In 2000 Courtney Love wrote an open letter to music industry where she was opposing majors music companies stealing artists work and people sharing mp3 files on the internet. In short she said then that she doesn't mind to have her music shared as music companies are stealing her anyway and making huge profits with it.

She also talks about music becoming a "content" to be put on web sites.

A very clever view of music industry state then and one year before Apple launched iTunes and started to sell mp3's by millions. Today music is mostly available as content through streaming sites such as Spotify or through downloads sites such as iTunes (which may be a reason for the poor quality of a lot of music nowadays...)

The whole letter can be read here : Courtney Love does the math
It's a bit long but it's worth the reading.


"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.

(...)

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.

(...)


Content providers

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.

(...)

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 @#$%& 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."

(...)

[www.salon.com]



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2013-05-13 17:10 by kowalski.