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Battersby: Have you checked yourself out on Napster? Brooke: "I've looked a couple of times and it's pretty frightening. There were like a couple hundred selections." Battersby: Is the live stuff bootlegged? Brooke: "Probably. Actually it's weird, once in a while I'll be doing a gig and I'll see little red lights around the room and I'll be like, shit, I don't want to be an old fuddy-duddy spoiler, cause I can understand how that would be really exciting to have. I can see that. But I'm really wary. I'm not the Grateful Dead. I'm not making a ton of money touring at this point. I need record sales to stay alive. And that's the whole beef of it. And, I think, if not for the whole Napster, anarchic approach and the fact that everyone thinks that it's us against the major labels, and we're going to kick their asses. I think that because the most visible spokes-persons for the artist's side of the story is Metallica, they're really easy to pinpoint and say, 'What are you so worried about? You're gazillion-aires.' But there's very little press for mid-level artist like me for whom it is groceries and rent and the phone bill. And I think that that's a hard idea to get across to kids for whom it's going so fast and everything is in your face and you can have it right now and it should be free. [And they think] "Why should I pay for this?" It's a really hard argument to make." Battersby: The other obvious thing is the copyright laws and the fact that I'm taking your song off of your CD and somebody else is getting it for nothing. Brooke: "There was a huge back-and-forth on my posting board over the whole Napster thing. There was a heated debate, and I sort of stayed out of it. I wrote one comment in the beginning and then when it got really profane I stepped out. It got really vitriolic and abusive. They got really violent about it [and said things like] 'Jonatha, what's up her bum? Why's she so upset about Napster? Music should be free! She's doing fine, what's she worried about.' Then there were all these people running to my defense saying,
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'Who do you think you are? Music shouldn't be free. She works her ass off to write this stuff and produce it and she's paying for it all her self.'" Battersby: How many copies of "Live" have you sold overall? Brooke: "I think we're around thirty-ish, thirty-two [thousand]." Battersby: Is that good? Brooke: "I don't know. Of course, we hoped for a million-gazillion but it's a little live record and it's got its quirks and squeaks. It's beautiful. I'm proud of it. But it was so fledgling and we were doing it all ourselves; trying to pay the indie promoter and the radio people, funding the web site and trying to stay on the road and do some more gigs to keep it in people's minds. So, I think it's respectable. It certainly broke even. We didn't totally lose our shirts. More importantly, it was a real psychological [boost. I realized that] I can do this as well as MCA or better. At least it's my failure or success at the end of the day." |
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