Let My People Go!
by Sean Carolan

It was probably around the time they invented Compact Discs (and the idea of selling music a second time to people that already owned it) that the music industry took a good, hard look at itself, found itself to be unredeemably corrupt, and set about doing something about it. Conscience, of course, would dictate that some level of effort might be expended to reduce some of that corruption.

The music industry has never been troubled by matters of conscience.

In the most recent high-profile case, when they realized that their onerously long contracts (long because they were valid not for a length of time, but for a number of releases) would fall afoul of California labor laws, they lobbied to get a special exemption that let them sue artists if they didn't deliver an agreed-upon number of "releasable" albums within the seven mandatory years of their contract. That exemption is being challenged right now, most notably in a hearing at the California State Capitol this week.

The exemption was made law in 1987, so it has taken a while.

At issue, primarily, is the question of whether this lets a record company drag their feet releasing follow-ups to a hit record, in the guise of managing "releasability". They could then recoup some of the money the artist made by suing them for breach of contract, or sue for an extension to the contract if the artist is still selling well. Think about that for a moment; it'd be easy for the label to engineer an artist's non-compliance. It's based on "releasability", which the company can decide on a whim.

Record companies (in the form of Ark21 and IRS Records head Miles Copeland, who it must be said actually has taken some risks) argue that their business is risky enough that they must have the freedom to decide what's "releasable" and what isn't. This, of course, assumes that an artist is at all times in danger of actively trying to lose their audience. One would expect that the artists probably feel differently.

A number of diseparate artists, such as Don Henley, Courtney Love, LeAnn Rimes and Patti Austin, are trying to make the collective feelings of the artists known to the legislators at the hearing, likely committing some degree of career suicide in the process. Austin, in fact, didn't hesitate to play the race card, saying: "I was always taught that Lincoln freed the slaves. I didn't realize that recording artists were excluded from that group."

With any amount of luck, the state of California will strike down this sop to the music industry. Who knows ... it could motivate the industry to throw their support behind artists who might actually have a contract tenure's worth of good albums in them.

Now if we can just get those albums filled with good songs...

©2001 Sean Carolan