Walking
the plank
 |
|
Courtney, turning things upside
down again
|
"That's why I'm willing to do it with a sword in my teeth."
Love is honest about not
knowing exactly where to go from here. Ideally, she'd like to get to MP3.com
and Napster before the record companies do, and work with them to become
more artist friendly. She agrees with Metallica's Lars Ullrich, who famously
challenged Napster and MP3.com to remove copyrighted Metallica files from
their services, about the threat of lost revenues. She feels quite strongly
that much of the grief that Ullrich has received is anti-artist, an implied
criticism that he doesn't "know his place." She just isn't counting on
the record companies to protect artists, either, because they don't.
"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."
Even more than cash, the fight over Napster is a fight over a business model that's ultimately doomed: the record companies want to be gatekeepers, and we're approaching a world without gates. If the fight is over distribution, then the record companies will lose their stranglehold as the numbers of ways to reach an audience expand beyond the ones they control.
"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," she says." 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."
She's doing her part. At the Hole website, which she runs with the help of "my 19-year-old webmistress," Love has posted dozens of high-quality MP3 files for free download. (You'll need Apple's QuickTime plug-in to listen to them.) Live performances and unreleased tracks, these are anything but throwaways.
Among the rare gems included is a haunting performance by her late husband, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, singing background on the song "Live Through This." I can only imagine how painful of it must have been for her to post this song, and while I felt honored to hear it, I also felt it vindicated her decision to use her own voice instead on the version that served as the title track for Hole's second album.
Many of the other tracks are downright playful, and some of the concert recordings include bits of Love's famous, and infamous, onstage banter. All of them, light and dark, while freely offered, reveal a woman playing for keeps.
They also reveal the limitations of MP3s for high fidelity sound. For arrangements as ornate as Hole's, Love is blunt: "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."
That's why she believes that people who are as passionate about listening to music as she is about creating it, will find ways to support artists as they move outside traditional distribution channels. They want artists to succeed, to create more music, and they want to hear high quality recordings. She admits that she still hasn't worked out the details of how this can happen, especially in a way that allows her music to be distributed to people who don't have computers.
Napster works, she says, for the same reason that people buy bootleg concert t-shirts in parking lots instead of buying higher-quality ones inside the arena: the inferior ones are easier to buy. Her goal is to make the connection between musician, music, and listener as direct and efficient as possible.