Who
You Calling a Pirate?
Why Courtney Love and
Intel are betting on the Net in the Battle of Napster
by Tim Wilson
Man About Town™
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Courtney Love. Courtesy
of www.holemusic.com
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Courtney Love hates piracy. Which is why she loves Napster.
"Technology isn't piracy," she says. "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 to free themselves from truly evil recording contracts. 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."
Love is very clear about the threat of Napster and other new distribution technologies to record companies though, who, she says, "figured out that it's a lot more profitable to control the distribution system than it is to nurture artists." Record companies are right to fear lost sales, not because real fans are satisfied with the sound of MP3 files — they're not, which is why record sales are climbing every bit as fast as MP3 downloads played back through broswer plug-ins. Record companies will face lost sales when potential buyers listen to digital samples online, and discover that everything an album but the hit single is worthless.
"I 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," says Love. If you're afraid of your own filler then I bet you're afraid of Napster."
But she's also clear about the potential threat to artists: "I'm afraid of Napster because I think the major label cartel will get to them before I do."
Doing
the Math
Recording three highly regarded albums with her band Hole and years of
touring on her own and with other musicians has given her a close look
at the record business, and she hasn't been what she sees, not only for
herself, but for any artists at all.
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Click the image
above to see the math in the "Love Manifesto"
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In a widely redistributed speech she gave to the Digital Hollywood conference earlier this summer, Love offered a hypothetical example of a band with a 20% royalty deal, hypothetical since few artists have a deal worth more than a fraction of that, who sell a million records. She very carefully describes standard industry arrangements for how a label's expenses are billed back to the artist and shows how, at the end of the day, her hypothetical band will have broken even after selling a million copies, and the record company will have netted nearly $7 million, and retained ownership of the music in perpetuity.
In reality, the picture is far grimmer. Best-selling R&B trio TLC sold $175 million worth of records for royalties of less than TWO percent, and balladeer Toni Braxton, with sales of over $180 million, received less than 35 cents per album for her efforts. Both declared bankruptcy, the result, says Love, of contracts that can only be called piracy.
Needless to say, Love is profoundly disturbed by the efforts of Napster and MP3.com to stave off court action by making deals with the same record companies who makes deals that send artists into bankruptcy. "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? 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.
"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'."
Artists have been willing to sign these kinds of contracts because they saw them as their only access to a very limited world. Those limits, says Love, are wholly artificial in a digital world. There's nothing about the fight over Napster that's fight about artists' rights, since record companies so routinely plunder them.
"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," Love says. "The digital world has no scarcities. There are countless ways to reach an audience."