"Well [pauses], that time wouldve been about two thousandeight-ish, somewhere in that neighborhood, and, the true reality of that situation was: the record deal that we had signed years and years before had escalating advances based on the current state of the industry when that was negotiated. Meanwhile, the industry has collapsed, and those advances didnt make any sense for the record label at that point.
They were astronomical compared to what an expected return would be. We were kind of presented with the situation of, Hey, if you wanna stay here, lets renegotiate something thats more realistic for us in terms of an advance, or, do it on your own.
Now, at that time in my life, it felt very much like, OK. The record business is broken. The model is broken. Id go through periods of having to look in the mirror and say, Lets see. I just made an album I spent a year working on. I turned it over to the record label to get manufactured. It leaked, and Im online, just boiling furious, at fans whore talking about how much they love this new album, that they just stole.
And then Id think, Wait a minute. Theyre not standing outside my house, bootlegging copies out the back of their van, yknow, to make money. Theyre sharing their excitement about songs Ive written, and music Ive done. And theyre excited about it. And Im pissed off at em, because what?
They didnt wait until a month from now, when theyd have to drive to a record shop (if they can find one,) to buy a piece of plastic they dont want, then rip it back to their computers, toman, this sucks.
Ok, somethings not right. Or they can buy it from iTunes at a lower bit quality, which at that time was also copy protected, which I was strongly against.
It becomes very clear, if you can remove the emotion from the equation, that, OK. The delivery system is broken. And the relationship between fans and artists and record labels is also broken. I thought I was smart enough to get that right. What I learned is it consumed The following years coming up to the present, have been spent trying to experiment with different business models.