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.

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.





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