badly for him that he doesn't 
know how to condense his case down to a sound-bite that sounds more 
reasonable than the one I saw today.

I also think Metallica is being given too much grief. It's 
anti-artist, for one thing. An artist speaks up and the artist gets 
squashed: Sharecropping. Don't get above your station, kid. It's not 
piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster or 
Gnutella or Freenet or iMesh or beaming their CDs into a My.MP3.com 
or MyPlay.com music locker. It's piracy when those guys that run 
those companies make side deals with the cartel lawyers and label 
heads so that they can be "the labels' friend," and not the artists'.

Recording artists have essentially been giving their music away for 
free under the old system, so new technology that exposes our music 
to a larger audience can only be a good thing. Why aren't these 
companies working with us to create some peace?

There were a billion music downloads last year, but music sales are 
up. Where's the evidence that downloads hurt business? Downloads are 
creating more demand.

Why aren't record companies embracing this great opportunity? Why 
aren't they trying to talk to the kids passing compilations around to 
learn what they like? Why is the RIAA suing the companies that are 
stimulating this new demand? What's the point of going after people 
swapping cruddy-sounding MP3s? Cash! Cash they have no intention of 
passing onto us, the writers of their profits.

At this point the "record collector" geniuses who use Napster don't 
have the coolest most arcane selection anyway, unless you're into 
techno. Hardly any pre-1982 REM fans, no '60s punk, even the Alan 
Parsons Project was underrepresented when I tried to find some 
Napster buddies. For the most part, it was college boy rawk without a 
lot of imagination. Maybe that's the demographic that cares -- and in 
that case, My Bloody Valentine and Bert Jansch aren't going to get 
screwed just yet. There's still time to negotiate.

Destroying traditional access

Somewhere along the way, record companies figured out that it's a lot 
more profitable to control the distribution system than it is to 
nurture artists. And since the companies didn't have any real 
competition, artists had no other place to go. Record companies 
controlled the promotion and marketing; only they had the ability to 
get lots of radio play, and get records into all the big chain store. 
That power put them above both the artists and the audience. They own 
the plantation.

Being the gatekeeper was the most profitable place to be, but now 
we're in a world half without gates. The Internet allows artists to 
communicate directly with their audiences; we don't have to depend 
solely on an inefficient system where the record company promotes our 
records to radio, press or retail and then sits back and hopes fans 
find out about our music.

Record companies don't understand the intimacy between artists and 
their fans. They put records on the radio and buy some advertising 
and hope for the best. Digital distribution gives everyone worldwide, 
instant access to music.

And filters are replacing gatekeepers. In a world where we can get 
anything we want, whenever we want it, how does a company create 
value? By filtering. In a world without friction, the only friction 
people value is editing. A filter is valuable when it understands the 
needs of both artists and the public. New companies should be 
conduits between musicians and their fans.

Right now the only way you can get music is by shelling out $17. In a 
world where music costs a nickel, an artist can "sell" 100 million 
copies instead of just a million.

The present system keeps artists from finding an audience because it 
has too many artificial scarcities: limited radio promotion, limited 
bin space in stores and a limited number of spots on the record 
company roster.

The digital world has no scarcities. There are countless ways to 
reach an audience. Radio is no longer the only place to hear a new 
song. And tiny mall record stores aren't the only place to buy a new 
CD.

I'm leaving
Now artists have options. We don't have to work with major labels 
anymore, because the digital economy is creating new ways to 
distribute and market music. And the free ones amongst us aren't 
going to. That means the slave class, which I represent, has to find 
ways to get out of our deals. This didn't really matter before, and 
that's why we all stayed.

I want my seven-year contract law California labor code case to mean 
something to other artists. (Universal Records sues me because I 
leave because my employment is up, but they say a recording contract 
is not a personal contract; because the recording industry -- who, we 
have established, are excellent lobbyists, getting, as they did, a 
clerk to disallow Don Henley or Tom Petty the right to give their 
copyrights to their families -- in California, in 1987, lobbied to 
pass an amendment that nullified recording contracts as personal 
contracts, sort of. Maybe. Kind of. A little bit. And again, in the 
dead of night, succeeded.)

That's why I'm willing to do it with a sword in my teeth. I expect 
I'll be ignored or ostracized following this lawsuit. I expect that 
the treatment you're seeing Lars Ulrich get now will quadruple for 
me. Cool. At least I'll serve a purpose. I'm an artist and a good 
artist, I think, but I'm not that artist that has to play all the 
time, and thus has to get fucked. Maybe my laziness and 
self-destructive streak will finally pay off and serve a community 
desperately in need of it. They can't torture me like they could 
Lucinda Williams.

You funny dot-communists. Get your shit together, you annoying sucka VCs

I want to work with people who believe in music and art and passion. 
And I'm just the tip of the iceberg. I'm leaving the major label 
system and there are hundreds of artists who are going to follow me. 
There's an unbelievable opportunity for new companies that dare to 
get it right.

How can anyone defend the current system when it fails to deliver 
music to so many potential fans? That only expects of itself a "5 
percent success rate" a year? The status quo gives us a boring 
culture. In a society of over 300 million people, only 30 new artists 
a year sell a million records. By any measure, that's a huge failure.

Maybe each fan will spend less money, but maybe each artist will have 
a better chance of making a living. Maybe our culture will get more 
interesting than the one currently owned by Time Warner. I'm not 
crazy. Ask yourself, are any of you somehow connected to Time Warner 
media? I think there are a lot of yeses to that and I'd have to say 
that in that case president McKinley truly failed to bust any trusts. 
Maybe we can remedy that now.

Artists will make that compromise if it means we can connect with 
hundreds of millions of fans instead of the hundreds of thousands 
that we have now. Especially if we lose all the crap that goes with 
success under the current system. I'm willing, right now, to leave 
half of these trappings -- fuck it, all these trappings -- at the 
door to have a pure artist experience. They cosset us with trappings 
to shut us up. That way when we say "sharecropper!" you can point to 
my free suit and say "Shut up pop star."

Here, take my Prada pants. Fuck it. Let us do our real jobs. And 
those of us addicted to celebrity because we have nothing else to 
give will fade away. And those of us addicted to celebrity because it 
was there will find a better, purer way to live.

Since I've basically been giving my music away for free under the old 
system, I'm not afraid of wireless, MP3 files or any of the other 
threats to my copyrights. Anything that makes my music more available 
to more people is great. MP3 files sound cruddy, but a well-made 
album sounds great. And I don't care what anyone says about digital 
recordings. At this point they are good for dance music, but try 
listening to a warm guitar tone on them. They suck for what I do.

Record companies are terrified of anything that challenges their 
control of distribution. This is the business that insisted that CDs 
be sold in incredibly wasteful 6-by-12 inch long boxes just because 
no one thought you could change the bins in a record store.

Let's not call the major labels "labels." Let's call them by their 
real names: They are the distributors. They're the only distributors 
and they exist because of scarcity. Artists pay 95 percent of 
whatever we make to gatekeepers because we used to need gatekeepers 
to get our music heard. Because they have a system, and when they 
decide to spend enough money -- all of it recoupable, all of it owed 
by me -- they can occasionally shove things through this system, 
depending on a lot of arbitrary factors.

The corporate filtering system, which is the system that brought you 
(in my humble opinion) a piece of crap like "Mambo No. 5" and didn't 
let you hear the brilliant Cat Power record or the amazing new 
Sleater Kinney record, obviously doesn't have good taste anyway. But 
we've never paid major label/distributors for their good taste. 
They've never been like Yahoo and provided a filter service.

There were a lot of factors that made a distributor decide to push a 
recording through the system:

How powerful is management?
Who owes whom a favor?
What independent promoter's cousin is the drummer?
What part of the fiscal year is the company putting out the record?
Is the royalty rate for the artist so obscenely bad that it's almost 
100 percent profit instead of just 95 percent so that if the record 
sells, it's literally a steal?
How much bin space is left over this year?
Was the record already a hit in Europe so that there's corporate 
pressure to make it work?
Will the band screw up its live career to play free shows for radio stations?
Does the artist's song sound enough like someone else that radio 
stations will play it because it fits the sound of the month?
Did the artist get the song on a film soundtrack so that the movie 
studio will pay for the video?

These factors affect the decisions that go into the system. Not 
public taste. All these things are becoming eradicated now. They are 
gone or on their way out. We don't need the gatekeepers any more. We 
just don't need them.

And if they aren't going to do for me what I can do for myself with 
my 19-year-old Webmistress on my own Web site, then they need to get 
the hell out of my way. [I will] allow millions of people to get my 
music for nothing if they want and hopefully they'll be kind enough 
to leave a tip if they like it.

I still need the old stuff. I still need a producer in the creation 
of a recording, I still need to get on the radio (which costs a lot 
of money), I still need bin space for hardware CDs, I still need to 
provide an opportunity for people without computers to buy the 
hardware that I make. I still need a lot of this stuff, but I can get 
these things from a joint venture with a company that serves as a 
conduit and knows its place. Serving the artist and serving the 
public: That's its place.

Equity for artists
A new company that gives artists true equity in their work can take 
over the world, kick ass and make a lot of money. We're inspired by 
how people get paid in the new economy. Many visual artists and 
software and hardware designers have real ownership of their work.

I have a 14-year-old niece. She used to want to be a rock star. 
Before that she wanted to be an actress. As of six months ago, what 
do you think she wants to be when she grows up? What's the glamorous, 
emancipating career of choice? Of course, she wants to be a Web 
designer. It's such a glamorous business!

When you people do business with artists, you have to take a 
different view of things. We want to be treated with the respect that 
now goes to Web designers. We're not Dockers-wearing Intel workers 
from Portland who know how to "manage our stress." We don't 
understand or want to understand corporate culture.

I feel this obscene gold rush greedgreedgreed vibe that bothers me a 
lot when I talk to dot-com people about all this. You guys can't 
hustle artists that well. At least slick A&R guys know the buzzwords. 
Don't try to compete with them. I just laugh at you when you do! 
Maybe you could a year ago when anything dot-com sounded smarter than 
the rest of us, but the scam has been uncovered.

The celebrity-for-sale business is about to crash, I hope, and the 
idea of a sucker VC gifting some company with four floors just 
because they can "do" "chats" with "Christina" once or twice is 
ridiculous. I did a chat today, twice. Big damn deal. 200 bucks for 
the software and some elbow grease and a good back-end coder. Wow. 
That's not worth 150 million bucks.

... I mean, yeah, sure it is if you'd like to give it to me.

Tipping/music as service
I know my place. I'm a waiter. I'm in the service industry.

I live on tips. Occasionally, I'm going to get stiffed, but that's 
OK. If I work hard and I'm doing good work, I believe that the people 
who enjoy it are going to want to come directly to me and get my 
music because it sounds better, since it's mastered and packaged by 
me personally. I'm providing an honest, real experience. Period.

When people buy the bootleg T-shirt in the concert parking lot and 
not the more expensive T-shirt inside the venue, it isn't to save 
money. The T-shirt in the parking lot is cheap and badly made, but 
it's easier to buy. The bootleggers have a better distribution 
system. There's no waiting in line and it only takes two minutes to 
buy one.

I know that if I can provide my own T-shirt that I designed, that I 
made, and provide it as quickly or quicker than the bootleggers, 
people who've enjoyed the experience I've provided will be happy to 
shell out a little more money to cover my costs. Especially if they 
understand this context, and aren't being shoveled a load of shit 
about "uppity" artists.

It's exactly the same with recorded music. The real thing to fear 
from Napster is its simple and excellent distribution system. No one 
really prefers a cruddy-sounding Napster MP3 file to the real thing. 
But it's really easy to get an MP3 file; and in the middle of Kansas 
you may never see my record because major distribution is really bad 
if your record's not in the charts this week, and even then it takes 
a couple of weeks to restock the one copy they usually keep on hand.

I also know how many times I have heard a song on the radio that I 
loved only to buy the record and have the album be a piece of crap. 
If you're afraid of your own filler then I bet you're afraid of 
Napster. I'm afraid of Napster because I think the major label cartel 
will get to them before I do.

I've made three records. I like them all. I haven't made filler and 
they're all committed pieces of work. I'm not scared of you 
previewing my record. If you like it enough to have it be a part of 
your life, I know you'll come to me to get it, as long as I show you 
how to get to me, and as long as you know that it's out.

Most people don't go into restaurants and stiff waiters, but record 
labels represent the restaurant that forces the waiters to live on, 
and sometimes pool, their tips. And they even fight for a bit of 
their tips.

Music is a service to its consumers, not a product. I live on tips. 
Giving music away for free is what artists have been doing naturally 
all their lives.

New models
Record companies stand between artists and their fans. We signed 
terrible deals with them because they controlled our access to the 
public.

But in a world of total connectivity, record companies lose that 
control. With unlimited bin space and intelligent search engines, 
fans will have no trouble finding the music they know they want. They 
have to know they want it, and that needs to be a marketing business 
that takes a fee.

If a record company has a reason to exist, it has to bring an 
artist's music to more fans and it has to deliver more and better 
music to the audience. You bring me a bigger audience or a better 
relationship with my audience or get the fuck out of my way. Next 
time I release a record, I'll be able to go directly to my fans and 
let them hear it before anyone else.

We'll still have to use radio and traditional CD distribution. Record 
stores aren't going away any time soon and radio is still the most 
important part of record promotion.

Major labels are freaking out because they have no control in this 
new world. Artists can sell CDs directly to fans. We can make direct 
deals with thousands of other Web sites and promote our music to 
millions of people that old record companies never touch.

We're about to have lots of new ways to sell our music: downloads, 
hardware bundles, memory sticks, live Webcasts, and lots of other 
things that aren't even invented yet.

Content providers
But there's something you guys have to figure out.

Here's my open letter to Steve Case:

Avatars don't talk back!!! But what are you going to do with real live artists?

Artists aren't like you. We go through a creative process that's 
demented and crazy. There's a lot of soul-searching and turning 
ourselves inside-out and all kinds of gross stuff that ends up on 
"Behind the Music."

A lot of people who haven't been around artists very much get really 
weird when they sit down to lunch with us. So I want to give you some 
advice: Learn to speak our language. Talk about songs and melody and 
hooks and art and beauty and soul. Not sleazy record-guy crap, where 
you're in a cashmere sweater murmuring that the perfect deal really 
is perfect, Courtney. Yuck. Honestly hire honestly committed people. 
We're in a "new economy," right? You can afford to do that.

But don't talk to me about "content."

I get really freaked out when I meet someone and they start telling 
me that I should record 34 songs in the next six months so that we 
have enough content for my site. Defining artistic expression as 
content is anathema to me.

What the hell is content? Nobody buys content. Real people pay money 
for music because it means something to them. A great song is not 
just something to take up space on a Web site next to stock market 
quotes and baseball scores.

DEN tried to build a site with artist-free content and I'm not sorry 
to see it fail. The DEN shows look like art if you're not paying 
attention, but they forgot to hire anyone to be creative. So they 
ended up with a lot of content nobody wants to see because they 
thought they could avoid dealing with defiant and moody 
personalities. Because they were arrogant. And because they were 
conformists. Artists have to deal with business people and business 
people have to deal with artists. We hate each other. Let's create 
companies of mediators.

Every single artist who makes records believes and hopes that they 
give you something that will transform your life. If you're really 
just interested in data mining or selling banner ads, stick with 
those "artists" willing to call themselves content providers.

I don't know if an artist can last by meeting the current public 
taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don't think you 
can last by following demographics and carefully meeting 
expectations. I don't know many lasting works of art that are 
condescending or deliberately stupid or were created as content.

Don't tell me I'm a brand. I'm famous and people recognize me, but I 
can't look in the mirror and see my brand identity.

Keep talking about brands and you know what you'll get? Bad clothes. 
Bad hair. Bad books. Bad movies. And bad records. And bankrupt 
businesses. Rides that were fun for a year with no employee loyalty 
but everyone got rich fucking you. Who wants that? The answer is 
purity. We can afford it. Let's go find it again while we can.

I also feel filthy trying to call my music a product. It's not a 
thing that I test market like toothpaste or a new car. Music is 
personal and mysterious.

Being a "content provider" is prostitution work that devalues our art 
and doesn't satisfy our spirits. Artistic expression has to be 
provocative. The problem with artists and the Internet: Once their 
art is reduced to content, they may never have the opportunity to 
retrieve their souls.

When you form your business for creative people, with creative 
people, come at us with some thought. Everybody's process is 
different. And remember that it's art. We're not craftspeople.

Sponsorships
I don't know what a good sponsorship would be for me or for other 
artists I respect. People bring up sponsorships a lot as a way for 
artists to get our music paid for upfront and for us to earn a fee. 
I've dealt with large corporations for long enough to know that any 
alliance where I'm an owned service is going to be doomed.

When I agreed to allow a large cola company to promote a live show, I 
couldn't have been more miserable. They screwed up every single thing 
imaginable. The venue was empty but sold out. There were thousands of 
people outside who wanted to be there, trying to get tickets. And 
there were the empty seats the company had purchased for a lump sum 
and failed to market because they were clueless about music.

It was really dumb. You had to buy the cola. You had to dial a 
number. You had to press a bunch of buttons. You had to do all this 
crap that nobody wanted to do. Why not just bring a can to the door?

On top of all this, I felt embarrassed to be an advertising agent for 
a product that I'd never let my daughter use. Plus they were a 
condescending bunch of little guys. They treated me like I was an 
ungrateful little bitch who should be groveling for the experience to 
play for their damn soda.

I ended up playing without my shirt on and ordering a six-pack of the 
rival cola onstage. Also lots of unwholesome cursing and nudity 
occurred. This way I knew that no matter how tempting the cash was, 
they'd never do business with me again.

If you want some little obedient slave content provider, then fine. 
But I think most musicians don't want to be responsible for your 
clean-cut, wholesome, all-American, sugar corrosive cancer-causing, 
all white people, no women allowed sodapop images.

Nor, on the converse, do we want to be responsible for your 
vice-inducing, liver-rotting, child-labor-law-violating, all white 
people, no-women-allowed booze images.

So as a defiant moody artist worth my salt, I've got to think of 
something else. Tampax, maybe.

Money
As a user, I love Napster. It carries some risk. I hear idealistic 
business people talk about how people that are musicians would be 
musicians no matter what and that we're already doing it for free, so 
what about copyright?
Please. It's incredibly easy not to be a musician. It's always a 
struggle and a dangerous career choice. We are motivated by passion 
and by money.

That's not a dirty little secret. It's a fact. Take away the 
incentive for major or minor financial reward and you dilute the pool 
of musicians. I am not saying that only pure artists will survive. 
Like a few of the more utopian people who discuss this, I don't want 
just pure artists to survive.

Where would we all be without the trash? We need the trash to cover 
up our national depression. The utopians also say that because in 
their minds "pure" artists are all Ani DiFranco and don't demand a 
lot of money. Why are the utopians all entertainment lawyers and 
major label workers anyway? I demand a lot of money if I do a big 
huge worthwhile job and millions of people like it, don't kid 
yourself. In economic terms, you've got an industry that's loathsome 
and outmoded, but when it works it creates some incentive and some 
efficiency even though absolutely no one gets paid.

We suffer as a society and a culture when we don't pay the true value 
of goods and services delivered. We create a lack of production. Less 
good music is recorded if we remove the incentive to create it.

Music is intellectual property with full cash and opportunity costs 
required to create, polish and record a finished product. If I invest 
money and time into my business, I should be reasonably protected 
from the theft of my goods and services. When the judgment came 
against MP3.com, the RIAA sought damages of $150,000 for each 
major-label-"owned" musical track in MP3's database. Multiply by 
80,000 CDs, and MP3.com could owe the gatekeepers $120 billion.

But what about the Plimsouls? Why can't MP3.com pay each artist a 
fixed amount based on the number of their downloads? Why on earth 
should MP3.com pay $120 billion to four distribution companies, who 
in most cases won't have to pay a nickel to the artists whose 
copyrights they've stolen through their system of organized theft?

It's a ridiculous judgment. I believe if evidence had been entered 
that ultimately it's just shuffling big cash around two or three 
corporations, I can only pray that the judge in the MP3.com case 
would have seen the RIAA's case for the joke that it was.

I'd rather work out a deal with MP3.com myself, and force them to be 
artist-friendly, instead of being laughed at and having my money 
hidden by a major label as they sell my records out the back door, 
behind everyone's back.

How dare they behave in such a horrified manner in regards to 
copyright law when their entire industry is based on piracy? When 
Mister Label Head Guy, whom my lawyer yelled at me not to name, got 
caught last year selling millions of "cleans" out the back door. 
"Cleans" being the records that aren't for marketing but are to be 
sold. Who the fuck is this guy? He wants to save a little cash so he 
fucks the artist and goes home? Do they fire him? Does Chuck Phillips 
of the LA Times say anything? No way! This guy's a source! He throws 
awesome dinner parties! Why fuck with the status quo? Let's pick on 
Lars Ulrich instead because he brought up an interesting point!

Conclusion
I'm looking for people to help connect me to more fans, because I 
believe fans will leave a tip based on the enjoyment and service I 
provide. I'm not scared of them getting a preview. It really is going 
to be a global village where a billion people have access to one 
artist and a billion people can leave a tip if they want to.

It's a radical democratization. Every artist has access to every fan 
and every fan has access to every artist, and the people who direct 
fans to those artists. People that give advice and technical value 
are the people we need. People crowding the distribution pipe and 
trying to ignore fans and artists have no value. This is a perfect 
system.

If you're going to start a company that deals with musicians, please 
do it because you like music. Offer some control and equity to the 
artists and try to give us some creative guidance. If music and art 
and passion are important to you, there are hundreds of artists who 
are ready to rewrite the rules.

In the last few years, business pulled our culture away from the idea 
that music is important and emotional and sacred. But new technology 
has brought a real opportunity for change; we can break down the old 
system and give musicians real freedom and choice.

A great writer named Neal Stephenson said that America does four 
things better than any other country in the world: rock music, 
movies, software and high-speed pizza delivery. All of these are 
sacred American art forms. Let's return to our purity and our 
idealism while we have this shot.

Warren Beatty once said: "The greatest gift God gives us is to enjoy 
the sound of our own voice. And the second greatest gift is to get 
somebody to listen to it."

And for that, I humbly thank you.

-- 
Monica Narula
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net