“Can I get a Sudafed?” a hung-over Courtney Love said as she swept into the room at the South by Southwest Music Conference, which concluded last weekend. A standing-room-only crowd at the music industry’s biggest annual gathering cheered her arrival, even though Love is more famous for being famous than for making music.
Kurt Cobain’s widow has spent most of the last few years in Hollywood, litigating her way out of a record contract with Universal Records, battling the surviving members of Nirvana for control of the band’s catalog, and suing the industry over long-standing business practices that, she claims, turn artists into the modern-day equivalent of plantation workers. Her two-hour-plus “interview,” ostensibly conducted by Los Angeles Times business reporter Chuck Phillips, was part therapy session, part dirt-dishing coffee klatch and part revisionist history of the music business. Her analysis, such as it was, of the music industry’s exploitation of artists and failing economy contrasted sharply with that of her archrival, Hilary Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the five major labels. Two days before Love’s rock-star entrance, Rosen sat in the same conference hall and calmly spelled out the party line.
Love agitated for the formation of an artists coalition, limits on long-term recording contracts and tighter accounting procedures as part of a massive overhaul of the industry’s business model. Rosen called for a mere tweaking of that model, but agreed that things will have to change if the industry is to shake off its current slump, which saw record sales drop 5 percent in 2001.
“The mistake the record companies have made, and maybe continue to make,” Rosen says, “is not taking enough risks with their business model.”
The conference scored a coup by bringing the two key players in the music-industry wars to its shindig, but it would have been even better to see Rosen and Love go head-to-head. In lieu of that, here’s how two of the most powerful women in music see the business:
Regrets, they’ve had a few
Love says she and fellow artists dropped the ball by not following Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam in the band’s boycott of Ticketmaster over escalating service fees in 1995-96. “None of us helped him. I sat there with a needle in my arm [a reference to her heroin addiction]. Now it’s time for all of us to step up. I will not be martyred for this the way Pearl Jam was.”
Rosen says the industry has become averse to risk, a slow-moving dinosaur unresponsive to consumers. “There are so many dysfunctional voices within the music-industry family all wanting their interests served, and the consumers got lost. . . . Shame on us.”
Is the end near?
“I’m not going to be a house [servant] anymore,” Love says in demanding that artists shouldn’t be tied to record labels for more than seven years, even though an exception to California labor law says otherwise. If the Recording Artists Coalition gets its way and the California legislature passes a law enabling recording artists to become free agents, Love says, it will mean that “within three years the music industry will have failed.”
Rosen says the upshot won’t be so dire, and that a compromise will be reached between artists and labels. “I believe that if an artist doesn’t want to be affiliated with a label after seven years, they shouldn’t have to be. . . . But successful artists forget that the system took a chance on them. They have to recognize that significant risk is involved and that a company is entitled to a return for taking that risk.”
Priced out of business
“Nobody in the food chain is serving the consumers well enough,” Rosen says, citing surveys that show that 34 percent of consumers didn’t buy more albums last year because they found what they wanted for free on the Internet, and that 24 percent couldn’t find what they wanted to buy. The industry has become too enamored with the compact disc as its primary format, she says, a mistake akin to a soft-drink company “selling its product only in 64-ounce bottles.” She says the price of CDs isn’t the issue so much as the lack of variety in pricing.
Love tacitly agreed that prices across the board are too high, and that artists will have to share the load of cutting back. “We’re gonna have to give up bidding wars — they’re egomaniacal and stupid competitions between record company executives,” she says. “And artists are gonna have to give up big advances.”
Could she be Satan?
“Ms. Rosen is a lobbyist with a good job and she’ll be made a scapegoat when the industry goes down,” Love says. “She is the devil, she is Darth Vader. My numbers are real, hers are false. I’ll take her on.”
Rosen: “It’s not in the [artists’] interest to talk about compromise. It’s in their interest to say the record companies are the devil, and they need to be organized to fight the devil.” But Rosen says that 10 years ago she offered artists coalition organizer Don Henley of the Eagles office space and financial support to help create a union. “Artists need an organization representing their interests.”
Love says she has already spent $2.4 million of her own money fighting the legal battle against the record industry. Not that Love is hurting for cash: The Nirvana catalog, to which she is primary beneficiary, has sold more than 70 million albums worldwide, she says, and she just sold the publishing rights to her late husband’s diaries for $4 million.
“When Universal sued Courtney, they sued the wrong artist,” says Love’s manager and boyfriend, Jim Barber, at another of the conference’s many panels on the industry’s declining fortunes. But he struck a conciliatory tone. Love enjoys being a rock star, and the major labels facilitate that stardom. “She wants to work with a major label, because a major can provide access to the marketplace,” Barber says. “She only asks they play fair.”
The good-cop, bad-cop routine makes Love and Barber formidable opponents for Rosen and the record labels. “He’s the brains, I’m the brawn,” Love proclaims. Rosen and the major labels are still the boss, but for how long?
Love’s suit against Universal is awaiting a ruling on a motion for summary judgment. The California legislature is expected to vote on a bill that would end the industry’s exception to the seven-year rule in a few weeks, which effectively would make artists free agents. And Love is itching to make another rock ‘n’ roll record. Says the mouth that roared, comparing herself to the current hot band: “I’m gonna put those little Strokes in their place.”
