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Originally posted by Mr. Fahrenheit
People poke fun at Courtney a lot because of her obvious problems, but she's such an intelligent woman.
Her take-down of the record business is legendary.
Her open letter to recording artists. |
Great read. Thanks for posting this, this is my first time reading it. Damn, Courtney was/is a badass bitch, taking on Universal AND trying to form a union. She's insightful at times, it just gets bogged down by unnecessary crazy, so no one ends up listening.
I also looked up that article she wrote for salon and she spilled a LOT of **** there too.
http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
From the part where she breaks down where exactly all of the artists advance label money goes:
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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.
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So basically, artists got stuck with paying for their own payola. WTF. This **** probably still goes on, lbr.
Also, this too:
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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?
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She was so hopeful about the digital age,
but I get the feeling not much has changed since she wrote all of this tbh.
Help ha now Courtney! Save ha from Luke!! Get us Lipsha!!!
she knew all along
